An Efficient and Reliable Mechanism: The Human Experience of Hohokam Ceramic Exchange during the Middle Sacaton Period (A.D. 1000–1070)

Summary

The human labor involved in physically carrying goods across the landscape underpins all artifact provenance studies in the prehispanic American Southwest, yet this labor is all too often left unacknowledged and unconsidered, even as detailed and sometimes remarkable patterns of artifact production and distribution are brought to light. This is especially true for the Phoenix Basin Hohokam, where ceramic provenance studies have revolutionized archaeologists’ abilities to understand the organization of pottery production and distribution, but the human labor involved in ceramic transport has been mostly only implied or obliquely referenced.

In this paper, I employ an Archaeology of the Human Experience (AHE) framework to explore the labor involved in ceramic exchange among the Phoenix Basin Hohokam during the middle Sacaton period (ca. A.D. 1000-1070), when the volume and extent of this exchange were at their peak. Through a case study from the site of Las Colinas, I focus on situating and investigating the labor of ceramic exchange as a condition of life for the middle Sacaton period Hohokam, considering how this labor was part of and affected broader social contexts, and exploring bodily, social, and temporal aspects of the experience of ceramic transport, drawing upon archaeological and ethnographic examples.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21851