Platform Cache Encampments: Implications for Mobility Strategies an the Earliest Ancestra Apaches

The Hormiguero site is a large mountainside Apache residential site int he Peloncillo Mountains of southern Arizona that lies int eh heart of historically documented Chiricahua Apache territory. It represent an encampment at an important caching location, a category of residential site that has not been previously described archaeologically. Ethnographic data are enlisted to understand this unique type of Apache residential site and a previously unknown cache form – the platform cache. Archaeological evidence is combined from a number of sites with caches like those at Hormiguero to interpret aspects of cultural identity and chronology including the presence of ancestral Apaches in southern Arizona as early as the 14th century AD.