Ancestral pueblo population aggregation and abandonment in the North American Southwest

After over a century of archaeological research in the American Southwest, questions focusing on population aggregation and abandonment continue to preoccupy much of Pueblo archaeology. This article presents a historical overview of the present range of explanatory approaches to these two processes, with a primary focus on population aggregation in those regions occupied by historic and prehistoric Pueblo peoples. We stress the necessarily complementary nature of most of these explanations of residential abandonment and aggregation. Case studies from the northern Southwest illustrate the continuous nature of these processes across time and space. We suggest that additional explanatory potential will be gained by the use of well-defined theoretical units to frame our current approaches. We extend the use of the local community concept as a theoretical unit of organization that, along with explicit archaeological correlates, should help advance our research into population aggregation and abandonment in this and other regions of the world.     

The Hohokam of Southwest North America

The Hohokam reached an apex of sociopolitical development between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries in the Sonoran Desert of North America. Hallmarks of the Hohokam tradition included red-on-buff pottery, large-scale canal irrigation agriculture, and monumental buildings, including ball courts, platform mounds, towers, and Great Houses. The development and elaboration of Hohokam society from their ceramic-producing predecessors during more than two millennia (ca. 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1450, or later) is a remarkable example of an arid land adaptation in the New World. The enigmatic collapse of Hohokam society took place shortly before European colonialists entered the North American Southwest in the mid–sixteenth century. Various agents (e.g., floods, disease, warfare) of this event are poorly understood and require additional study. So, too, does the degree of historical continuity between contemporary indigenous peoples and precontact archaeological cultures (e.g., Hohokam) in what is now Arizona and northern Mexico.     

Development at the Edge of Difference: Rethinking Capital and Market Relations from Lugu Lake,Southwest China

This paper rethinks the relationships between capitalist development in indigenous places and the fabric of local differences and specificities. It first develops a critical appraisal of the celebration of ethnic identities, local agency and indigenous knowledge in existing literatures. It suggests that, based on such insights, we can further envision the possibility of questioning and problematising the ontology and concept of the capitalist economy. Above all, this paper is interested in non-capitalist factors percolating into capitalist economies and creating fissures in their logical and ontological coherence. It examines how capitalist economies depend on local specificities to achieve particular configurations. We elucidate this argument with a case study of indigenous development in Lugu Lake, Southwest China, which is inhabited by the ethnic Mosuo people. Through the dual lenses of land and labour, we pay special attention to the transition from grassroots development initiatives to heavy dependence on exogenous capital and entrepreneurs.     

Animate Objects: Shell Trumpets and Ritual Networks in the Greater Southwest

For over a millennium, shell trumpets have been an important part of Southwestern US ritual practice. We investigate the distribution of Southwestern shell trumpets, arguing that they are objects that are accorded animacy and can be used to track the history of different social networks. Using ethnohistoric and ethnographic documentation, at least two traditions of historically linked ritual practices are identified: one associated with serpent iconography and the other with curing, warfare, and sorcery. These two traditions represent enduring dispositions that link various regions of the Southwest through the introduction and adoption of ritual practices associated with migration and the transformation of late prehistoric societies.     

Recent Research on Chaco: Changing Views on Economy, Ritual, and Society

Current research on Chaco Canyon and its surrounding outlier communities is at an important juncture. Rather than trying to argue for the presence or absence of complexity, archaeologists working in the area are asking different questions, especially how Chacoan political, economic, ritual, and social organization were structured. These lines of inquiry do not attempt to pigeonhole Chaco into traditional neoevolutionary types, but instead seek to understand the historical trajectory that led to the construction of monumental architecture in Chaco Canyon and a large part of the northern Southwest in the 10th through 12th centuries. This review discusses the conclusions of current research at Chaco including definitions of the Chaco region, recent fieldwork, histories of Chaco archaeology, chronology, paleoenvironmental reconstruction, demography, political organization, outlier communities, economic organization, social organization, ritual, violence, and the post-Chacoan reorganization. Although many issues are hotly debated, there is a growing concensus that power was not based in a centralized political organization and that ritual organization was a key factor in the replication of Chacoan architecture across a vast regional landscape. Exactly how ritual, social, and political organization intersected is a central question for Chaco scholars. The resolution of this problem will prove to be of interest to all archaeologists working with intermediate societies across the globe.     

元朝西南军粮的筹措

灭亡南宋（1279年）之后,元朝在西南地区用兵不断。西南恶劣的气候地理环境使得军粮供给困难。再加上军官侵渔,元军经常发生缺粮现象。为筹措军粮,元朝政府主要采取了四种措施：一,征用百姓将粮食调运至西南地区;二,在西南地区开展屯田缓解供应压力;三,通过赋税的转移与增收来增加西南地区税粮收入和购买粮食的本钱;四,采用入中法解决边粮的运输问题。     

Agriculture and community in Chaco Canyon: Revisiting Pueblo Alto

The Bonito Phase (ca. AD 860–1140) in Chaco Canyon is widely recognized as one of the primary sources of information about emergent social complexity in prehispanic North America. Large masonry buildings called “great houses,” such as Pueblo Bonito, are iconic symbols of the rapid rise of a powerful society based on the ability to harness labor to prolonged construction projects. It is clear that the political forces at work during the Bonito Phase had an agricultural foundation, presumably in the financing of construction through food surpluses, but the actual nature of farming in Chaco is surprisingly opaque to archaeologists. Indeed, many researchers have concluded that farming in Chaco Canyon was too constrained by poor soils to have supported the dynamic developments associated with the massive stone structures and extensive trade systems of the Bonito Phase. The popular perspective that Chaco was mysterious or enigmatic is largely a response to this view of the canyon as agriculturally marginal. In this study we argue that a predictive model of potential agricultural productivity that includes other portions of the canyon besides the floodplain indicates that Chaco was not marginal for farming. The results of this analysis suggest that great house communities may have been sited to control local production zones and that some great houses may have been linked to others in order to manage multiple agricultural areas.     

Patterning in procurement of obsidian in Chaco Canyon and in Chaco-era communities in New Mexico as revealed by X-ray fluorescence

X-ray fluorescence analysis of obsidian artifacts from sites located in Chaco Canyon and from three Chaco-era communities in New Mexico permits determination of their geological origin. These source data are used to describe patterning in obsidian procurement in sites located in Chaco Canyon dating from A.D. 500–1150, and in a three non-Canyon communities occupied during the period of Chaco Canyon's regional prominence (ca. A.D. 875–1150). These data demonstrate that the most proximate sources generally dominate the sourced obsidian assemblages from sites of all periods, but also suggest differences in procurement patterning both over time and across space. Within Chaco Canyon, there is a notable shift from Mount Taylor obsidian to use of Jemez Mountains sources over time. These data also suggest that earlier analyses of obsidian from sites in Chaco Canyon misidentified some obsidian artifact sources; these new data indicate the central areas of disagreement and provide a revision of procurement patterning. In the Chaco-era communities located outside Chaco Canyon, procurement patterning diverges. The Blue J community shows an increase in use of the nearby Mount Taylor source over time. Two communities located toward the southern extent of the Chaco great house distribution reveal a markedly distinct procurement pattern, obtaining nearly all of their obsidian from southern sources largely unrepresented at Chaco Canyon. Combined, these data provide new insights into raw material procurement and artifact production at sites in Chaco Canyon, and in communities occupied during the Chaco Phenomenon, the period of the Canyon's greatest regional influence.     

Geomorphological setting and Native American acquisition of buff-firing ceramic clays in the Lower and Middle Gila River Valley, Arizona

This study addresses buff-firing clay sources in dynamic alluvial settings along Arizona’s Gila River in the U.S. Southwest. We establish clay resource distribution relative to the geomorphic histories of the Lower and Middle Gila River based on 38 clay samples and ethnographic data from two US Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) projects. Buff-firing clayey alluvium, deposited in the Gila River floodplain 800 to 1,500 or more years ago, was a surficial ceramic raw material source for prehistoric Hohokam and lowland Patayan potters. This geomorphic unit was later removed in some places and buried by up to 3-4 m of sediment in others, reducing the availability of buff-firing clays in the Hohokam Classic period and requiring historic Pee Posh and Akimel O’odham potters to dig pits to access it. Sources were further destroyed in catastrophic floods in the late 19th and early 20th century, affecting ceramic manufacture patterns and ultimately contributing to the decline of pottery production by the O’odham living in the Gila River Valley. Our results contribute to regional ceramic ecology and should also be of interest to others investigating alluvial clay use in general or buff-firing alluvial clays in particular. The study also illustrates the value of combining geomorphic and ethnographic data to examine major changes in resource distribution and use.     

Large game, agricultural land, and settlement pattern change in the eastern Mimbres area, southwest New Mexico

The 12th-century depopulation of large villages in the Mimbres region of the US Southwest has been attributed to a number of causes, including resource stress. This study combines archaeological evidence and models of environmental conditions in the eastern Mimbres area of southwest New Mexico to assess the magnitude and timing of food stress from a combination of a period of reduced precipitation and the effects of prolonged hunting and farming activities on the landscape. Results indicate that large game in the area was quite sensitive to hunting pressure, and was locally depleted long before settlement reorganization occurred. Access to arable land was somewhat reduced around the time of settlement reorganization, but productive land remained locally plentiful. Although the settlement reorganization did not improve access to large game or arable land, farmers’ perceptions of below-average conditions for agriculture relative to their expectations and past experience would have contributed to decisions to move.