Experienced Team, Expert Analysis

Cultural resources projects often recover diverse collections of artifacts and specimens, including items made of clay, stone, shell, metal, mineral, and animal bone, as well as preserved seeds, pollen, and other plant remains. Desert Archaeology’s team of in-house specialists brings years of expertise and innovation to a wide range of artifact and biological analyses. Download the flyer for a quick look at what we have to offer, then explore the rest of this page for more information.

Artifact assessments and biological species identifications are used to determine the cultural and temporal affiliations of impacted sites, and they help us understand how past peoples related to their environment and to each other. More information about our team members and their areas of expertise can be explored below.

Desert Archaeology’s specialists contribute to all of our comprehensive cultural resources management projects and are available on a contract basis to perform analyses for other firms or academic researchers. Our staff can work from your analysis plan or can collaborate with you to create a research design. We provide complete analytical services for professional CRM and academic projects on a contract basis, from conducting basic identifications to recording detailed data and providing reports to your specifications.

Email us for analyst availability, scheduling, and current rates.

Ceramics

Decorated ceramics are a key source of the highly refined chronological information that is essential to accurate, cost-effective archaeological research. Desert Archaeology’s specialists have made significant refinements to both the Tucson Basin and Phoenix Basin ceramic typologies, resulting in much finer chronological resolution than was possible before and major new insights into social change in the past.

James M. Heidke has been the lead pottery and clay figurine analyst at Desert Archaeology since 1988. Mr. Heidke has worked with pre-European contact and Historic era collections from sites located throughout Arizona. His research has focused on ceramic typology and seriation, and their role in evaluating depositional integrity, temper-based studies of pottery provenance, as well as issues related to the organization of ceramic craft production and distribution, and container morphology and function, all using stringent quantitative methods.

Mr. Heidke is available to participate in cooperative research projects or to conduct analyses for specific projects. Email us for availability, scheduling, and current rates.

Flaked Stone

R. J. Sliva has been Desert Archaeology’s lead flaked stone analyst since 1994, conducting analyses that record a range of technical and design data from stone tools, the raw materials used to make them, and the waste products generated during their manufacture to investigate the social behaviors, cultural affiliations, and demographics of past peoples.

Sliva has developed detailed projectile point typologies for the region that are in widespread use by other researchers, along with techniques for using debitage (waste flake) data to understand how people organized their workspaces, to trace the different ways men and women used flaked stone technology, to recognize how technological traditions changed over time, and to distinguish the materials made by members of different social groups. Published works include a technical manual on general flaked stone analysis procedures and a projectile point monograph that includes a typological guide to the points made by early farmers in the Southwest.

Analysis services for CRM professionals and academic projects are available on a contract basis, including full assemblage analysis, projectile point identification, and artifact illustration and imaging. Email us for availability, scheduling, and current rates.

Ground Stone

Tessa Branyan-Martin has been with Desert Archaeology since 2018. Her technological approach to artifact study incorporates use-wear studies and experimental tool and task replication to determine how the artifacts on archaeological sites were made and used.

Branyan-Martin continues the innovative ground stone analytical methods pioneered by Desert’s Jenny Adams, focusing on how changes in tool morphology across time and space coincide with population movement, material sourcing, and manufacturing techniques.

Analysis services for CRM professionals are available on a contract basis. Email us for availability, scheduling, and current rates.

Historical Materials

An in-house team of project directors and analysts conducts comprehensive artifact analysis and archival research for historic projects. Team members have analyzed in excess of 500,000 artifacts and have conducted research in major archives in Arizona, the National Archives, and the Huntington Library in Los Angeles.

We also use online resources, including census records, scanned newspapers, vital records, court records, maps, and photographs, to research properties and to create biographies of individuals and families.

Investigated assemblages, families, and properties span the time from the seventeenth century arrival of Spaniards in the Southwest to the recent past. The historic research team is led by J. Homer Thiel, who specializes in historic ceramics, glass bottles, and genealogical research. The team also includes Dr. Michael W. Diehl, who specializes in firearms and military items, and Christine H. Virden-Lange. James M. Heidke works with historic ceramics, and Jennifer A. Waters analyzes faunal materials.

Mr. Thiel has published multiple research articles in the Journal of the Southwest, Historical Archaeology, Industrial Archaeology, and American Ancestors. He is also an accomplished speaker who contributes to popular-interest presentations that link enthusiastic audiences to the history of their communities.

Desert Archaeology’s historical archaeology researchers can provide a range of consulting, research, and analytical services on a contract basis. Email us for availability, scheduling, and current rates.

Paleobotany and Pollen Data

Dr. Michael W. Diehl’s 26 years of paleoethnobotanical identifications and pollen interpretations allow him to provide unrivaled paleobotanical services and archaeological interpretation at competitive rates.

Dr. Diehl is a preeminent scholar on matters of prehistoric and historic food selection, foraging, and food production, and the relationships among environment, ethnicity, and food consumption.

His recent publications in peer-reviewed journal articles, books, and book chapters address such widely varied topics as changes in precipitation in southern Arizona and the social and economic responses to those changes; relationships among pollen, aquatic microfauna, and prehistoric food storage in Tucson; the organization of late prehistoric Apache land use in central Arizona; the introduction of cultigens to the Southwest; change through time in subsistence strategies in Arizona and New Mexico; Apache, Hohokam, and Mimbres Mogollon subsistence; and historic expressions of ethnic identity in food consumption.

Dr. Diehl maintains an in-house laboratory and comparative collection, and he is available on an as-needed basis for sample analysis, as well as for pre-bid consultation and inclusion on proposals. Email us for availability, scheduling, and current rates.

Shell

Christine H. Virden-Lange has more than 20 years of experience conducting identification and analysis of marine and freshwater shell species found at prehistoric and historic sites in the Southwest United States. She has an interest in the use of shell during the Early Agricultural period, shell production and exchange networks, and ornament production techniques.

Ms. Virden-Lange uses both macroscopic and microscopic techniques to observe species-diagnostic structural attributes, as well as the traces left on shell ornaments that reveal details of prehistoric people’s manufacturing techniques. In addition to performing the shell analysis for assemblages recovered during Desert Archaeology’s excavations, she has helped analyze and document artifacts in legacy collections, including those from the Phoenix-area Hohokam settlement of Snaketown and the late Mogollon Grasshopper Pueblo in east-central Arizona.

She is available to conduct species identification and worked shell artifact analysis on a contract basis. Email us for availability, scheduling, and current rates.

Zooarchaeology

Jennifer A. Waters has conducted analyses of faunal materials from sites throughout Arizona since 1996. The study of animal bone is essential for reconstructing the diet of past human populations from both prehistoric and historic times, and also answers questions about how people acquired and shared food and the ways they used their environment.

Analyzing the vertebrate faunal material from sites in southern Arizona has given Ms. Waters a broad perspective on both prehistoric and historic food preferences. Trends through prehistory in faunal assemblage characteristics such as taxonomic diversity, ratios of small to large animals, and ubiquities of small animal taxa show changes in diet breadth, hunting logistics, and prey and pest relationships. Shifts in hunting strategies provide answers to questions about settlement size and duration, land-use patterns, and economic organization. For historic assemblages, faunal analysis allows people’s diets and economic practices related to meat preparation to be reconstructed. Their ethnicities may also be identified through the study of butchering marks, element representation, and taxonomic composition.

Ms. Waters is available to conduct species identification and full assemblage analysis on a contract basis. Email us for availability, scheduling, and current rates.