Prehistory of the St. Johns Area, East-Central Arizona: The TEP St. Johns Project [No. 153]

Abstract

The TEP St. Johns Project was conducted by the Cultural Resource Management Section of the Arizona State Museum under contract to Tucson Electric Power Company and was designed to mi~igate impacts to cultural resources located within a proposed railrbad right-of-way corridor east of St. Johns, Arizona. The proposed corridor begins at a point 8 miles northeast of St, Johns and extends 27 miles southward to the proposed TEP Springerville Generating Station north of Springerville, Arizona. The corridor crosses both State and private lands; no federal lands were involved. Archaeological investigations on State lands were conducted under Arizona State Museum Permits No. 79-15 (Phase I) and No. 79-21 (Phase 11). A preexcavation testing phase determined that 14 of 25 recorded sites within the corridor warranted intensive study; 12 of these yielded evidence for occupation by Archaic groups, and two were small Cibola Anasazi pueblos occupied in the Pueblo I I and Pueblo 111 periods (A.D. 1050 to 1200). The research design stressed the need to describe and define the Archaic culture pattern represented in th~ St. Johns area, which had previously been the subject of only limited study. Evidence was found for an intermittent Archaic occupation spanning 5500 B.C. to A.D. 600, and the settlement pattern was found to have interesting parallels with the pattern described by Irwin-Williams (1973) for the 0shara Tradition in northwestern New Mexico. Analysis of data focused on describing vafiabil ity in lithic reduction technology and attempted to ascertain if this variability could be related to temporal and cultural change. The two pueblo sites were found to be individual components of a larger Cibola Anasazi pueblo settlement of 11 small pueblos (the Platt Ranch Settlement). The settlement was occupied for a relatively short period--between A.D. 1050 and 1250. An interesting aspect of the pueblos was that all were constructed of adobe rather than rock masonry. The research strategy addressed problems of determining whether occupation was seasonal or permanent and the subsequent implications for defining Puebloan settlement systems duiing the Pueblo II and Pueblo III periods in the upper Little Colorado River region.