Visions of peaceful people confronted by a harsh environment have long dominated archaeological studies of the prehistoric Southwest of the United States and Northwest of Mexico. Recently many archaeologists have begun to question this view and argue instead that violence and warfare were ever present and drove cultural developments in the region. These archaeologists offer a significant challenge to established interpretations that ignore or downplay warfare and that instead highlight factors such as environmental adaptation, climatic change, and exchange as the driving forces behind cultural change. This challenge necessitates a major reconsideration of our interpretations of Southwestern/Northwestern prehistory. Archaeologists need to ask what is the evidence for warfare in specific cases, when does it occur and how does it change over time?
Dark, isolated, volcanic hills dot the desert landscape of Sonora, Mexico. The prehistoric inhabitants of the desert constructed terraces up the sides of many of these hills, and built rooms, compounds, and other edifices on their summits to create cerros de trincheras. Advocates of a violent prehistory for the Southwest/Northwest have interpreted these sites as being defensive in nature and as evidence for warfare in the Sonora. Other archaeologists have explicitly challenged the defensive nature of these sites. The Cerros de Trincheras and Defense Project will synthesize and analyze the information from previous projects in the region. It will conduct eight weeks of field work to map and surface collect cerros de trincheras in the Rio Altar and Rio Magdalena drainages of northwest Sonora, Mexico. The project will use Geographic Information Systems analysis to answer a series of questions including: Is there evidence for defense at these sites? If not what was the range of activities on these sites? If so, how were these sites defensive? What is being protected? How did defense relate to other activities and aspects of the sites? And how did these relations change over time?
The results of the Cerros de Trincheras and Defense Project will advance knowledge and understanding by resolving the debates over the defensive nature of cerros de trincheras. This resolution will have implications for the larger issue of the nature, extent, and role of warfare in the prehistoric Southwest/Northwest. If these sites were not defensive then they cannot be used as evidence for endemic or epidemic warfare in the Southwest/Northwest. If they were defensive then knowing what was being protected will allow us to infer the nature and extent of warfare in the region. By asking these questions for multiple time periods we can examine the changing face of warfare and defense. On the broadest scale our project will contribute to anthropological considerations of war before civilization.
The project will integrate research and education to promote teaching, training and learning. It will be a bi-national project that combines US and Mexican students in a cooperative research program. It will introduce these students to existing networks that link North American and Mexican archaeologists in northern Mexico. The project will have a public education component that will include lectures in the US and Mexico and field trips for interested public groups. The project will communicate its results in scientific outlets, popular journals, and museum exhibits.
