By the late seventeenth century, the Spanish presence in the northwestern frontier of New Spain comprised established military, agricultural, and missionary settlements. A number of missions, visitas, and communities of Tohono O'odham were in place along the Santa Cruz River and under the watchful administration of Jesuit missionaries and military forces. In the San Pedro River valley, some 40 miles east of the Santa Cruz and the mission of Bac, the edge of the empire was reached and the frontier between the Spanish and neighboring Native Americans took over. Among the people whom the Spaniards encountered in the San Pedro River valley were the Sobaipuri Pima, who are best known through the records of Padre Kino and Lieutenant Manje, the Alcalde Mayor of Sonora. These records are from the Spanish point of view, however, and do not convey a full sense of how and where the Sobaipuri lived in the region. Furthermore, although informative and intriguing (albeit one-sided) information on the Sobaipuri is found in the Spanish records, the archaeology of the Sobaipuri remains poorly understood. Few sites have been documented and reported on since the work of Charles Di Peso of the Amerind Foundation during the 1950s, when he investigated the Spanish Presidio of Terrenate (also known as Quiburi), and the Sobaipuri site of Gaybanipitea.

The research program being conducted by Jim Vint intends to refine and augment the limited universe of Sobaipuri archaeology that has been developed to date. His geographical focus is the stretch of the San Pedro River valley between the old townsite of Fairbank and northward to the area around the mouth of Aravaipa Canyon; this is the region where a number of the sites documented by the Spanish are located. By using a methodology that combines documentary records with archaeological research, known and previously undocumented sites will be investigated and placed within the context of Spanish records, as well as being viewed from an archaeological perspective outside of the Spanish documentary framework. This multi-faceted approach will provide a fuller picture of the Sobaipuri and Spanish frontier than that from documentary or archaeological research alone. The sparse nature of Sobaipuri sites and the sporadic documentary records make this research a challenging but promising endeavor.