Triangulating Piipaash History along the Lower Gila River, Southwestern Arizona

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative Archaeology: How Native American Knowledge Enhances Our Collective Understanding of the Past" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Contemporary Piipaash of the Gila River and Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Communities, in the greater Phoenix area of south-central Arizona, have histories tying them to the lower Gila and lower Colorado Rivers. These “down river” landscapes were their exclusive territories until they moved upriver for safety and solace among their Akimel O’Odham allies in the middle Gila River valley. Piipaash ancestors completed this profound demographic transformation less than a generation before the region’s annexation by an expanding US Empire in 1848/1852. While an outline can be pieced together through ethnohistoric and oral historical records, archaeologists have all but ignored this social process and its material signatures. This paper synthesizes recent collaborative research that is weaving together a Piipaash cultural landscape along the lower Gila River. Known for its immense galleries of rock imagery and fields of ground figures, the lower Gila also hosts ancestral Piipaash settlements that offer authorship for the images. Attention to the substance and structure to these settlements provides a better understanding of the history and demography of the Piipaash and other riverine Yuman Tribes, and Patayan archaeology more broadly.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Collaborative Archaeology: How Native American Knowledge Enhances Our Collective Understanding of the Past   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38714.0