Sunset Mesa Ruin lies near the confluence of the Rillito and Santa Cruz Rivers in the northern Tucson Basin. First recorded in the late 1930s by Frank Midvale, the site contains two components: a prehistoric Rincon phase Hohokam settlement dating between A.D. 1000 and 1100 and a historical-period component centered on a three-room adobe dating to the late nineteenth century. Much of the report focuses on Rincon phase settlement and subsistence. The authors use data collected from the excavation of a discrete residential cluster of five pit houses to document a sequential series of small courtyard groups. Excavation of a canal segment provides the authors the opportunity to investigate Hohokam irrigation practices in the Tucson Basin, which differ dramatically from their better-known counterparts in the Phoenix Basin.

The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once described a village as “deserted” when all the adult males had vanished. While his statement is from the first half of the twentieth century, it nonetheless illustrates an oversight that has persisted during most of the intervening decades. Now Southwestern archaeologists have begun to delve into the task of “engendering” their sites. Using a “close to the ground” approach, the contributors to this book seek to engender the prehistoric Southwest by examining evidence at the household level. Focusing on gendered activities in household contexts throughout the southwestern United States, this book represents groundbreaking work in this area. The contributors view households as a crucial link to past activities and behavior, and by engendering these households, we can gain a better understanding of their role in prehistoric society. Gender-structured household activities, in turn, can offer insight into broader-scale social and economic factors. The chapters offer a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to engendering households and examine topics such as the division of labor, gender relations, household ritual, ceramic and ground stone production and exchange, and migration. Engendering Households in the Prehistoric Southwest ultimately addresses broader issues of interest to many archaeologists today, including households and their various forms, identity and social boundary formation, technological style, and human agency. Focusing on gendered activities in household contexts throughout the southwestern United States, this book represents groundbreaking work in this area. The contributors view households as a crucial link to past activities and behavior, and by engendering these households, we can gain a better understanding of their role in prehistoric society. Gender-structured household activities, in turn, can offer insight into broader-scale social and economic factors.

In this new volume, the results of Rex E. Gerald’s 1957 excavations at the Davis Ranch Site in southeastern Arizona’s San Pedro River Valley are reported in their entirety for the first time. Annotations to Gerald’s original manuscript in the archives of the Amerind Museum and newly written material place Gerald’s work in the context of what is currently known regarding the late thirteenth-century Kayenta diaspora and the relationship between Kayenta immigrants and the Salado phenomenon. Data presented by Gerald and other contributors identify the site as having been inhabited by people from the Kayenta region of northeastern Arizona and southeastern Utah. The results of Gerald’s excavations and Archaeology Southwest’s San Pedro Preservation Project (1990–2001) indicate that the people of the Davis Ranch Site were part of a network of dispersed immigrant enclaves responsible for the origin and spread of Roosevelt Red Ware pottery, the key material marker of the Salado phenomenon. A companion volume to Charles Di Peso’s 1958 publication on the nearby Reeve Ruin, archaeologists working in the U.S. Southwest and other researchers interested in ancient population movements and their consequences will consider this work an essential case study.

Communities and Households in the Greater American Southwest presents new research on human organization in the American Southwest, examining families, households, and communities in the Ancestral Puebloan, Mogollon, and Hohokam major cultural areas, as well as the Fremont, Jornada Mogollon, and Lipan Apache areas, from the time of earliest habitation to the twenty-first century. Using historical data, dialectic approaches, problem-oriented and data-driven analysis, and ethnographic and gender studies methodologies, the contributors offer diverse interpretations of what constitutes a site, village, and community; how families and households organized their domestic space; and how this organization has influenced researchers’ interpretations of spatially derived archaeological data. Today’s archaeologists and anthropologists understand that communities operate as a multi-level, -organizational, -contextual, and -referential human creation, which informs their understanding of how people actively negotiate their way through and around community constraints. The chapters in this book creatively examine these interactions, revealing the dynamic nature of ancient and modern groups in the American Southwest. The book has two broad complementary themes: one focusing on household decision-making, identity, and structural relations with the greater community; the other concerned with community organization and integration, household roles within the community, and changes in community organization—violence and destabilization, coalescence and cooperation—over time. Communities and Households in the Greater American Southwest weaves a rich tapestry of ancient and modern life through innovative approaches that will be of interest not only to Southwestern archaeologists but to all researchers and students interested in social organization at the household and community levels. Contributors: James R. Allison, Andrew Duff, Lindsay Johansson, Michael Lindeman, Myles Miller, James Potter, Alison E. Rautman, J. Jefferson Reid, Katie Richards, Oscar Rodriguez, Barbara Roth, Kristin Safi, Deni Seymour, Robert J. Stokes, Richard K. Talbot, Scott Ure, Henry Wallace, Stephanie M. Whittlesey

"For the newcomer to the literature and logic of human behavioral ecology, this book is a flat-out bonanza—entirely accessible, self-critical, largely free of polemic, and, above all, stimulating beyond measure. It's an extraordinary contribution. Our understanding of the foraging-farming dynamic may just have changed forever."—David Hurst Thomas, American Museum of Natural History

This volume presents a range of petrographic case studies as applied to archaeological problems, primarily in the field of pottery analysis, i.e. ceramic petrography.