Petrographic thin-section analysis and chemical assays will target the components of red-on-buff sherds, including clay, temper and paint, to identify and characterize raw material sources and reconstruct patterns of ceramic manufacture, the researchers said. That implies a greater level of inter-village coordination to create greater economies of scale at the expense of emerging settlement hierarchies."The competing hypotheses will be tested through geochemical and petrographic examination of raw materials and ceramic artifacts in order to determine how the Hohokam achieved such great economic and production success," Eiselt said. The second proposes that ceramic manufacturing was highly concentrated in one or a few villages that were supplied with raw materials by other villages.The first proposes that a number of villages were producing ceramics independently and trading them for agricultural products - such as cotton - to outside consumers."That's particularly true for societies whose traditional beliefs are not ruled by the bottom line or production and demand."Įiselt and Darling said the current study will test two competing hypotheses by probing the organizational principles and capacity of core Hohokam technological systems:
"It's been postulated by archaeologists that stratification and ranking can be superceded by alternative approaches to production in quantity," Darling said. Hierarchical forms of management for mass-production are more familiar in the non-Indian world, Darling said. The results have the potential to show that highly productive craft industries can occur in the absence of managerial elites." "With production output at the level suggested by the millions of sherds and vessel fragments recovered from archaeological sites of this period, we would expect to find political hierarchies, craft specialists, guilds and mass-production techniques," Eiselt said. They used hand-dug canals to irrigate thousands of miles of desert, making the land suitable for growing a wide variety of farm crops.Īs pottery specialists living along the middle Gila River, the Hohokam produced and perhaps traded thousands of vessels to the entire region in return for agricultural commodities from surrounding groups, according to the researchers. The pottery was critical to a complex system of water management devised by the Hohokam. The researchers will probe how a prehistoric society that was fairly egalitarian, without cities or strict social classes, was able to mass-produce ceramic pottery, Eiselt said. For links to more information see Ritually regulated or a managerial elite? when production of the decorated ceramic pots, known as "red-on-buff," was at its peak, said Eiselt and Darling. The analysis looks at a slice of time from 1000 A.D. Darling is director of the O'odham tribe's Cultural Resource Management Program. Andrew Darling.Įiselt is director of the SMU-in-Taos Archaeological Field School and an SMU assistant professor of anthropology. The three-year project examines artifacts and ceramic production materials from 12 sites in the Sonoran Desert just south of what is now Phoenix, according to archaeologists and co-investigators Sunday Eiselt and J. Under the landmark research partnership, the tribe and SMU hope to better understand the Hohokam ceramic technology and manufacturing techniques. The National Science Foundation is funding the research with a $134,636 grant. Today's Gila River Indian Community residents, the O'odham, are descendants of the Hohokam. The ancient people used the pottery for daily serving, storage, and social and religious gatherings. by a culture archaeologists call the Hohokam. Archaeologists from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and the Cultural Resource Management Program of the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona have launched a unique research partnership to decipher the mechanics of the large-scale industry.
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