The Gila Pueblo Salado

Gila Pueblo is the type-site for the Salado Culture, whose people were the late-prehistoric Western Pueblo inhabitants of the Roosevelt Basin in east-central Arizona. Their pottery has the largest areal distribution of any Southwestern prehistoric ware. The most famous of their sites are Tonto Cliff Dwellings, near the southern shore of Roosevelt Lake, and Gila Pueblo and Besh-ba-gowah, just south of Globe. Gila Pueblo was a major village, consisting of several hundred contiguous rooms. It was a large, nucleated settlement, located at or near the center of a densely populated area. It was one of eight such settlements located along Pinal Creek which, in turn, lay astride the major trade route coming up the San Pedro River from Casas Grandes. In this comprehensive volume, Charmion R. McKusick and Jon Nathan Young detail the discoveries they made during excavations of Gila Pueblo in the 1970s. Their findings offer important insights into the influential culture that occupied the pueblo. Many of those insights are further explored in Charmion McKusick’s Upland Salado Iconography and Religious Change.