People Moving Pottery: Modeling the Circulation of Fourmile Polychrome in East-central Arizona

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Pedestrians: Current Research in GIS-Based Movement Modeling for Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Southwest archaeologists have long relied on the exchange and movement of decorated pottery to infer cultural boundaries, migrations, and broader social networks. However, little investigation has been done on the processes or paths used to transport pottery within these social networks. The distribution of fourteenth-century Fourmile Polychrome ceramics presents an excellent case study to investigate these larger questions of the movement of people and pottery due to its narrow production zone, pinpointed in previous chemical sourcing analyses, and wide area of circulation. Using a combination of Least Cost Path and Circuit Theoretic geospatial modeling, we analyze the physical and cultural landscapes in east-central Arizona to identify possible corridors of human movement between known pottery-creator and -recipient villages. We corroborate these hypothetical movement models using ethnographic and ethnohistoric resources including literature, oral histories, images, and historic maps. This paper focuses needed attention on how people, not just pots, moved around the rugged landscape below the Mogollon Rim, the decision-making processes behind the paths they took and the loads that they carried.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Ancient Pedestrians: Current Research in GIS-Based Movement Modeling for Archaeology

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51187