There And Back Again: A Geochemical Analysis of Casas Grandes Shell Procurement and Exchange

Summary

Previous studies of shell exchange in the Southwest have supported archaeological interpretations of competing regional networks in which the Hohokam, Sinagua, and Anasazi acquired shell from the Gulf of California, while the Casas Grandes, Mimbres, and Western Puebloan groups acquired shell from West Mexico. This study will build on previous analyses by integrating stylistic analysis with an expanded compositional database to further examine the role of shell exchange in the Animas phase region of New Mexico and Arizona. ICP-MS analyses of shell artifacts from 76 Draw will be combined with modern shell and an expanded Casas Grandes geochemical dataset to investigate potential regional sources for shell procurement. The geochemical analysis of shells from 76 Draw, as well as other Animas phase and Casas Grandes samples, will provide a clearer picture of exchange and interactions between the Casas Grandes core and sites in the borderlands.

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

• Moving Forward in Casas Grandes Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage