The Ties that Bind: Integrating Archaeological, Ethnographic, and Computational Models of Movement across the Great Bend of the Gila in Southern Arizona

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Landscape Archaeology - Part 2" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Cultural landscapes are amalgamations of places, resources, and peoples’ lives, as well as the ties that bind them together, such as sense-sheds (visual, auditory, etc.) and routes of movement. Landscape

archaeologists tend to rely on computational models of viewsheds and optimal paths to approximate the immaterial and phenomenological threads that weave sites and artifacts into cultural landscapes. In

the deserts of the North American Southwest, material signs of relict Indigenous trails offer actual glimpses into corporeal movement and relational connectivity across landscapes and over generations.

Moreover, descendant communities perpetuate knowledge of traditional practices and methods related to long-distance travel. This paper provides a case study from southern Arizona in the integration of

archaeological and ethnographic data on Indigenous trails with computational models of economically optimal travel routes. Along the Great Bend of the Gila River, O’Odham and Piipaash farmers and their

Huhugam and Patayan ancestors maintained familial, cultural, economic, and spiritual relationships through regular correspondence and visitation along defined travel corridors that bridged population

centers in the middle and lower Gila River valleys. A composition of archaeological, ethnographic, and computational data allows us to more fully understand the nature and evolution of this landscape of

connectivity than either dataset alone.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Interdisciplinary Approaches to Landscape Archaeology - Part 2   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51404