Existing comment:
The Culture of Tuzigoot:
When archeologists Caywood and Spicer excavated Tuzigoot, they saw a mix of styles and traits. They could not attribute the village to a specific culture and concluded instead that influences from the south, west, and north were at work.
Today Tuzigoot is usually considered a southern Sinagua site, based on village plan, room sizes, burial treatments, and farming methods. However, some scholars, looking at regional patterns in new ways, prefer to think of Tuzigoot as part of what they call the Central Arizona Tradition.
They argue that the Verde Valley, and much of central Arizona's transition zone, was inhabited by local populations with Mogollon cultural heritage. Through time, these groups adopted traditions like those of their neighbors.
But, they remained recognizably different. They produced elaborate stone ground tools and plain pottery, practiced both floodwater and dry farming, and had a mixed subsistence strategy that emphasized hunting and the cultivation of agave, cactus, and cotton, in addition to corn. |