Among desert farmers of the prehistoric Southwest, irrigation played a crucial role in the development of social complexity. This innovative study examines the changing relationship between irrigation and community organization among the Hohokam and shows through ceramic data how that dynamic relationship influenced sociopolitical development. David Abbott contends that reconstructions of Hohokam social patterns based solely on settlement pattern data provide limited insight into prehistoric social relationships. By analyzing ceramic exchange patterns, he provides complementary information that challenges existing models of sociopolitical organization among the Hohokam of central Arizona. Through ceramic analyses from Classic period sites such as Pueblo Grande, Abbott shows that ceramic production sources and exchange networks can be determined from the composition, surface treatment attributes, and size and shape of clay containers. The distribution networks revealed by these analyses provide evidence for community boundaries and the web of social ties within them. Abbott's meticulous research documents formerly unrecognized horizontal cohesiveness in Hohokam organizational structure and suggests how irrigation was woven into the fabric of their social evolution. By demonstrating the contribution that ceramic research can make toward resolving issues about community organization, this work expands the breadth and depth of pottery studies in the American Southwest.

Explains the simple but beautiful work of Hohokam potters and provides glimpses of a flourishing prehistoric culture in the Southwest. More than 20 images accompany concise and informative text for the non-specialist.

The Encyclopedia of Prehistory represents temporal dimension. Major traditions are an attempt to provide basic information also defined by a somewhat different set of on all archaeologically known cultures, sociocultural characteristics than are eth covering the entire globe and the entire nological cultures. Major traditions are prehistory of humankind. It is designed as defined based on common subsistence a tool to assist in doing comparative practices, sociopolitical organization, and research on the peoples of the past. Most material industries, but language, ideology, of the entries are written by the world's and kinship ties play little or no part in foremost experts on the particular areas their definition because they are virtually and time periods. unrecoverable from archaeological con The Encyclopedia is organized accord texts. In contrast, language, ideology, and ing to major traditions. A major tradition kinship ties are central to defining ethno is defined as a group of populations sharing logical cultures.

For a thousand years they flourished in the arid lands now part of Arizona. They built extensive waterworks, ballcourts, and platform mounds, made beautiful pottery and jewelry, and engaged in wide-ranging trade networks. Then, slowly, their civilization faded and transmuted into something no longer Hohokam. Are today's Tohono O'odham their heirs or their conquerors? The mystery and the beauty of Hohokam civilization are the subjects of the essays in this volume. Written by archaeologists who have led the effort to excavate, record, and preserve the remnants of this ancient culture, the chapters illuminate the way the Hohokam organized their households and their communities, their sophisticated pottery and textiles, their irrigation system, the huge ballcourts and platform mounds they built, and much more.