Arizona Archaeological Society, Rim Country Chapter

In 1937, a group of CalTech geology professors and hardy boatmen set out in small wooden boats on a 6 week journey through the Grand Canyon to study the ancient rocks of the canyon’s Inner Gorge.  At the time, fewer than a dozen river parties had successfully run the canyon – often with a loss […]

The Hohokam Native American culture flourished in southern Arizona from the sixth through fifteenth centuries. Hohokam artifacts, architecture, and other material culture provide archaeologists with clues for identifying where the Hohokam lived, interpreting how they adapted to the Sonoran Desert for centuries, and explaining why their culture mysteriously disappeared. In this presentation Dart illustrates the […]

In many Southwestern matrifocal cultures, Indigenous women’s lives are modeled after female heroes and sacred women who exemplify and express courage and kinship values. Among some tribal cultures, rites of passage celebrate female creativity and the transformative nature of women, hence there was not a need for the concept of feminism. Nevertheless, Indigenous women’s lives […]

Salt has been a valuable trade item throughout human history. Native American salt procurement in the Southwest involved dangerous journeys across sacred landscapes associated with a deity called Salt Woman. This presentation describes the history of a famous salt mine in Camp Verde, Arizona, where prehistoric Sinagua tools used for mining salt were discovered in […]

The occurrence of meteorites on archaeological sites in North America has been known since the early 19th century. From the Hopewell culture in the eastern United States, to the Polar Eskimo, to the Indians in the American Southwest and northern Mexico, meteorites have been found on these ancient sites. Much like meteorite hunters of today, […]