PETRIFIED NATIONAL FOREST PARK, ARIZONA—Two villages estimated to be 1,300 years old have been discovered in the high desert of northern Arizona. The sites, recently acquired by Petrified Forest National Park, feature walls and floors lined with slabs of sandstone. “Last year we found a large habitation site, and this summer we found a match, less than a mile away, a site that has dozens and dozens of different features. We have now two large groups of pit house structures, both of them with probably more than 50 structures associated with them,” park archaeologist William Reitze told Western Digs. He and his team also recovered ceramics and stone points from the late Basketmaker period, when the residents of the village were transitioning from nomadic foraging to a more sedentary society based upon agriculture. “These sites are often in large sand dunes, but there is no rock there. So any kind of slab at all that you find out there was brought in by people,” Reitze explained. To read more about the prehistory of the Southwest, see ARCHAEOLOGY’s “Who Were the Anasazi?“
