Very interesting informative article about studies of Anasazi migration into Hohokam territory in Arizona. Several cool photos, including the first rectangular kiva I’ve seen attributed to Anasazi. mjh

Pueblo groups moved to San Pedro River sites in 13th century by PAUL L. ALLEN, Tucson Citizen

The Pueblos, from the Tusayan and Kayenta areas, brought with them prized obsidian and pottery, but they strained the economy in southern Arizona’s river valleys.

Evidence shows that platform mounds began appearing about 1275, coinciding with the migrants’ arrival.

”This may be more than a coincidence,” said Jeffrey Clark of the Center for Desert Archaeology. ”The mounds serve integrative functions inside the villages but also could have served as territorial markers for the irrigation communities – an architectural message directed to the migrants that ‘We were here first; this is our turf.’ ”

The Tucson-based, nonprofit center has spent more than a dozen years studying the northern San Pedro River Valley. The area, from around Benson north to the river’s confluence with the Gila River, is the last relatively undisturbed riparian setting in the southern Southwest. …

The Hohokam and Hohokam-influenced groups living in the San Pedro Valley north of today’s Redington in the late 1200s likely were puzzled by construction being done by their new neighbors about seven miles south, an area now called Davis Ranch.

Architecture was an important aspect of the socio-religious organization of southern Arizona communities.

While the locals constructed formal platform mounds, 6 to 8 feet tall upon which important ceremonies were conducted, their new neighbors were digging an underground room – a kiva that also would serve a ceremonial function.

This second article is shorter but chock full of new (to me) places and names in Arizona. Lots of new things to investigate. mjh

Ancient sites reveal clues to life, death of a culture by PAUL L. ALLEN, Tucson Citizen

The movement of Pueblo migrants from the Four Corners region to the southern San Pedro Valley and from northern New Mexico into the Rio Grande Valley to the south between the mid-1100s and the late 1300s was greeted with mixed reactions by the ”locals.”

In some communities, archaeological evidence indicates the newcomers coexisted peacefully and over time were simply absorbed. But evidence suggests not all encounters were so peaceful.

Reeve Ruin, a Pueblo community north of what now is Cascabel, is defensively located atop a high cliff. It was protected by stone walls fashioned with narrow openings that limited access to the village itself. The site was excavated in the 1950s by Charles Di Peso of the Amerind Foundation.

Curiously, the Davis Ranch site, a second migrant village located on a flat across the river from Reeve, also excavated by Amerind, appears to have no such defensive aspects.