Chronicle Heritage’s Phoenix office recently conducted a Class III cultural resource inventory of 3,200 rugged and remote acres within the Tonto National Forest in advance of a proposed fuels thinning project by the U.S. Forest Service.
The Class III survey of the area of potential effects (APE) included attempts to revisit, update, or fully rerecord 60 previously recorded sites, 40 of which were rerecorded, and identification of 47 new sites. In addition to the newly identified and fully or partially rerecorded sites, 13 sites were revisited and assessed. Of the 87 sites recorded, rerecorded or updated during the survey, 75 were recommended eligible for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places.
Chronicle Heritage also raised the possibility of the association of the sites recorded during the survey with the Perry Mesa Archaeological District.
“Given the continuous spatial patterning and cultural continuity between sites within the existing Perry Mesa District and sites in the APE, a strong case could be made for adding five sites identified as prehistoric room block villages (during the inventory) to the existing Perry Mesa district,” said Dr. Angela Huster, Regional Principal Investigator.
The survey led to an over 50 percent increase in the number of known sites and a 30 percent increase in the number of known rooms in the APE, “recording significant new data for evaluating competing academic models for the area,” said Huster.
No artifacts were collected during fieldwork, but for sites with fewer than 100 artifacts, all artifacts were recorded. For sites with more than 100 artifacts, diagnostic artifacts were recorded for the entire site. Artifacts recorded included prehistoric ceramics, flaked stones, ground stones, shells, faunal bones, historic ceramics, cans and glass.
Surveying “Extremely Rugged” Terrain
The survey was conducted by Chronicle Heritage archaeologists walking parallel transects spaced no more than 15 meters apart.
“As part of the survey, our field crew traversed a series of sections in the national forest with extremely rugged terrain. There was a lack of cell service through most of the project area, and a section where the road was so bad that National Forest personnel had to ferry our crew and gear in by ATV,” said Huster.
The APE surveyed is in the greater West Verde, a remote region in central Arizona that connects several better studied areas, particularly the aforementioned Perry Mesa to the west and the Verde Valley to the northeast.
“Our work provided north-south and east-west survey corridors across the region, allowing for the evaluation of competing hypotheses about the relationship between neighboring regions,” said Huster.
The Verde Confederacy Hypothesis
One of these theories is the Verde Confederacy hypothesis. According to “Prehistoric Warfare in Central Arizona, USA: Assessing Its Scale with Ceramic Chemistry”, published in the academic journal Geoarchaeology in January 2013, “some archaeologists posit conflict persistently waged in central Arizona, which thereby promoted the emergence of region-sized polities, including the so-called Verde Confederacy. Relying largely on settlement-pattern data, these theorists have hypothesized warfare and alliance practiced at a regional scale, apparently larger than anywhere else in the prehistoric American Southwest.”
According to Huster, the results of “our survey do not generally support the Verde Confederacy hypothesis.”
Settlement levels in the Central Arizona region grew gradually between A.D. 700-1300, before increasing sharply from A.D. 1300-1450.
“Throughout time, the people in the project area have had strong cultural similarities to Perry Mesa to the west, demonstrating that Perry Mesa was not the cultural ‘island’ that it is often characterized as,” said Huster. “Because Perry Mesa’s population grew in tandem with neighboring regions, West Verde could not have served as the source of population sent out to settle areas along the edges of the proposed confederacy. Sites in the study area are not especially defensively located, and large-site layouts are too variable to be the product of a single organized building campaign.”
Huster recently co-authored an article in the Journal of Arizona Archaeology that goes into more detail about the findings of the survey and the historic relationship between West Verde and Perry Mesa.
A Multi-purpose Survey
“The survey provided a systematic dataset from a little-known area with significant implications on the archaeological understanding of the region’s social-political organization,” said Huster.
The project also provided Tonto National Forest with management data for fire prevention activities, road maintenance, and looting prevention, as well as an improved understanding of the site density in the region.
In addition, Chronicle Heritage received a follow-up contract/project extension from Tonto National Forest based on the results of the project.