ABSTRACT
The southern sector of the Greater Southwest is homeland to Uto-Aztecan-speaking groups of southern Arizona and the adjacent Mexican state of Sonora. North of West Mexico is the huge, arid zone that can be termed, from a United States perspective, the Greater Southwest. At the end of the twentieth century, Indians in the Southwest had by no means reversed the injustices they suffered through four centuries of colonial domination. Water rights are perhaps the most crucial economic issue: throughout the Greater Southwest, agribusiness irrigation and the water demands of modern cities are rapidly depleting a severely limited resource. Western Mexico has been less explored by archaeologists than other regions of the country. Archaeologists have looked for their occupations in rockshelters and found packed earth levels indicating fairly regular use of the natural shelters and storage pits, cooking hearths, and at Cienega Creek in Arizona.
