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Chichilticale is a long-sought-after location on the Coronado expedition route in southeastern Arizona. It is referred to numerous times in documents, and various expedition members stayed there, making it potentially one of the most discoverable of the Coronado expedition camp sites. Nonetheless, it remained lost until recently when data from a variety of sources provided a basis to establish hypotheses that were then tested and retested until Chichilticale was located. This site, 1 km long, has hundreds of Spanish period artifacts related to the 1539–1540 two-month winter encampment established during Melchior Díaz's reconnaissance north to check on Fray Marcos de Niza's report. Crossbow bolt heads, copper lace aglets, caret- or gable-headed nails, copper bells, and many other artifacts and features provide a surprisingly rich archaeological record of this place and of an unexpected and unrecorded battle that changes history for the Sobaipuri O'odham.

Archaeological research related to the Coronado expedition of 1539–42 in southern Arizona is revealing evidence that has substantial implications for our understanding of the regional Natives, specifically the Sobaipuri O’odham. Most researchers have thought that these earliest Europeans encountered, described, and stayed among the Ópata, but new research is beginning to provide insights into the role the relatively unknown O’odham played in the outcome of this earliest period of intercultural contact. For a century now the consensus has been that the trail descended the San Pedro River in Arizona, having proceeded up the Río Sonora in Mexico. In this reconstruction, the expedition somehow avoided the Sobaipuri O’odham settlements. Yet, evidence for the route has been found farther west, and proceeds northeast through the heart of O’odham territory. Evidence of 12 Coronado expedition sites in Arizona demonstrate that the expedition trail went through areas with the most important and highest densities of Sobaipuri O’odham occupation. Marcos de Niza visited these residents and then, late in 1539 the Díaz-Zaldívar reconnaissance camped for an extended period in the area of one of the highest density distributions of Sobaipuri O’odham village sites. The Sobaipuri O'odham attacked both this place called Chichilticale and a later (1541) Spanish townsite, San Geronimo III/Suya established in their homeland. This is just one of the ways the Sobaipuri O’odham had an impact on the expedition.

Trending upward as an archaeological field of study, protohistoric mobile groups provide fascinating new directions for cutting-edge research in the American Southwest and beyond. These mobile residents represent the ancient and ancestral roots of many modern indigenous peoples, including the Apaches, Jumano, Yavapai, and Ute. These important protohistoric and historic mobile people have tended to be ignored because their archaeological sites were deemed too difficult to identify, too scant to be worthy of study, and too different to incorporate. This book brings together information from a diverse collection of authors working throughout the American Southwest and its fringes to make the bold statement that these groups can be identified in the archaeological record and their sites have much to contribute to the study of cultural process, method and theory, and past lifeways. Mobile groups are integral for assessing the grand reorganizational events of the Late Prehistoric period and are key to understanding colonial contact and transformations. Now, the only analyses, overviews, and class lectures that will be considered comprehensive will be those that address the presence of these many widespread mobile peoples. 

In 1698, the Apache and their allies attacked a sleeping Sobaipuri-O’odham village on the San Pedro River at the northern edge of New Spain, now in southern Arizona. This book, about one of the most important Southwestern battles of the era in this region, reads like a mystery. At the same time, it addresses in a scholarly fashion the methodological question of how we can confidently infer anything reliable about the past.   Translations of original Spanish accounts by Father Kino and others convey important details about the battle, while the archaeological record and ethnographic and oral traditions provide important correctives to the historic account. A new battlefield signature of native American conflict is identified, and the fiery context of the battle provides unprecedented information about what the Sobaipuri grew and hunted in this out-of-the-way location, including the earliest known wheat.   That this tumultuous time was a period of flux is reflected in the defensive, communal, and ceremonial architecture of the O'odham, which accommodated Spanish tastes and techniques. Practices specific to the O’odham as they relate to the day’s events and to village life illuminate heretofore unexplained aspects of the battle. The book also records a visit by descendant O’odham, reinforcing the importance of identifying the historically documented location.   A Fateful Day in 1698 will be of significant interest to archaeologists and historians.

Highly mobile people must have sheltered in structures of some kind; but these are notoriously difficult to find. The author uses nineteenth-century photographs of an occupied Apache settlement to show how such shelters may have been made, comparing them with their archaeological remains in the present day. This suggests a ‘signature’ for the temporary shelters used by mobile groups in any period.

A bronze cannon or wall gun has been recovered from an archaeological context associated with the Vázquez de Coronado expedition. It was found on the floor of a Spanish stone-and-adobe structure that was chronometrically dated by two techniques to this era. Artifacts found at the site and in the structure are diagnostic of this expedition. This hook gun is described and placed in context. This wall gun is the first gun known to be associated with the Coronado expedition and is the oldest firearm ever found within the continental USA, and perhaps the oldest cannon currently known on the continent. We discuss how and where the gun was manufactured and its lack of use in the battle at San Geronimo III.

When in 1692 Jesuit Father Eusebio Francisco Kino first visited the Wa:k community and referenced it as San Xavier del it was located to the north of its present location in Arizona. The church would have been located within the Sobaipuri O'odham village, but debate surrounding the location of the first church is complicated by the questions as to what constitutes a church in this frontier region, which part of the textual record should be privileged, and, accordingly, who can be credited with constructing the first church. Evidence from a variety of sources elucidates the history of Wa:k, including archaeology, Spanish documentary sources, and oral history. Alternative suggestions as to the location of San Xavier's first churches are discussed. It is argued that the first two churches were in Kino's time and these were located to the north of the current Franciscan church, as were the Segesser and Espinosa churches, before the village was moved south and a new Franciscan church was built in the 1770s.

New methodologies are needed to address multiple componentcy and short reuse episodes that are characteristic of mobile group residential and logistical strategies. Chronometric results are often misinterpreted when evaluated within a framework suited to long-term sedentary occupations. The standard practices of age-averaging, eliminating apparent \"anomalous\" results, and relying on high profile diagnostic tools and vessels and the most visible features—along with the expectation for \"contextual congruence\"—mask multi-componentcy and episodic reuse. High incidences of site reuse have been detected by considering alternate site development models and looking specifically for evidence of distinct shorter term occupations.

For some time archaeologists have sought evidence of interactions noted in Spanish documents between mobile groups and the Eastern Frontier Pueblos specifically at the Salinas Pueblos. Most effort has focused on the examination and excavation of the pueblos themselves, either under the assumption that visitors routinely lived within the pueblos or because evidence of mobile visitors around and outside the pueblo has not been forthcoming. Surveys over the past decade have revealed evidence of mobile group encampments at the perimeter of these pueblos, consistent with mobile group signatures defined elsewhere in the region. One example described in this article, site LA 152447 is located near and within the influence zone of the pueblo inferred to be the historically referenced Tabirá. This site is a large mobile group encampment with numerous structures. Site LA 152447 is described and discussed with reference to documentary and ethnographic data. Implications for recognizing these types of mobile group sites are discussed.

The Hormiguero site is a large mountainside Apache residential site in the Peloncillo Mountains of southern Arizona that lies in the heart of historically documented Chiricahua Apache territory. It represents an encampment at an important caching location, a category of residential site that has not been previously described archaeologically. Ethnographic data are enlisted to understand this unique type of Apache residential site and a previously unknown cache form-the platform cache. Archaeological evidence is combined from a number of sites with caches like those at Hormiguero to interpret aspects of cultural identity and chronology including the presence of ancestral Apaches in southern Arizona as early as the 14th century a.d.