Test Excavations at a Small Site Along the Sacramento River

Evaluation of cultural resources, that is, the process of determining the significance of a specific resource, is fundamental to any cultural resource management program. The conservation of all cultural resources for future scientific research and for public benefit, would be an ideal situation, but it is not possible given the necessity for certain land disturbing activities which impact these resources. Therefore, evaluations regarding the significance of cultural resources are critical for management purposes, and to ensure that the most significant sites are conserved.

The National Register criteria for determining significance provide one means of evaluating cultural resources, and must be applied to cultural resources affected by federal undertakings. These criteria are broadly defined, and the one applicable to prehistoric sites states that significant resources include those "that have yielded or are likely to yield information important to prehistory or history."

How is the value of a site to prehistory or history to be determined? This question may become particularly complex when applied to sites which are visible only as small ephemeral scatters of chipped stone with no evidence of architectural features. These types of sites are quite numerous in the Sacramento Mountains of south-central New Mexico. Are such sites significant because they possess subsurface materials or features which may contain important information? Do they represent seasonal or temporary hunting or gathering camps, and if so, how do these fit into the overall settlement-subsistence system of a prehistoric people? It is because ,of such questions and the need to assess the significance of small non-architectural sites on other than an intuitive basis that the following report is written. A small expenditure of time and energy is necessary to make adequate assessments of significance for small artifact scatters, and the effort placed on such determinations is necessary in order to more effectively manage the cultural resource.

Originally the information in this record was migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. In 2014, as part of its effort to improve tDAR content, the Center for Digital Antiquity uploaded a copy of the document and further improved the record metadata.