North America - Southwest (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only April Kamp-Whittaker. Andrea Barker. Margaret Nelson.

Hohokam Risks and Trade-offs is the product of research funded by an NSF Coupled Human and Natural Systems grant that focused on the role of social and ecological diversity in reducing risk of food shortfall or supporting food security. Several teaching tools were developed to demonstrate to students the risks undertaken and trade-offs made by prehistoric southwestern groups in the selection of residential locations. The curriculum, based on a platform designed by NASA, engages students in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Watkins.

Construction, operation, and maintenance of the extensive prehistoric irrigation systems of the Phoenix Basin required a significant input of labor. The ethnographic record suggests that the organization of agricultural labor among smallholder irrigation farmers can be varied and complex. Hohokam householders had a variety of labor arrangements at their disposal, and were flexible in their application of different strategies to meet changing environmental and cultural conditions. Hohokam...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Riggs. Blythe Morrison.

Despite the importance of Cultural Resource Management (CRM) in contemporary archaeology, the task of teaching students proper field techniques still largely falls on academic institutions in the form of summer archaeological field schools. Although CRM derives from numerous federal laws and policies, the same laws have made the conduct of field school increasingly difficult as federal, state and tribal land managers impose restrictions on the scope of excavations on lands that were once...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Wright. Will Russell.

During the pre-Classic era (ca. AD 400-1150), pithouses and houses-in-pits were the preferred modes of residential architecture among Hohokam communities. When excavated, these wood-framed domiciles often show signs of burning, which effectively closed the structures’ lifecycles as dwellings. Among affiliated and descendant communities such as the O’odham and some Yuman-speaking groups, a person’s death could prompt the burning of their home in order to combat any pollution, sickness, or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Rozo.

By using multiple lines of evidence from the archaeological material record, as well as from the environmental pollen record, this paper will explore the history of anthropogenic landscape changes at one particular site in the Galisteo Basin of New Mexico. Located on the margins of the Spanish mission system, the ancestral Pueblo site of Paa-ko and its surrounding field systems present an ideal opportunity to tease out the thread of colonial influences on local communities, particularly with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Renteria. Ronald Towner.

Cebolla Canyon, in the El Malpais National Conservation Area, New Mexico, was homesteaded extensively in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by Hispanic and Euro-American families. The local environment provided grazing resources for sheep and cows, and the ability to homestead in this area allowed families to pursue seasonal or year-round occupation. The regional histories of these migrants differ, but the exploitation possibilities of land and timber provided people with the promise of land...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Miljour. Karen R. Adams.

The Homol’ovi settlement cluster, a group of Hopi villages occupied A.D. 1260–1400, shared common utilization of a wide range of wild and domesticated plants for both subsistence and non-subsistence needs. Inhabitants had an extremely well-rounded and informed view of the plant world that surrounded them, as well as plant resources obtained from afar. The ubiquity of domesticates in the archaeological record indicates a heavy reliance on agriculture for food, household items, clothing, fuel, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Pilles.

Honanki is a 13th century, ca. 60 room cliff dwelling in the scenic Red Rock country near Sedona, Arizona.. It has been a popular attraction to scientists and tourists ever since it was first reported by Jesse Walter Fewkes in 1895. Over the years, time and people had caused considerable disturbance to the site and damage was accelerating as Sedona became an ever-more popular recreational destination. To deal with these problems, the Coconino National Forest applied for a grant from the newly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leigh Kuwanwisiwma.

For thousands of years, the Hopi clans have traversed both the South and North American continents. Today, this presence is evidenced by the thousands of Hopi/Puebloan archaeological ruins. As well, esoteric ceremonies of today are ancient ceremonies and reinforce a living connection to our cultural history and religion. This great migration period of Hopi people was in fulfillment of a spiritual covenant between clans and our spiritual deity and guardian called Ma’sawu. Ma’sawu is the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Ditto.

At Chaco Canyon, clear indications of social differentiation in the Pueblo world first appeared during the 9th-11th centuries. One materialization of this is the contrast between two contemporaneous architectural forms: great houses, interpreted as populous communities or largely empty centers of seasonal ritual pilgrimage, and small houses, explained as multi-family households. Since ritual artifacts have been excavated from both house categories, analyzing inter- and intra-site variation in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Graves.

Examining household-level economic behaviors has long been a means for archaeologists to explore social and political organization in ancient Hohokam society. In this presentation, I reflect on the training and influence of Katherine Spielmann in my thinking about the economic roots of inequality in small- scale societies and begin to outline an explicitly political-economic framework to explore the structure and bases of power among the Hohokam of southern Arizona. The Hohokam household was the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Ingram.

If interdisciplinary concepts such as resilience and vulnerability are to be useful to archaeologists, then understandable methods of identifying these complex social phenomena are needed. Archaeological approaches that use familiar methods and material indicators will encourage exploration of these interdisciplinary concepts. This presentation will demonstrate how both human resilience and vulnerability to climatic conditions can be identified using changes in residential abandonment rates...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Randall McGuire.

Archaeologists live in a North America divided by lines. These lines include the borders of nations, the boundaries of states and provinces and the limits that we as archaeologists have drawn around culture areas. These lines affect in subtle and complex ways, how we frame questions, how we define the boundaries of our studies, what journals we read, what colleagues we talk to, where we go to school and dozens of other aspects of archaeology. Most if not all of these lines had no meaning for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerod Roberts. Victoria Muñoz. Carolyn Boyd.

Digital photography provides increasingly sophisticated applications that are invaluable to rock art researchers. Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center relies heavily on many of these applications to document, preserve, and analyze rock art—such as 3D modeling through Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetry, multi-focal stacking, color management, and digital field microscopy for stratigraphic analyses. Depending on which applications are used, there are important considerations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Curtis Schaafsma. Polly Schaafsmsa.

We present a brief history of rock art research in North America, identifying some of the social forces and schools of thought that have shaped these studies within and outside of the confines of traditional archaeology. Among relevant issues within academia are prevailing paradigms that aspire to specific goals and interests that orient archaeological research. Even when these interests and concerns would benefit from the analysais of prehistoric images made by the socio/cultural groups under...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Walter Dodd.

Palette means "little shovel" in French. The name derives from a commonly held belief that these curious objects were shallow, hollowed-out containers in which paint pigments were prepared. Another suggestion is that they were used as snuff trays, i.e., surfaces for grinding up hallucinogens prior to chewing or inhalation. This paper advances a new hypothesis with testable implications. It is argued that palettes were employed as mirrors, possibly in ritual contexts. Test results from a series...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Levi Keach.

In 2016, Desert Research Institute archaeologists identified 26NY15768, an artifact scatter consisting primarily of Vegas Vic brand root beer bottles dating to 1953. 26NY15768 is located in Frenchman Flat on the Nevada National Security Site, known as the Nevada Proving Grounds at the time of deposition. The Nevada National Security Site, under various names, has served as the United States’ continental nuclear test site since it was withdrawn from the Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tim Ferguson.

Research in the Virgin Branch Puebloan region indicates that during the middle Pueblo II Period there were strong socio-economic mechanisms linking the lowlands in southern Nevada to the uplands on the Arizona Strip. Ties between these areas are demonstrated by the presence of large numbers of ceramics produced in the uplands that have been recovered from lowland sites. Traditional ecological and economic models suggest that these trade networks may have been a way to reduce risk by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Fernandez.

The prehistoric exchange of macaws and their feathers was a ritually charged cultural phenomenon observed across the Southwestern United States and portions of Northern Mexico. Nowhere was the integration of this industry more apparent than at Paquimé, the principal center of the Casas Grandes culture, in present day Northern Chihuahua, Mexico. The residents of Paquimé and some of its outlying community members imported, bred, raised, and ritually sacrificed various species of macaws by the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Seltzer.

The mission period of the American Southwest during the late 1500s and early 1600s, is defined by the adoption of Spanish Catholicism by the Pueblo people. Missionaries gradually introduced the Pueblo people to Catholicism in order to obliterate and replace the Pueblo peoples’ traditional religion. The result of the Pueblo people resisting the Spanish, created a form of religious syncretism in which Pueblo people were forced to blend Christianity with their traditional religion in order to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Casey Hanson.

This poster presents the results of an investigation of the contraband market and frontier trade networks that existed in Spanish Colonial and Mexican Texas. The archaeological record dating to the late 18th and early 19th centuries in San Antonio is defined by the appearance of English-made goods, predominately refined English earthenwares, illegally imported from New Orleans. This investigation compared artifact collections and documents from the Bexar Archives spanning the Colonial Period...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachael Byrd. Alice Garcia.

Aggregation characteristic of prehistoric east-central Arizona archaeological sites influenced residential and regional identities during the Pueblo III (1100-1300 A.D.) period. Some aspects of these identities can be explored by focusing on mortuary feature and osteological data. In 1991, a total of 101 burial features were mapped and excavated at Slade Ruin (AZ Q:15:1 [ASM]) located on private land in Eager, Arizona to avoid contamination from a nearby hydrocarbon spill. This cemetery sample...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Woodson.

This paper examines the impact of changes during the Hohokam Classic period on the social organization of canal irrigation management along the middle Gila River in south-central Arizona. A series of important social, political, and environmental changes occurred during the Hohokam Sedentary to Classic period transition. This study examines this transition to see if it represents a hinge point in how irrigation was organized. The focus is on the irrigation organization which is the social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tanya Chiykowski.

Around 1200 AD, Trinchereños (members of the Trincheras Tradition of the Sonoran Desert) covered the hillside of Cerro de Trincheras, Sonora, Mexico in over 900 terraces. After such extensive investment in shaping and laying out space within the site, they then proceeded to live in relatively ephemeral domestic structures on the hillside. This paper addresses the apparent contradiction of impermanent houses on robust platforms by examining how Trinchereños built, maintained and managed space...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deborah Gangloff.

Archaeotourism, the visiting of sites of historic and prehistoric significance, not only satisfies people’s interest in the past, but more importantly helps to build greater support for cultural resource preservation and research. While protecting sites is paramount, professional archaeologists cannot ignore or risk losing the opportunities archaeotourism provides; namely creating a scientifically- and culturally-literate population that can help advance the protection of cultural resources and...