An Alluvial Site on the San Carlos Indian Reservation, Arizona

The Mountainous belt of east-central Arizona has produced little evidence bearing on the problem of human history prior to the introduction of pottery and agriculture and the development of village life. In terms of the Christian calendar the events since about A.D. 1 are understood with varying degrees of clarity and reliability, but before the beginning of the Christian era the record for this region is still largely a void. The nature of the terrain, composed mainly of mountains with narrow, steeply pitching, and deeply entrenched valleys, has been unfavorable for the formation of the kind of alluvial deposits in which early human remains are often found. But there is no reason to suppose that the ecology of a mountainous region was less attractive to people of a primitive subsistence economy than were the plains or the broad low-lying intermountain valleys.