Compliance Archaeology Has Tended to Focus on Specific Locations of Sites, While the Broader Landscape of Traditional Use Areas
ARCHAEOLOGICAL TRAILS AND ETHNOGRAPHIC TRAILS: CAN THEY MEET? RUTH ARLENE MUSSER-LOPEZ ARCHAEOLOGICAL HERITAGE ASSOCIATES (RIVER AHA) STEVE MILLER BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT, LAKE HAVASU FIELD OFFICE Compliance archaeology has tended to focus on specific locations of sites, while the broader landscape of traditional use areas, travel corridors, and places named in tradition is often overlooked. An opportunity for landscape-level analysis presented itself in a proposed large Off Highway Vehicle (OHV) open area adjacent to the Colorado River. While a continuous Salt Song Trail may not be physically manifest, researchers found evidence of a corridor including trail segments, stacked rock features (“prayer shrines”), and short-term camps. When taken into consideration with prehistoric events and places named in ethnographies and current traditional practices, these fragmented segments may be components of the Salt Song Trail. The Salt Song Trail and other ethnographic trails in the Mojave Desert are elements of very large- scale ethnographic landscapes. These landscapes include the land, its springs, passes, and notable peaks; the fossil traces of human behavior ranging from stone tool manufacture, sheltering, and ceremony; and the empirically observable tread or alignment of the trail itself (Figure 1). The difficulty lies in linking, or attempting to link, archaeological observations characterized by very specific locations to named ethnographic trails, which in most cases have only generalized provenience and which, in some cases, may not have an actual physical referent. The purpose of this paper is to share tentative findings of recent fieldwork in Standard Basin, Arizona, a large drainage situated on the eastern side of the Colorado River south of Lake Havasu City.
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