Perspectives On Southwestern Prehistory

Paul Minnis, Charles L Redman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367282745
• eBook ISBN: 9781000301472
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Recent archaeoglogical work in the American Southwest and Northern Mexico has fueled a great deal of regionally specific research: archaeologists, faced with an avalanche of new and unassimilated data, tend to foucs on their own areas to the exclusion of the broader, panregional view. "Perspectives on Southwestern Prehistory" advocates the larger f

Section V
History of Southwestern Archaeology

Introduction

History of Southwestern Archaeology

J. Jefferson Reid

Southwestern archaeologists are losing the past; not the prehistoric past, but their intellectual history. At the first Southwest Symposium at Arizona State University in January 1988, I scanned the audience to observe that my generation had apparently grown up. Absent were Emil Haury, Florence Hawley Ellis, Jesse Jennings, and many others who had been our teachers and leaders not so many years ago. In their place appeared George Gumerman, William Lipe, James Judge, Cynthia Irwin-Williams, and Don Fowler, the latter still hiding behind the fiction of eternal youth by claiming continuing status as Jesse Jennings' student. From that vantage Fowler has been among the first, the few, to look deeply into personalities, events, and ideas of our special history.

For the first time in the short span of southwestern archaeology there is no personal, direct link uniting active archaeologists with the pioneers-Fewkes, Hewett, Cummings, Gladwin, Morris, Colton, and Kidder. As a community of archaeologists, we are experiencing the effects of the discipline's youthfulness-barely a hundred years have elapsed since Cushing dug at Los Muertos-and, in part, our own personal nostalgia for a more youthful time. Regardless of the operation of sociological and psychological forces, the study of archaeology's intellectual past is a natural subject for archaeologists, whether they are cultural historians, processualists, post-processualists, or simply interested in reconstructing prehistory without duplicating previous efforts. Quite apart from high-sounding academic justifications, the history of southwestern archaeology abounds in great stories and good fim, the stuff of legends.

I cannot easily sort the personal motivations that draw me to understand past peoples and events, though I assume them to be part of the complex that attracted me to archaeology. My interviews with Emil Haury and Watson Smith took me far beyond the particular intellectual issues that prompted those engagements. I quickly came to realize that the study of prehistory can be a highly personal enterprise, one marked by all the complicated subtleties of human interaction. We cannot fully interpret the narratives of Southwest prehistory without knowing the historical context in which they were produced. This observation is not fresh, but as we pursue an increasing number of pressing archaeological assignments, our intellectual history runs the risk of being overlooked or being reduced to quaint anec dotes. With the passing of second generation pioneers we lose forever the opportunity to capture history in the first person.

The papers in this section address particular historical develop ments in the concepts used to investigate prehistory. Wirt Wills discusses changes in the ways archaeologists have investigated the transition to agriculture in the Southwest. Stephen Lekson charts shifts in the models of population aggregation and sedentism. Andrew Christenson looks at different notions of population growth and mobility on the Colorado Plateau. Finally, Christian Downum examines the role of individual and institutional conflict in early Flagstaff archaeology. In these papers, young scholars point the way to a more complete understanding of the intellectual history of southwestern archaeology.

Valuable archaeological resources are being lost daily to the ravages of progress, vandals, and time. Among these resources we must count the men and women who pioneered the study of southwestern prehistory. Preserving their historical role demands our immediate attention.

20
Cultivating Ideas: The Changing Intellectual History of the Introduction of Agriculture to the American Southwest

W. H. Wills

Introduction

If there is a common theme which links the 40 years of study on the beginnings of agriculture in the American Southwest, it is that the adoption of domesticated plants was an unmomentous occasion resulting in one or more millenia of casual, "take it or leave it" efforts at food production¹. For most archaeologists, the important shift in the role of agriculture did not come until the appearance of village communities, long after the initial acceptance of cultigens (e.g., Haury 1962:115; Minnis 1985:310).

The one sour note in all this unanimity has been Berry's (1982) assertion that there were immediate and profound socio-economic impacts the moment agriculture arrived in the Southwest. This reformulation of traditional views on early agriculture is a case study in Berry's more inclusive condemnation of what he terms "gradualist" thinking among southwestern prehistorians. According to Berry, archaeologists have unintentionally obscured the dynamic patterns of the past by lumping processes--like the adoption of agriculture--into culture historical periods demarcated by arbitrary and perhaps meaningless temporal boundaries.

Berry's own model of "sociocultural intrusion" as the cause of agricultural introduction has been spoiled by new radiocarbon dates and a nearly universal rejection of his theoretical assumptions (see Cordell 1983; 1984b; Dean 1985; Plog 1985). Nevertheless, there is an interesting point in Berry's study that I think warrants consideration, and that is the extent to which interpretations of processes such as incipient agriculture have been influenced by the culture historical models that we use to describe that development.

I would like to suggest that our perception of the nature of agricultural beginnings in the Southwest is, in large part, a product of the way we use typology to identify temporal sequences. Specifically, it appears that we rely on a comparison between the ceramic period (post-A.D. 200) and the early agricultural period, rather than a comparison that involves the preagricultural archaeological record. As a result, I believe that our consistent return to the interpretation of a "casual" agricultural involvement is not so much due to obvious archaeological indications of such a strategy, but rather is a constraint which we impose on our research by not developing a theoretical position for explaining why foragers should become farmers.

A Brief History of Investigations

We can conveniently divide studies of the earliest southwestern agriculture into two primary periods, one occurring between 1948 and 1957, and the other beginning in 1980 and lasting until the present. The first period is the initiation of field research directed at the origins of agriculture, while the second represents a sort of revival movement stemming from frustration with the results of the first period.

The serious study of incipient Southwest food production began in 1948 with the surprising discovery of preceramic maize at Bat Cave, in the Mogollon Mountains of west-central New Mexico (Dick 1965; Mangelsdorf 1950). The Bat Cave Project lead to a decade of seminal excavations in the region designed to farther our understanding of the introduction of agriculture to the Southwest (Martin et al. 1952; Martin et al. 1954; Haury 1957, 1962). Two factors account for this explosive interest in early agriculture; the development and application of radiocarbon dating and the presence of deeply stratified archaeological sites. Radiocarbon dating gave prehistorians startling new insight to the preceramic period with the first chronometeric age determinations for this time span, while stratified deposits provide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Current Context of Southwestern Prehistory
• Section I. Hunters and Gatherers
• Section II. Transitions to Sedentism
• Section III. Elites and Regional Systems
• Section IV. Protohistoric Period: Transitions to History
• Section V History of Southwestern Archaeology