Shell, Trade, and Systems of Value at the Dawn of Agriculture in the Tucson Basin

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Current studies on nacreous shell jewelry, those with an iridescent inner layer, during the Early Agricultural period (2100 BC - 150 AD) (Vint 2017) have chiefly examined how the material was brought into the Tucson Basin without much consideration for if it’s presence in the region was purely due to chance or if it was specifically chosen. Central to that question is understanding how nacreous shell artifacts were valued in the region and if that differed from non-nacreous artifacts. To address this gap in our knowledge, a series of chi-square and Fisher’s exact tests were conducted on the various shell assemblages recorded from 17 sites dated to the Early Agricultural period. These tests compared nacreous and non-nacreous shells across eight types of contexts and 26 stylistic forms in order to see if either shell material was found more or less frequently in any particular context or fashioned into any particular form. The results from these tests suggest that nacreous shell material was used and valued independently, with clear connections to mortuary practices. Additionally, these results reaffirm previous hypotheses on the origin of nacreous shell in the Tucson Basin and suggest regional differences in shell use across the study area.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39896.0