Digging without Getting Dirty: Making use of Archival Data to Explore Variations of Labor Costs in Hohokam Residential Architecture at Pueblo Grande.

Summary

Archaeological research in Arizona’s Phoenix Basin has been ongoing for nearly four decades, reaching its heyday during the 1990s. This resulted from large CRM projects associated with development in Phoenix, especially ADOT. The potential uses of data collected as a part of these excavations has only begun to be realized, and efforts to digitally preserve and make available these data accessible for new analysis are underway. At Pueblo Grande and elsewhere in the lower Salt River Valley, there was a rapid change from Hohokam pithouses to narrow-walled adobes at ~1150 AD. This change was probably the result of environmental degradation, which made it necessary to use less wood and more adobe in house construction. Later, a second transition to massive-walled adobes enclosed behind towering compound walls occurred across the Hohokam region around 1275 AD. Using archival data we calculated labor costs for more than 100 rooms at Pueblo Grande and compared them within and between architectural styles. We found the labor costs for massive-walled adobes were considerably greater than for other kinds of structures. From these labor costs we aim to better understand the architectural transitions, as well as examine potential wealth differentiation at Pueblo Grande and beyond.

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

• The Afterlife of Archaeological Information: Use and Reuse of Digital Archaeological Data   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage