 Archaeologists exploring the high desert of northern Arizona have found a pair of “matching” villages that date back some 1,300 years, revealing evidence of a crucial phase in Southwestern prehistory. Most of the features had walls and floors lined with slabs of sandstone, an architectural style unique to the region, even though there’s no stone to be found around the village. “Last year we found a large habitation site, and this summer we found a match, less than a mile away, a site that has dozens and dozens of different features,” Reitze said. “We have now two large groups of pithouse structures, both of them with probably more than 50 structures associated with them.” 
 
 In addition to the distinctive sandstone architecture, both sites turned up fragments of brown ceramics and stone points that are indicative of the late Basketmaker period, a cultural phase that prefigured the Ancestral Puebloans who went on to build the monuments of Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. Indeed, last year’s survey of the ranch revealed ruins of a multistory great house that was likely part of the cultural and trade network based in Chaco Canyon. [Read about last year’s discovery: “‘Impressive’ Pueblo Great House, Dozens of Ruins Found in Petrified Forest National Park“] 
 
 But the two newfound villages date back to a key phase before that time — to the Basketmakers’ transition, around the year 700, from nomadic foraging to a more sedentary, agricultural, and complex society. NPS 
 
 Both of the large basket-maker sites are in neighboring, stabilized sand dunes less than a kilometer apart, Reitze said. So any kind of slab at all that you find out there was brought in by people,” Reitze explained. NPS 
 
 "It’s really interesting because it really allows us to see on a larger scale things we’ve noticed in other areas in the park," Reitze said. “So we can ask some of these questions, and fill in answers not only to the archaeology here, but to the archaeology throughout the northern Southwest.”
– An ancient village has come to light in Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park—and it's the second such find in as many years. The villages are some 1,300 years old, dating from between 200 AD and 700 AD, ABC News reports. Archaeologists discovered homes dug into the ground known as pit-houses, built in sand dunes. Their floors and walls were lined with sandstone, Archaeology reports. Such accommodations exist elsewhere in the park; in these villages, however, they're clustered together, park archaeologist Bill Reitze says. Each village has "probably more than 50 structures," he notes, as Western Digs reports. The sites appear to be from a cultural era known as the Basketmaker period. Teams have also found tools and weapons made from petrified wood, shells, and ceramics, ABC notes. The findings come as the park doubles in size following an expansion enacted by Congress a decade ago. "There are not a lot of national parks that have the opportunity to get bigger like this to protect sites and produce future research," Reitze notes. "Because the park is doubling in size, we are finding something every day." (Another fascinating recent archaeological discovery: the remains of a mysterious "witch girl" found in Italy.)