Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
The Mountainous belt of east-central Arizona has produced little evidence bearing on the problem of human history prior to the introduction of pottery and agriculture and the development of village life. In terms of the Christian calendar the events since about A.D. 1 are understood with varying degrees of clarity and reliability, but before the beginning of the Christian era the record for this region is still largely a void. The nature of the terrain, composed mainly of mountains with narrow, steeply pitching, and deeply entrenched valleys, has been unfavorable for the formation of the kind of alluvial deposits in which early human remains are often found. But there is no reason to suppose that the ecology of a mountainous region was less attractive to people of a primitive subsistence economy than were the plains or the broad low-lying intermountain valleys.
The University of Arizona Archaeological Field School was established at Point of Pines on the San Carlos Indian Reservation in 1946. Acknowledgment is made of the support given this venture during the early years by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and by other interested persons. Credit is also due those students who worked diligently, both in the field and in the laboratory, to provide many of the data for this paper. Special thanks are extended to H. R. Crane and James B. Griffin, of the University of Michigan, who responded wholeheartedly to our request for assistance in the area of radiocarbon analysis, and to the Research Corporation for its encouragement and support in the development of the Carbon-14 Age Determination Laboratory of the University of Arizona.