The Arizona Public Service Cholla-Saguaro Transmission Line Mitigation Project, an undertaking as large in scope as its full title suggests, began in April of 1977. It is hereafter referred to as Cholla. The project's obvious purpose was to mitigate construction impacts to prehistoric sites along that portion of the line extending from the Cholla generating plant near the Little Colorado River to the upper drainage of Devore Wash south of Lake Roosevelt, a distance of 135 transmission-line miles. The Tonto-Roosevelt Region constitutes a geographic unit only in the sense that it labels a dispersed group of sites impacted by APS construction activities. As a region, it is not a spatially significant analytic unit. Likewise, the study areas that subdivide this region have meaning only as convenient labels for smaller groups of sites. If defined as drainages (see Gregory 1979), these study areas have the potential to structure future archaeological investigation. The study areas include, from north to south, Lower Cherry Creek, Coon Creek, Black Mesa, and Devore Wash. In this report, however, they structure the presentation of site information, and reference different areas of archaeological investigation in the Tonto-Roosevelt Region. Seventy-nine sites were identified in the Tonto-Roosevelt Region of the Cholla Project; 13 were intensively investigated. At only four of these did excavations exceed simple test pits. This small number of sites representing relatively simple occupations presented excruciating problems to the archaeological fieldwork. The seemingly straightforward mitigation of impacts to simple sites was exacerbated by conditions of the environment, the APS construction schedule, and the uncertainty with which the Arizona State Museum, National Forest Service, and APS initially coordinated efforts to comply with nascent Federal regulations. Aspects of this history bear directly upon the conduct of the archaeological research and thus provide a perspective from which to evaluate the content and structure of the research.
