Hohokam Fieldhouses and Agricultural Labor

Summary

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 agricultural labor was operationalized in fieldhouses, and I look to these features for evidence of variation in labor strategies.

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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