Southwestern archaeology

Southwestern archaeology is a branch of archaeology concerned with the Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico. This region was first occupied by hunter-gatherers, and thousands of years later by advanced civilizations, such as the Ancestral Puebloans, the Hohokam, and the Mogollon.

This area, identified with the current states of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Nevada in the western United States, and the states of Sonora and Chihuahua in northern Mexico, has seen successive prehistoric cultural traditions for at least of 12,000 years. An often-quoted statement from Erik Reed (1964) defined the Greater Southwest culture area as extending north to south from Durango, Mexico, to Durango, Colorado, and east to west from Las Vegas, Nevada, to Las Vegas, New Mexico.^[1] Differently areas of this region are also known as the American Southwest, North Mexico, and Oasisamerica, while its southern neighboring cultural region is known as Aridoamerica or Chichimeca.^[1]

Many contemporary cultural traditions exist within the Greater Southwest, including Yuman-speaking peoples inhabiting the Colorado River valley, the uplands, and Baja California, O'odham peoples of Southern Arizona and northern Sonora, and the Pueblo peoples of Arizona and New Mexico. In addition, the Apache and Navajo peoples, whose ancestral roots lie in the Athabaskan-speaking peoples in eastern Alaska and western Canada, entered the Southwest prior to European contact.