Quaternary Stratigraphy and Tectonics, and Late Prehistoric Agriculture of the Safford Basin (Gila and San Simon River Valleys), Graham County, Arizona

This guidebook accompanied the 46th annual meeting of the Rocky Mountain Cell
of the Friends of the Pleistocene (FOP) and the 2002 Fall Field Trip of the
Arizona Geological Society. The meeting and field trip were held in the Safford
Basin, southeastern Arizona. The Friends of the Pleistocene is an informal
gathering of Quaternary geologists, geomorphologists, and pedologists who meet
annually for a field conference.

The first part of the guidebook consists of road logs with descriptions of
stops covering the three days of the field trip. An overview of the geology of
the Safford Basin is given in Stop 1-1. The second part of the guidebook
consists of four short papers that discuss adjacent areas or that expand upon
the road log descriptions of the field trip stops. The first paper by Reid and
Buffler is a summary of upper Cenozoic depositional facies in the Duncan Basin,
the first basin to the east of the Safford Basin. The next three papers expand
upon (1) the soil study of the gridded field agricultural complex (Stop 2-3,
Homburg and Sandor), (2) the vertebrate fossils of the San Simon Valley in the
southeastern part of the Safford Basin (Stop 3-1, Thrasher), and (3)
paleoIndian irrigation systems and settlements in Lefthand Canyon at the foot
of the Pinaleno Mountains (Stop 3-2, Neely and Homburg).

[Summary provided by the USGS.]