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Underwritten by the Bureau of Reclamation, Northland Research archaeologists surveyed more than 7,450 hectares (18,410 acres) of southern Arizona. Two hundred four archaeological sites were recorded. Some sites, but not many, were historic in age; a few were Archaic, from the era before ceramics and sedentary agriculture in the Southwestern lowlands. The majority were from the intervening Hohokam cultural sequence. We learned from these sites that the prehistory of southern Arizona is, at one and the same time, both more complicated but less complex than we had formerly imagined. Our work under the CAP Non-Indian Distribution Division contract focused primarily on an area of southern Arizona broadly known as the Santa Cruz Flats. We say broadly, because we use the "Flats" as a covering term for all of the plain that is south of the Gila River and north of the Tucson Basin and that is drained by the Santa Cruz River, and Greene, Santa Rosa, and Vekol washes. Within it, drainage patterns are indistinct, and were so even before a substantial part of the flats had been converted to agricultural land, due to the low gradient of the plain. The flats are intermediate between what have been traditionally considered the main foci of development for late prehistoric culture, the Salt/Gila River Valley and the Tucson Basin, and as such have not been studied nearly as much as the lands to the north and south. In this respect, the research history of the Flats mirrors its modem developmental history. The concentration of the Distribution Division effort on the Flats has given us a unique perspective from which to view on the prehistory of southern Arizona and our report here is primarily concerned with this viewpoint.

This report is about 58 archaeological sites located in and around an expansive desert basin known as the Santa Cruz Flats, located south of the Gila River. None of these sites are large. The biggest among them had only three, widely separated houses. Most of them had no houses, and the majority lacked material remains except for a mere scattering of artifacts now perched on the modern ground surface. Several of the sites included occupations dated to the modern, Historic, Euro-American era, while a few other sites produced chipped stone projectile points that likely date to the Archaic stage, the time of hunter-gatherers, before the advent of agriculture among the prehistoric peoples of the region. The most frequently represented material remains were those associated with the prehistoric Hohokam culture, the sedentary (at least semi-sedentary) agriculturalists who occupied the northern Sonoran Desert between A.D. 300 and 1450. The sites located within the construction corridor of the Santa Rosa Canal, a large water delivery system linked to the Central Arizona Project, are not quintessential Hohokam sites. The few Hohokam sites that contained preserved houses likely represent seasonal use only, and the vast majority of the sites include evidence of limited employment, probably for gathering wild crops; hunting; or tending, harvesting, and packing the yield away for storage and use elsewhere. Overall, these sites suggest rather heavy exploitation of resources formerly located on the Santa Cruz Flats, to a degree not previously appreciated, and at a time when it was supposed the Flats held less attraction. During the Hohokam pre-Classic period, there were few large communities outside the Tucson and Phoenix basins; the few settlements that were located in the intervening range were tightly restricted, by all outward appearances, to the bajadas of the surrounding mountains (Wilcox 1988a).