Keywords

southwestern Utah, archaeology, farming

Abstract

Prehispanic farmers belonging to the Virgin and Fremont traditions once occupied most of Utah and adjacent parts of Arizona and Nevada. Through much of the twentieth century, these areas were called the "Northern Periphery'' of the Southwest, but in recent decades, both Fremont and Virgin have often been left out of syntheses of southwestern archaeology-even though they clearly had strong connections to the Southwest and represented, respectively, the northernmost and westernmost extensions of maize-based horticulture in western North America. This exclusion results from a combination of factors, the most important of which are geography and the territorial behavior of some archaeologists who chose to isolate Fremont archaeology from southwestern studies.

Original Publication Citation

James R. Allison 2010 The End of Farming in the “Northern Periphery” of the Southwest. In Leaving Mesa Verde: Peril and Change in the Thirteenth-Century Southwest, edited by Timothy A. Kohler, Mark D. Varien, and Aaron Wright, pp. 128-155. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.