Settlement Structure at La Villa: A Preclassic Hohokam Village

Summary

For roughly 400 years after La Villa was founded, around A.D. 500, the village would have been one of the largest in the Phoenix Basin, rivaling, perhaps, the great centers of Snaketown and Grewe on the Middle Gila River. Recent excavations at the site by Desert Archaeology Inc. combined with a series of previous investigations provide intriguing new information about the organization of settlement at Hohokam villages. The work at La Villa has resulted in the identification of two large plazas as well as occupation extending more than 120 m beyond the plaza edges. Our investigations at La Villa have identified multiple long-lived social units close to the plazas while occupations farther from the plazas are of shorter duration. We suggest that settlement along the perimeter of the plaza would have been by the village founders and their descendants, with these spaces curated for hundreds of years. A plaza proximate location would have served to display the historical relationship of the households to the founding of the village reinforcing social, political, and economic rights that are likely to have been derived from first-comer status.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Society and Economy in the Hohokam World: New Evidence and Insights from Canal System 2, Phoenix, Arizona

Keywords

Spatial Coverage