The Arizona Strip Cultural Landscape and Place Name Study

This report is the product of a study funded by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) entitled, The Arizona Strip Cultural Landscape and Place Name Study. The study has five main objectives: (1) to provide an overview of American Indian Cultural Landscapes and their relevance for federal agency practices, (2) to describe the ethnographic, historic, and cultural bases for Southern Paiute communities’ access to particular sites within the Arizona Strip, (3) to identify Numic place names, trails, and stories associated with selected cultural landscape sites within the Arizona Strip, (4) to include descriptions of the cultural significance of natural resources and physical environmental features at selected cultural landscape sites, and (5) to determine the need for future studies based on gaps identified in the historic and ethnographic record. The study is intended to serve as a foundation for identifying and managing Native American resources, cultural sites and cultural landscapes on the Arizona Strip.

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This report is organized in two volumes. The first volume is entitled Yanawant – Paiute Places and Landscapes in the Arizona Strip (Stoffle et al. 2005). The second volume is entitled, Southern Paiute History and Place Names (Austin et al. 2005), and it draws upon historical accounts, diaries, and oral histories to document Southern Paiute occupation and use of the Arizona Strip from the time of European and Euro-American contact until the middle of the twentieth century. The volume also includes Paiute names for 148 places on and in the vicinity of the Arizona Strip. Volume One is focused on direct interviews with Southern Paiute people at places in the Arizona Strip. These locations were chosen to represent kinds of places that are culturally significant to Southern Paiute people. These include rock art sites, archaeology sites, springs, rivers, canyons, mountains, lava flows, and areas with special vistas. These places were chosen by representatives of the involved tribes, AZ BLM staff, and the project director at the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at the University of Arizona. This is a first study of its kind funded by the AZ BLM and so a study goal was to see what kinds of contemporary cultural importance would be assigned by Indian people to kinds of places. During four field sessions (2003-2004), 136 interviews were conducted at 14 sites. Southern Paiute representatives and BARA ethnographers could not go to all places of cultural significance in the Arizona Strip so the study has laid a foundation for more comprehensive studies in the future.