Cumulative Survey: Defining Coalescent Communities in the American Southwest

Summary

The fundamental shift from artifacts to settlements as the basic units of archaeological inquiry required a rethinking of methodologies. Now the basic questions were about measuring interactions of people deployed differentially on cultural landscapes. At a more abstract level it required adoption of the logic of relations in preference to the typological logic of entities and their qualities. If settlements are portrayed as variously colored dots on a map, interactions can be expressed as what connects those dots. Full coverage survey of whole cultural landscapes on larger and larger spatial scales, in the end, is essential for mapping the relationships that provide the data for discovering and testing models of those interactions. Cumulative survey, however, the assembling of information on all known sites larger than farmsteads on macro-regional scales, while not an alternative to full coverage survey, does allow at least preliminary studies of coalescent communities in the late prehistoric American Southwest. Distance parameters of potential interactions can then be studied, and the addition of ceramic data from those sites opens the door to analyses based on network theory. In my professional lifetime, Stephen Kowalewski has been a friend, a sounding board, and an inspiration for many such studies.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Staying Out of Small, Square Holes: The Contributions of Stephen Kowalewski to the Understanding of Human Societies at Regional and Global Scales

Keywords

Spatial Coverage