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The Beaver Creek Agricultural Community on the San Juan River, Utah*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Alexander J. Lindsay Jr.
Alexander J. Lindsay Jr.*
Affiliation:
Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff, Ariz.
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Abstract

This prehistoric Pueblo III community consists of 14 sites with evidence of efforts to control water and soil on or near the delta formed by Beaver Creek, an intermittent tributary of the San Juan which flows through Cha Canyon draining a watershed of about 16 square miles on the northern slopes of Navajo Mountain. The small house units, kivas, terraces, linear and grid borders, ditches, windscreens, and possible cisterns or walled-in springs were built by Anasazi people of Kayenta affiliation from the adjacent Rainbow Plateau who occupied the canyon lands probably seasonally during the 12th century. The terraces and linear and grid borders are comparable to those found at Point of Pines in east-central Arizona. The stone-lined ditches span sandy surfaces between the steep gravel slopes and the arable alluvial sediments transporting water to areas which could not be farmed without irrigation. Notched stones set at right angles to the ditches served to keep the water in the ditches at grade so that it could be diverted through tapered-stone turn-out gates to terraced and stone-bordered fields. Rows of rock built on high ground and counter to prevailing winds deflected the wind, stopped blowing sand, protected soil moisture, and reduced sand-blasting of plants. This apparently successful use of the canyon lands which was based on careful exploitation of local ecological conditions lasted about 100 years. It was terminated by increasingly dry conditions which lowered the level of the San Juan and caused tributaries such as Beaver Creek to cut the alluvial sediments used for farming. About 1900 Paiute and Navajo groups moved into the area, using it for some farming during the 1930's, but currently only for forage and water.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , October 1961 , pp. 174 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1961

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Footnotes

*

This report was first given at a symposium on “Land Use and Settlement in Arid Environments” 1960 Pecos Conference, Flagstaff. It is a Museum of Northern Arizona Contribution to the Study of Glen Canyon, No. 28, and is part of the results of the scientific investigations being conducted by the Museum in cooperation with the National Park Service

References

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