| OCR Text |
Show Chapter 14 THE FIRST KAYENTAN FARMERS: SUMMARY AND INTERPRETATION OF BASKETMAKER II Phil R. Geib Archaeological study of the preceramic farming culture known as Basketmaker II within the Kayenta region spans nearly a century and includes such luminaries of Southwestern archaeology as Alfred Kidder. The rich bounty of perishable remains retrieved from dry caves of the Marsh Pass area early in the 1900s provided a detailed picture of the material culture of these initial farmers, as well as a sizable skeletal sample (Guernsey 1931; Guernsey and Kidder 1921; Kidder and Guernsey 1919). A focus on dry cave excavations continued into the early 1960s (Lindsay et al. 1968; Lockett and Hargrave 1953), and still has much to offer (e.g., Smiley and Parry 1992; Chapter 2 of Volume II). Basketmaker research shifted direction during the 1970s towards an emphasis on open sites, with Lipe's research on Cedar Mesa leading the way (see review in Matson 2006). Issues of settlement pattern and subsistence came into focus and chronology became an important topic. Within the Kayenta region, BMAP's excavations on northern Black Mesa exemplified this trend. When that project ended in the early 1980s, excavation of 35 late Basketmaker II (Lolomai phase, ca. 50-350 cal. AD) sites of various settlement types provided the first detailed documentation of this previously unstudied portion of the local archaeological record (see review in Smiley 2002b). By excavating all or portions of 17 Basketmaker II sites within the N16 ROW, the NMRAP has greatly added to the database for the first farmers within the Kayenta region. This effort increased the excavated sample of open Basketmaker II sites within the Kayenta region to half again what it was based on prior research. Moreover, the NMRAP findings come from a portion of the Kayenta region that complements and augments the data for open Basketmaker II sites on northern Black Mesa both geographically and temporally. Indeed, NMRAP's contribution to our understanding of Basketmaker II was greater than initially suspected, in part because of more time depth and longer-duration use of a few favored locales than was true for northern Black Mesa. Furthermore, several of the open sites as well as Atlatl Rock Cave, a site tested in conjunction with the road project, provide evidence for the Basketmaker II-Basketmaker III transitional interval (Geib and Spurr 2000), which is poorly known for the entire Four Corners region and not at all on northern Black Mesa. The NMRAP research plan (Chapter 2 of Volume I) specifically addressed the Basketmaker II archaeological record with a research issue designated as the agricultural transition under the study domain of economic specialization. The shift from a hunting-gathering economy to one based on farming has been a long-standing research topic throughout the world. Almost 30 years ago, Flannery (1973:271) bemoaned the fact that research on the origins of agriculture had become a bandwagon, and although there are perhaps fewer projects these days with this topic as a chief focus, there seems little letup in the volume of ink and paper devoted to the topic (e.g., Barker 2006; Cowan and Watson 1992a; Ford 1985; Gebauer and Price 1992; Harris and Hillman 1989; Kennett and 2006; Piperno and Pearsall 1998; Price and Gebauer 1995; Smith 1998). The American Southwest, a region of primary crop acquisition (a secondary setting) rather than one of pristine domestication (Minnis 1992:122; Cowan and Watson 1992b), has seen no shortage of research into the agricultural transition (see reviews in Huckell 1990, 1995; Mabry 1998; Matson 1991; Wills and Huckell 1994). An unprecedented increase in the excavation of early agricultural sites and the dating and restudy of old collections during the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, and continuing into this new millennium, has greatly increased our knowledge of this interval of profound change in prehistoric cultural development. Still, much remains to be learned. The agricultural transition in the secondary setting of the Colorado Plateau may have transpired by the diffusion of crops and farming knowledge to in situ foragers or by the migration (demic diffusion) of farmers. These two alternative but not mutually exclusive pathways to the agricultural transition both may have operated on the Colorado Plateau (see review by Matson 1991, 2003), perhaps at different times and with somewhat differing consequences. Just having crops is the initial step towards greater V.14.1 |
