The excavation season is still a couple months away, but archaeologists here at Crow Canyon have been hard at work on research projects—and that work is paying off with a pair of new publications.

Crow Canyon supervisory field archaeologist Samantha Fladd, Ph.D., and Arizona State Museum repatriation coordinator Claire S. Barker, Ph.D., have published “Miniature in Everything But Meaning: A Contextual Analysis of Miniature Vessels at Homol’ovi I” in the latest issue of the journal American Antiquity.

In the article, Fladd and Barker examine miniature ceramic vessels found at Homol’ovi I—a prehispanic pueblo site in northern Arizona. Through analysis of the craft mastery, use, and deposition of the vessels at the site, Fladd and Barker argue that the objects served as important components in the preparation or closure practices of ritual spaces at the pueblo.

In addition, Crow Canyon’s Director of Archaeology, Susan Ryan, Ph.D., has published a chapter on the role of kiva architecture during the Pueblo II and Pueblo III periods in the Southwest in a new book, Coming Together: Comparative Approaches to Population Aggregation and Early Urbanization, edited by Attila Gyucha, Ph.D. (State University of New York Press, Albany).

The chapter, “Integration and Disintegration: The Role of Kiva Architecture in Community Formation during the Pueblo II and Pueblo III Periods in the U.S. Southwest,” takes a look at the question of how the built environment is reflected in the formation and dissolution of ancestral pueblo communities. The goal of the study is to increase the understanding of how social, economic, political, and cultural principles and mechanisms relate to population nucleation in both the past and present.

You’ll have a great opportunity to ask Fladd and Ryan about their research in person later this year as a participant in Crow Canyon’s Archaeology Research Program, which is currently focused on the Haynie site near Cortez, Colorado, as part of our Northern Chaco Outliers Project.

For more information on how you can be a part of this exciting research project, click here or call 800-422-8975, ext. 451 to talk to one of our enrollment specialists.