A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
The long history of field research at Grasshopper, a massive, 500-room pueblo in an isolated mountain meadow in east-central Arizona, has produced a wealth of architectural information. Drawing on this extensive research, Charles Riggs reconstructs the pueblo, and provides a glimpse into the everyday life of the community at a critical time in Southwest prehistory.
Between AD 1300 and 1330, a group consisting mainly of newcomers to the area established and then enlarged Grasshopper. From the architectural remnants excavated by the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School it is possible to determine that the earliest arrivals settled Grasshopper relatively quickly and that subsequent groups from the region and the Colorado Plateau built their houses next to kinsmen. The houses of locals and immigrants remained separate in discrete room blocks despite their occupants’ participation in communal groups.
Ultimately short-lived, by AD 1330 the influx of immigrants tapered and the architecture came to reflect a more seasonal, less intensive use of the area. Eventually the community was abandoned and the walls were left to crumble. In The Architecture of Grasshopper Pueblo, Riggs gives us a new view of community life at this ancient Puebloan site.
Early Pithouse period villagers played a generative role in the cultural and historical sequence of the Mogollon region, which is best known for the stunning black-on-white pottery of the Classic Mimbres culture. This volume presents a complete report on the archaeology of two important Early Pithouse settlements located along the Rio Mimbres, including detailed accounts of the excavation units, depositional contexts, architectural details, radiocarbon dates, miscellaneous artifacts, and ceramic frequency distributions.
The Thomson and McAnally sites contain architecture, artifacts, and other remains of the earliest relatively sedentary horticulturalists to occupy this part of the Southwest. The authors synthesize the data about charges over time in the villagers’ lifestyle to develop a new chronology for the occupation of the region.
Written for general readers—and for the White Mountain Apache, on whose land Grasshopper Pueblo is located and who have participated in the excavations there—the book conveys the simple joys and typical problems of an ancient way of life as inferred from its material remains. Reid and Whittlesey's account reveals much about the human capacity for living under what must strike modern readers as adverse conditions. They describe the environment with which the people had to cope; hunting, gathering, and farming methods; uses of tools, pottery, baskets, and textiles; types of rooms and households; and the functioning of social groups. They also reconstruct the sacred world of Grasshopper as interpreted through mortuary ritual and sacred objects and discuss the relationship of Grasshopper residents with neighbors and with those who preceded and followed them.
Grasshopper Pueblo not only thoroughly reconstructs this past life at a mountain village, it also offers readers an appreciation of life at the field school and an understanding of how excavations have proceeded there through the years. For anyone enchanted by mysteries of the past, it reveals significant features of human culture and spirit and the ultimate value of archaeology to contemporary society.
The Jornada branch of the Mogollon culture and its inhabitants played a significant economic, political, and social role at multiple scales. This volume draws together results from recent large-scale CRM work that has amassed among the largest data sets in the Southwest with up-to-date chronological, architectural, faunal, ceramic, obsidian sourcing, and other specialized studies. Chapters by some of the most active researchers in the area address topics that reach beyond the American Southwest, such as mobility, forager adaptations, the transition to farming, responses to environmental challenges, and patterns of social interaction.
Late Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers and Farmers of the Jornada Mogollon is an up-to-date summary of the major developments in the region and their implications for Southwest archaeology in particular and anthropological archaeological research more generally.
The publication of this book is supported in part by the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society and the Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware.
Contributors: Rafael Cruz Antillón, Douglas H. M. Boggess, Peter C. Condon, Linda Scott Cummings, Moira Ernst, Tim Graves, David V. Hill, Nancy A. Kenmotsu, Shaun M. Lynch, Arthur C. MacWilliams, Mary Malainey, Timothy D. Maxwell, Myles R. Miller, John Montgomery, Jim A. Railey, Thomas R. Rocek, Matt Swanson, Christopher A. Turnbow, Javier Vasquez, Regge N. Wiseman, Chad L. Yost
Author Tammy Stone focuses on a number of general deliberations on the archaeology of middle-range society and the prehistory of the American Southwest. This includes the complex dynamics of migration, identity, ethnic interaction, and the ability of archaeologists to identify these patterns in the archaeological record. The integration and ultimate expulsion of a group of Kayenta Anasazi at Point of Pines Pueblo in the Mogollon Highlands of east-central Arizona provides a case study and location where these themes played out. Stone uses a detailed architectural analysis of the pueblo to attain a nuanced and dynamic understanding of migration from the perspective of both the Kayenta migrants and their Mogollon hosts. By examining the choices that individuals, families, and small groups made about identity and alliance from the perspective of both the migrants and host community—the latter being an aspect often missing from analyses of migration—this volume provides never-before-published data on Point of Pines Pueblo and contributes considerably to the study of community dynamics at large.
This volume presents the latest research on the development and use of communal spaces and places across the Mogollon region, located in what is now the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. New data demonstrate that these spaces and places, though diverse in form and function, were essential to community development and cohesion, particularly during critical formative periods associated with increasing sedentism and farming, and during comparable periods of social change.
The authors ask questions crucial to understanding past communities: What is a communal space or place? How did villagers across the Mogollon region use such places? And how do modern archaeologists investigate the past to learn how ancient people thought about themselves and the world around them? Contributors use innovative approaches to explore the development patterns and properties of communal spaces and places, as well as how and why these places were incorporated into the daily lives of village residents. Buildings and other types of communal spaces are placed into broader cultural and social contexts, acknowledging the enduring importance of the kiva-type structure to many Native American societies of the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico.
Classic site reports establish the Mogollon on their own cultural track distinct from the Anasazi and also document the earliest known association of tree-ring dates with pottery in the Southwest. The excavations of Mogollon sites reported on in this volume were conducted at the early (1939–1941) field schools in Forestdale, Arizona.
Contributors:
Larry D. Agenbroad
Eric J. Arnould
Walter H. Birkby
Vorsila L. Bohrer
Jeffrey S. Dean
Michael W. Graves
Sally J. Holbrook
Gerald K. Kelso
William A. Longacre
Charmion R. McKusick
J. Jefferson Reid
John W. Olsen
Stanley J. Olsen
William Reynolds
William J. Robinson
Izumi Shimada
Stephanie M. Whittlesey
David R. Wilcox
University of Utah Anthropological Papers No. 133
Point of Pines Pueblo has long been the center of theoretical debates in southwestern archaeology, yet detailed descriptions of the site have been lacking. Located on the San Carlos Apache Reservation in central Arizona, this large Mountain Mogollon village (about 800 rooms) dates from AD 1200 to 1400. For the first 100 years of occupation it was a multiethnic community and is often referenced in discussions of aggregation, community organization, migration, and ethnic interaction. In Point of Pines Pueblo Tammy Stone details the architectural structures and cultural materials at the site, providing a body of information never before published.
From 1947 to 1960, Point of Pines Pueblo was excavated by the University of Arizona field school under the direction of Emil Haury. Data from that work were housed at the Arizona State Museum Archives. Stone draws from those original excavation notes to present detailed descriptions of each architectural structure and extramural feature along with information on the associated artifacts, dated dendrochronology samples, and ethnobotanical samples unearthed at the site. A rich source of raw data, this book will serve as a valuable resource for years to come.
Reid and Whittlesey present the arguments and actions surrounding the Mogollon discovery, definition, and debate. Drawing on extensive interviews conducted with Haury before his death in 1992, they explore facets of the debate that scholars pursued at various times and places and how ultimately the New Archaeology shifted attention from the research questions of cultural affiliation and antiquity that had been at the heart of the controversy. In gathering the facts and anecdotes surrounding the debate, Reid and Whittlesey offer a compelling picture of an academician who was committed to understanding the unwritten past, who believed wholeheartedly in the techniques of scientific archaeology, and who used his influence to assist scholarship rather than to advance his own career.
Prehistory, Personality, and Place depicts a real archaeologist practicing real archaeology, one that fashioned from potsherds and pit houses a true understanding of prehistoric peoples. But more than the chronicle of a controversy, it is a book about places and personalities: the role of place in shaping archaeologists’ intellect and personalities, as well as the unusual intersections of people and places that produced resolutions of some intractable problems in Southwest history.
Minnis proposes that, faced with the threat of food shortages, nonstratified societies survive by employing a series of responses that are increasingly effective but also are increasingly costly and demand increasingly larger cooperative efforts. The model Minnis develops allows him to infer, from evidence of such factors as population size, resource productivity, and climate change, the occurrence of food crises in the past. Using the Classic Mimbres society as a test case, he summarizes the regional archeological sequence and analyzes the effects of environmental fluctuations on economic and social organization. He concludes that the responses of the Mimbres people to their burgeoning population were inadequate to prevent the collapse of the society in the late twelfth century.
In its illumination of the general issue of responses to food shortages, Social Adaptation to Food Stress will interest not only archeologists but also those concerned with current food shortages in the Third World. Cultural ecologists and human geographers will be able to derive a wealth of ideas, methods, and data from Minnis's work.
Pithouses are the earliest identifiable domestic architecture in many areas of the world, and can provide insights into the origins of communities--a fundamental component of past and present societies. In this book, Lisa Young and Sarah Herr invite archaeologists to explore the development of communities using information from pithouse sites in the American Southwest.
Using regional and topical syntheses to investigate the formation of pithouse communities, contributors to this volume examine the complex relationship between the economic transition to agricultural dependence and the social changes associated with sedentism. They discover that during this transformation, peoples' relationship with the landscape changed in ways that affected their use of space, community organization, and cultural identity.
Employing various theoretical perspectives, these contributions analyze changes in pithouses, site layout, communal architecture, and settlement patterns to investigate the development of place-based communities. Chapters look at community formation strategies in populous regions like the northern San Juan Basin, the southern Colorado Plateau, Mimbres/southern Mogollon, and Hohokam Basin and Range and compare them with social structures in more sparsely populated regions like the northeast Hohokam peripheries, the Arizona Transition Zone, the Cibola region, southeast New Mexico, and the northern Rio Grande. The book also includes thematic discussions of panregional economic change, the complex relationship between house and household, and the demographic shifts accompanying the Neolithic Demographic Transition.
An essential book for students and archaeologists interested in the origins of communities, Southwestern Pithouse Communities is also an important comparative resource for scholars interested in social change during the transition to settled village life.
Like the enigmatic Mogollon culture it sought to explore and earlier University of Arizona field schools in the Forestdale Valley and at Point of Pines, Grasshopper research engendered decades of controversy that still lingers in the pages of professional journals. Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittlesey, players in the controversy who are intimately familiar with the field school that ended in 1992, offer a historical account of this major archaeological project and the intellectual debates it fostered.
Thirty Years Into Yesterday charts the development of the Grasshopper program under three directors and through three periods dominated by distinct archaeological paradigms: culture history, processual archaeology, and behavioral archaeology. It examines the contributions made each season, the concepts and methods each paradigm used, and the successes and failures of each. The book transcends interests of southwestern archaeologists in demonstrating how the three archaeological paradigms reinterpreted Grasshopper, illustrating larger shifts in American archaeology as a whole. Such an opportunity will not come again, as funding constraints, ethical concerns, and other issues no doubt will preclude repeating the Grasshopper experience in our lifetimes.
Ultimately, Thirty Years Into Yesterday continues the telling of the Grasshopper story that was begun in the authors’ previous books. In telling the story of the archaeologists who recovered the material residue of past Mogollon lives and the place of the Western Apache people in their interpretations, Thirty Years Into Yesterday brings the story full circle to a stunning conclusion.
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