Peña Blanca

Project name: Peña Blanca
Period: AD 500–1900
Project directors: Nancy Akins and Stephen Post

Agricultural Adaptation in the Northern Santo Domingo Basin

OAS excavations at seven sites along NM 22 provided new information on identity, subsistence, and community at various scales over almost 1,500 years of human occupation. The sites span the introduction of agriculture to the Northern Santo Domingo Basin in the AD 400s, the establishment and demise of (arguably) the first Ancestral Puebloan agriculture-based community in the Northern Santo Domingo Basin and the upper Northern Rio Grande Valley, the period from AD 1190 to 1450, and late historic-period use of the terraces as seasonal residences by Cochiti Pueblo farmers.