The Davis Ranch site is a monumental achievement in many ways. As a site excavation report, its thoroughness and execution are superlative, a tribute to the efforts of dozens of scholars over a span of more than 60 years. But it is more than an excavation report; it is also a fascinating glimpse into past social lives, with uncommon precision afforded by unusual conditions. To put things in context, the archaeological record of the American Southwest has a diversity and distinctiveness that has always encouraged scholars to make fine-grained divisions among a multitude of archaeological cultures. A major distinction was identified in the early twentieth century, between the Hohokam of southern Arizona and Puebloan groups to the north-east.
In 1957, the Amerind Foundation hired Rex Gerald, a veteran of nearby University of Arizona projects, to excavate the Davis Ranch site because it was thought to connect historic-period populations in the area with archaeological cultures. Gerald and his colleagues conducted state of the art research and produced a detailed record of what they found, but failed to discover the desired link between archaeological and historic periods. It may have been due to disagreement about such interpretations that the excavation report was never published.
Gerald suspected, however, that the Davis Ranch site was an important clue in a different puzzle. Southwestern archaeologists had long pondered the Salado phenomenon: a widespread suite of traits, especially Roosevelt Red Ware pottery, which appeared suddenly in the Hohokam region during their Classic Period. The Salado phenomenon has inspired nearly a century of debate about whether it represented the spread of people or ideas. Early suspects were immigrants from Puebloan regions, but questions remained about how this might have unfolded.
The Davis Ranch site provided an exceptional view into the process of migration and diaspora because it clearly displayed evidence not only of Puebloan Kayenta immigrants in the Hohokam region, but also of their interactions with local groups over generations. In the decades since its excavation, the Davis Ranch site has become legendary in Southwestern archaeology as an exemplar in studies of ancient migration. Remaining unpublished, however, it was mostly known by word of mouth and a well-known photograph of its famous ritual kiva (a subterranean chamber used for spiritual ceremonies).
The story of knowledge lost to incomplete publication is all too familiar in archaeology, but the Davis Ranch site avoids this fate. Thanks to the superior technical work done by Gerald and his crew, and the efforts of the Amerind Foundation to curate its products for generations, a great deal of valuable information awaited Patrick Lyons and his colleagues when they began research in the San Pedro River Valley in the 1990s. A central goal of preservation archaeology, as practised by Lyons and the Center for Desert Archaeology (now Archaeology Southwest), was to maximise research gains while minimising damage to archaeological sites. They conducted survey and small test excavations at 29 sites, including the Davis Ranch site, refining their understanding of ceramic typology and its implications for chronology. They leveraged these data with analyses of existing materials in museum collections.
The combination of research from different generations distinguishes this publication. The scale of effort given to excavation of the Davis Ranch site was modest for its time—16 rooms, a kiva and five pit houses in a dozen weeks—but it was at a scale that is increasingly prohibitive for financial and ethical reasons in academic archaeology. Using previous generations of data collected at this scale in contemporary research makes it possible to address large questions with more modest budgets, and less destruction of the diminishing archaeological record. Lyons, and the many who helped him revitalise and publish this project, explicitly hoped that it would serve as a model for the kind of research that could be done with existing collections. It more than accomplishes this purpose.
The core of the volume is a 200-page report describing excavation procedures and discoveries in five chapters, focusing on architecture, burials, artefacts and pottery. This section is written by Gerald but includes edits and comments by Lyons. The report is accompanied by reanalysis of pottery by Lyons, and extensive appendices contributed by ten regional experts describing different material classes. Lyons provides an introduction and, together with Jeffery Clark, a concluding chapter on the significance of the site. These two chapters are where the rewards of reanalysing and reinterpreting old evidence become apparent. With Clark's experience studying the archaeology of immigrants, and Lyons's refined Roosevelt Red Ware typology, they are able to build on a half century of additional research to demonstrate convincingly what Gerald could only suspect. The Davis Ranch site was clearly a Kayenta immigrant enclave, but this report demonstrates more than that. The most fascinating aspect of the report is the detail at which the authors are able to interpret the evolution of social relationships over a period of generations.
The Davis Ranch site shows clear evidence of Kayenta immigrants from north-eastern Arizona settling in the San Pedro River Valley, at the margins of the local Hohokam population. They continued to display hallmarks of their Puebloan identity, including the use of decorated pottery and the construction of a distinctive pueblo and kiva. They also used their diasporic connections with Kayenta migrants in other regions to control trade in obsidian with local Hohokam groups. Over time, they developed a new pottery type, Roosevelt Red Ware, which they traded broadly with local populations, and which represented a ‘meta-identity’ that transcended local groups and fostered peaceful interaction. As their community grew and they increasingly integrated with local people, the kiva fell into disuse and was abandoned.
That such detail could be discerned archaeologically has long made the Davis Ranch site one of the most important in the region. Its publication, with an abundance of masterfully produced black and white and colour photographs, illustrations and maps, as well as hundreds of pages of data tables, is proof of the value of existing museum collections and a gift to future scholars.
