Old Pueblo Archaeology Center’s “Third Thursday Food for Thought” program presents “Indigenous Trail Networks and the Engineering of Cultural Landscapes of the Sonoran Desert” by preservation anthropologist Aaron M. Wright, Ph.D. This free Zoom online presentation will be given on Thursday, August 20, 2026 from 7:00-8:30 pm ARIZONA/Mountain Standard Time (same as Pacific Daylight Time).

Archaeology has long fixated on places – settlements, ceremonial centers, the bounded spaces where people congregated. But what about the spaces between? This presentation turns attention to movement itself, examining how ancestral O’odham and Yuman communities built and traveled the trail networks that connected their world. Drawing on recent fieldwork in southern Arizona, the talk argues that these routes were far more than footpaths worn into desert soil. Evidence of planning, construction, and sustained maintenance points to a deliberate built infrastructure – corridors that organized travel, transport, and communication across a vast and deeply interconnected landscape. To follow these trails is to see the desert not as empty space, but as a cultural environment actively engineered by the people who lived within it – and to broaden our understanding of Indigenous infrastructure well beyond monumental architecture. Aaron M. Wright is a preservation anthropologist with Archaeology Southwest in Tucson. This presentation will not be recorded.

To register for the Zoom webinar go to https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_PhtiWS2ZSfGcI8ngeFcWwg. For more information contact Old Pueblo at info@oldpueblo.org or 520-798-1201.

Flyer: 20260820(v2)ThirdThursday_AaronWright_IndigenousTrailNetworks&EngineeringOfCulturalLandscapes
Caption: A constructed trail corridor atop desert pavement in southwestern Arizona, photo by Aaron Wright