Hohokam (Other Keyword)
76-100 (187 Records)
Full-coverage regional archaeological surveys conducted throughout the world in diverse environmental contexts have demonstrated the advantages of this methodology for addressing a broad range of anthropological issues. The Northern Tucson Basin Survey (1980-1987) directed by Suzanne and Paul Fish represents the first application of this methodology to document prehistoric Hohokam settlement and land-use. Contiguous survey blocks centered on three Classic Period platform mounds and their...
Games, Feasting, and Trade Fairs: Assessing the Relationship between Ballcourts and Exchange at the Ironwood Village Site (2015)
A significant amount of research in Hohokam archaeology has been dedicated to understanding the structure of interaction and exchange. One particular model that has gained recent momentum is that of a marketplace economy revolving around ballcourt events that served as gathering points for social and economic interaction. These markets, or trade fairs, would have provided a reliable mechanism for the exchange of goods to spatially and socially disparate populations. Feasting also may have been...
Geochemical Evidence for Dispersed Ground Stone Tool Production at Hohokam Villages in the Middle Gila River Valley, Arizona. (2017)
A recent geochemical provenance analysis of Hohokam vesicular basalt grinding tools argued for the nucleated production of trough manos and metates during the Pre-Classic (A.D. 500-1100) and Classic (A.D. 1100-145) periods (Fertelmes 2014). One locus of production was suggested to have been the primary village of Upper Santan, which acquired vesicular basalt from the Santan Mountains and then distributed finished or nearly complete grinding tools to settlements across the Middle Gila River...
Geometric Morphometric Analysis of Hohokam Projectile Points from the Tonto Basin (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Geometric Morphometrics in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Traditional analyses of projectile points often use visual identification, the presence or absence of discrete characteristics, or linear measurements to classify points into distinct types. Geometric morphometrics provides additional tools for analyzing, visualizing, and comparing projectile point morphology. In this study, I compare the...
Gillespie Dam Site
Data recovery excavations
A GIS-Approach to a Prehistoric Travel Corridor in the Phoenix Area (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents the preliminary results of a GIS-based approach for the documentation and interpretation of a prehistoric Hohokam travel corridor in the South Mountains of Phoenix, Arizona. Trails, their associated features and co-occurrences of artifacts, when combined with settlement data, provide important clues about intercommunity relationships and...
Groundstone Analysis from West Phoenix Basin Hohokam Village Sites (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To date, much of the archaeological research in the Phoenix Basin has focused on the central Phoenix area, and specifically the areas surrounding Canal Systems 1 and 2. Recent cultural resource management testing and excavation projects in the west Phoenix area have provided new insights into Hohokam daily life at the confluence of the Salt and Gila...
Heḍt (2016)
Iron oxides and other associated minerals (“ochre”) are among the most common pigments used by prehistoric North American populations, particularly in the Hohokam region of central Arizona where they were employed in mortuary rituals, as body paint, and to decorate pottery, basketry, arrows, and pictographs. This paper identifies the wide variety of iron-oxides making up Hohokam, O’odham and Pee Posh red paint (in O'odham, heḍt) and it considers how prehistoric artisans manipulated earthy,...
Hohokam Communities: Taking Risks and Making Trade-offs (2016)
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...
Hohokam Dry Farming along the South Mountains Bajada, South-Central Arizona (2018)
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...