Hohokam (Other Keyword)
76-100 (163 Records)
Hohokam communities who resided alongside the perennial rivers in south-central Arizona are renowned for the massive canals they engineered and operated, representing some of the largest preindustrial irrigation systems in the world. In light of such achievement, dry farming technologies and practices remain a lesser known component of the Hohokam agricultural landscape. This paper takes a close look at recent fieldwork around the South Mountains, an upland setting at the confluence of the Salt...
Hohokam Fieldhouses and Agricultural Labor (2015)
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...
Hohokam Platform Mounds and Costly Signaling (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Why Platform Mounds? Part 2: Regional Comparisons and Tribal Histories" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hohokam platform mounds (as well as ball courts and earthen "trash" mounds) are forms of monumental architecture requiring the expenditure of labor for purposes not related to shelter and subsistence. Selectionist theory predicts that economically unessential behavior (wasteful spending, superfluous activity) used...
Hohokam Pottery Manufacturing Specialization at Lower Santan Village Along the Middle Gila River, Southern Arizona (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Gila River Indian Community Cultural Resource Management Program completed extensive data recovery at Lower Santan Village with more than 2,500 cultural features investigated at this prehistoric Hohokam settlement. The village is located on the north side of the middle Gila River, along the southwestern flank of the Santan Mountain bajada. The village...
Hohokam Settlement and Agriculture along the New River (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Archaeological Research by PaleoWest" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents the results of three recent PaleoWest data recovery projects at small habitation sites and agricultural areas surrounding AZ T:7:68(ASM)/Palo Verde Ruin, one of the primary northern-periphery Hohokam sites along the New River. Previous work at the Palo Verde site had demonstrated a pattern of multiple small sites during...
Hohokam Water-Harvesting in the Queen Creek Area: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives of Water Management along Ephemeral Drainages in the Southern Arizona Desert (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Phoenix Basin Hohokam are celebrated for the construction of massive and elaborate canal systems fed by perennial waterways, principally the Salt and Gila rivers. In desert areas, however, along the many ephemeral drainages that crisscross the region, rainfall-harvesting and water-storage technologies largely overshadowed canal irrigation. These...
Home Bodies: An Examination of House Cremation among the Hohokam (2016)
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...
Horizon Events: Hohokam Ritual Relations with the Distant and Phenomenal (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For well over a millennium, Hohokam communities in the southern Southwest dwelled in a terrain of perennial river valleys fringed by a horizon of jagged mountains. Villages and livelihoods were nestled on the valley floors near the rivers, leaving the uplands as an uninhabited periphery between the everyday experience...
Household and Political Economy in Ancient Hohokam Society (2017)
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...
How Were Hohokam Palettes Used? Testing a Novel Hypothesis (2017)
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...
Identity and Ideology in the Hohokam Ballcourt World (2018)
The Hohokam Ballcourt World encompassed much of the middle Gila River watershed from around A.D. 800 to 1100. The widespread ideology that many archaeologists associate with the use of ballcourts correlates with an expression of group identity that manifests itself in the archaeological record as the suite of traits that mark the Hohokam pre-Classic period. Despite the fact that archaeologists commonly define groups based on their material culture, these groups are not static. Parts of identity...
The Impact of Changes during the Hohokam Classic Period on Irrigation Agriculture and Irrigation Management in the Middle Gila River Valley, Arizona (2017)
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...
The Interaction of Hohokam Ideology and Religious Beliefs in the Hohokam Practice of Dual Cemeteries (2015)
From A.D. 900 to 1400 Hohokam populations frequently used both corporate and household cemeteries within the same village. The practice became more visible following A.D. 1200, when burial was by inhumation in household cemeteries and by cremation in corporate cemeteries. The choice of cemeteries gave households flexibility in dealing with the tension between Hohokam sociopolitical ideology and religious beliefs. Burial in the privacy of household cemeteries served their egalitarian ideology...
Intersite Difference in Distant Interactions, Hohokam Canal System 2, Phoenix Basin, Arizona (2015)
Material evidence of interaction between prehispanic peoples in the U.S. Southwest and Mesoamerica is first detected ca. 2000 BCE with the introduction of maize, figurines, and ceramics. Such markers of long-distance interaction increase in diversity and abundance in later periods, including copper bells, scarlet macaws, and other objects and symbols. These objects and symbols moved up to 2000 km by social actions and mechanisms that remain obscure. Although the Hohokam had the strongest ties to...
Ironwood Village Data Recovery
This project was located within the footprint of the Marana Center commercial development, at the southeastern juncture of Interstate 10 and Twin Peaks Road in Marana, Arizona. The Marana Center project is subject to compliance with Section 404 of the Clean Water Act and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. PaleoWest conducted the Phase II archaeological data recovery on behalf of Vintage Partners, LLC between April 14 and June 27, 2014.Excavations at Ironwood Village led to...
Irrigation Time: An Assessment of Time as a Factor in Hohokam Irrigated Acreage (2018)
The Hohokam within the lower Salt River Valley, central Arizona, practiced large-scale irrigation the spanned thousands of acres. Previous studies examining Hohokam irrigation assumed that there was a direct correlation between the amount of available water within the lower Salt River and the amount of land that could be irrigated. The amount of available water is necessary for assessing where water was sufficient for successful crops and where insufficient water made agricultural production...
It Takes a (Big) Village: Preserving the Legacy of Pueblo Grande (2015)
Archaeology can marshal new digital infrastructure not simply to rescue endangered legacy information, but to revive and enhance those data for innovative research approaches. Over the course of two decades, Soil Systems, Inc. (SSI), collected vast amounts of archaeological information and digital data during the company’s work at Pueblo Grande, one of the largest and most centrally-located of the Classic period Hohokam villages in the Salt River Valley. This poster highlights efforts to...
La Plaza y La Cremaria: Archaeological Investigations in a Portion of AZ U:9:165 (ASM), a Multicomponent Site in Tempe, Maricopa County, Arizona (2005)
Data recovery within a small portion of La Plaza, AZ U:9:165 (ASM), revealed both prehistoric and historic remains. The prehistoric component included seven structure remnants, four cremation burials, six pits, 17 canal segments, and three miscellaneous features. Absolute and relative dates suggest occupation by the Hohokam during portions of the Colonial, Sedentary, and early Classic periods. The habitation-related features and burials were clustered in the northwest corner of the project...
Late Preclassic and Late Classic Period Archaeology in the Upper Reaches of Queen Creek, Superior, Arizona (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We summarize research findings from a data recovery project conducted along US Highway 60 near Superior, Arizona for the Arizona Department of Transportation. Prehistoric sites here range from small habitation sites (farmsteads and/or hamlets) of the late Preclassic – early Classic (AD 1000 - 1160) to both small and large habitation sites of the late...
A Look at the Artifact Assemblage from the Dairy Site Marana, Arizona (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Community Matters: Enhancing Student Learning Opportunities through the Development of Community Partnerships" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pima Community College recently partnered with local cultural resource management firm, Tierra Right of Way Services, Ltd. to aid in a data recovery project involving the Dairy Site (AZ AA:12:285[ASM]). The Dairy Site is a prominent multi-component site in Marana, Arizona dating...
Looking through the Glass: How Large-Scale XRF Obsidian Sourcing Has Expanded Our View of Late Pre-Hispanic Regional Networks in the U.S. Southwest (2019)
This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past three decades, the Geoarchaeological XRF Lab, founded and directed by Steve Shackley, has defined and established unique chemical fingerprints for nearly all of the obsidian sources used by Native Americans in the pre-Hispanic U.S. Southwest. Sources and sub-source localities can be reliably identified...
Los Guanacos: One Hundred Years Later, Recent Documentary and Archaeological Research Concerning a Prehistoric Hohokam Site First Investigated by the Hemenway Expedition of 1887 - 1888 (1988)
Much current archaeological research into prehistoric Hohokam society deals with relationships among the variables of site size, types of architecture, chronological placement, and the development of the canal system through time. Unfortunately, an alarming number of Hohokam sites have been destroyed or severely altered during the last hundred years of agricultural and urban development in the Salt River Valley. Because of these losses, early historic descriptions of Hohokam sites are of vital...
Loss of Color: Pigments in the Trincheras Tradition (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Coloring the World: People and Colors in Southwestern Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have largely defined the Trincheras Tradition by pottery, in particular the distribution of purple painted ceramics. The purple pigment, found in both specular and non-specular forms, was part of a bichrome and polychrome regional tradition that flourished across the Sonoran Desert between 700-1200 AD. Many...
Macroscale Analysis of Faunal Remains in the Hohokam Area of Southern Arizona: Preliminary Results (2015)
Pre-Contact societies in southern Arizona developed large-scale, agriculturally-based communities with essentially no access to domesticated meat. Their hunting opportunities were limited, as well, by the need to live close to water sources for irrigation. The resulting trade-offs between community needs have important implications for political organization, labor choices, and gender roles. In this poster, we present preliminary results of a GIS analysis of relationships between species...
Measuring Household Inequality in Hohokam Society: An Analysis of Domestic Architecture at Pueblo Grande (2017)
Recent archaeological efforts to explain the emergence and persistence of social inequality have been hampered by a lack of information about how wealth was transmitted across generations and how it may have accumulated or diminished over time. Building on studies that have shown domestic architecture to be an excellent material expression of household wealth, we provide a method for reconstructing the amount of labor invested in house construction at Pueblo Grande, taking into account different...