Early Mortuary Traditions in the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Transcending Boundaries and Exploring Pasts: Current Archaeological Investigations of the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The earliest settled villages in the Borderlands region of the Sonoran Desert are largely associated with the protracted transition from foraging to farming and the foundation of Formative period archaeological cultures in the region. Mortuary practices associated with the Early Agricultural (EA) period (2100 B.C.-A.D. 50) principally focused on inhumation burial but culminate with the introduction and eventual dominance of cremation burial. EA communities, spread across southern Arizona and northern Sonora, often placed the deceased in flexed positions in houses, pre-existing pits, or small groups with limited funerary objects. There is also a significant variability inherent in these patterns such as extended positions and multiple burials, indicating a great deal of individual expression in mortuary rituals. We argue that these traditions downplay vertical social distinctions and instead reflect horizontal distinctions based on achieved community role and gender. These commonalities end with the eventual adoption of cremation and begin to diverge near the modern border in subsequent archaeological traditions. The transition to cremation-based rituals is a major shift in the cosmology of death and formed the basis for mortuary rituals among the Hohokam tradition in southern Arizona and the Trincheras tradition in northern Sonora.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Transcending Boundaries and Exploring Pasts: Current Archaeological Investigations of the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23981