Northwest Santa Fe Relief Route

Project name: Northwest Santa Fe Relief Route
Site types: Residential, habitation, logistical hunting, foraging, and resource extraction
Period: Early Archaic to historic Pueblo and Euroamerican
Project director: Stephen Post

7,000 Years of Occupation on the Piedmont

Over the course of 14 years, the OAS investigated 60 archaeological sites on the Santa Fe Piedmont with at least 77 temporal components. Fourteen of those sites were excavated, revealing a 7,000-year history of occupation in the piedmont from the Early Archaic to the historic Pueblo and Euroamerican periods. The excavation phase resulted in a greatly expanded view of the Archaic period in this area and enabled us to conduct a detailed examination of Ancestral Pueblo foraging strategies. The particular importance of the project is that it extended across the entire geographical range of the piedmont from the low-elevation juniper grasslands to the upper elevations of the piñon-juniper zone.