Under the direction of Dr. Paul Fish, Mr. Matthew Pailes will conduct research for his doctoral dissertation. He will investigate community structure and household exchange patterns in northeastern Sonora, Mexico, which developed between AD 900 and 1600. In this region, the interests of households to maintain subsistence autonomy, in conflict with the need to form larger groups for security and other reasons, led to unique organizational patterns. This research is broadly important because it provides insight into how groups and alliances form in traditional small scale societies and how they are maintained or altered over substantial periods of time.
Sixteenth century accounts of Spanish explorers describe hierarchically organized territorial communities in northeastern Sonora. Previous researchers argued defensive needs and elite control of long distance exchange were the foundation of community organization. A pilot study in the Moctezuma Valley provided data contrary to this reconstruction. Communities appear to be small, relatively unorganized, and integrated through local exchange. The insights from this pilot study are the basis for two research questions: 1) Were communities actually composed of small settlement groups lacking in inter- or intra-community political differentiation? and if so, 2) Did the small scale of communities encourage households to maximize local settlement ties as a means of risk mitigation? To answer these questions Mr Pailes will intensively map and excavate a sample of structures at the largest sites in three settlement communities. This will provide data on internal settlement organization and test whether the settlements held structurally equivalent roles in their respective communities. A second line of research will employ microscopic techniques to investigate the provenance of ceramic artifacts. Provenance data determined from petrography will indicate the extent and variability in household economic ties to other communities and will serve as a proxy for inferring social relationships. The project also will refine the poor chronology of this region through ceramic seriation and thermoluminescence dating of pot sherds.
This proposed project has broader impacts for several reasons. It will provide detailed information on an understudied region between the better-known U.S. Southwest and Mesoamerica and contribute significantly to reconstructions of pan-regional political trajectories. Simply refining the chronology in northeastern Sonora will have significant impacts. Community outreach is a focus of the planned work. To foster a sense of connectivity to the past, local residents will be employed during excavation. The project will invite local students and residents to visit the excavations. These efforts will inform local residents of the value of archaeological remains and discourage their unneeded destruction. A Mexican collaborator will be involved with the project to encourage international cooperation and interest in shared research questions. The project will provide experience to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Arizona.
Data will be disseminated through a variety of means. Traditional scholarly journal articles and formal conference presentations will be produced for Spanish and English audiences. M. Pailes will give several public lectures in the United States and will lead site tours to the area for avocational and other interested groups. Copies of the dissertation will be provided to Mexican government offices and institutions.
This archaeological project was designed to investigate the time period AD 1000-1600 in eastern Sonora, Mexico. Unlike the nearby southwestern United States, archaeologists know very little about this area and time period. This is a large obstacle because archaeologists believe the area served several important roles, including as a passageway for Mesoamerican ideas and materials from groups such as the Toltec, Aztec, and West Mexican groups to Native Americans in what is today the United States. The area also may have been a destination for populations that emigrated out of other nearby regions for poorly understood reasons. Early explorers, such as Coronado passed through eastern Sonora in the 1500s and provided some descriptions of the region and its populations. These written descriptions are what most interpretations are based upon. The research funded by the National Science Foundation facilitated archaeological investigations aimed at verifying these accounts and building a model of the local societies. The basic research questions intended to answer whether or not the area had an economy that would have made it easy for ideas, people, and materials to pass through the region and to come up with a basic reconstruction of population size, cultural-affiliation, and political organization overtime. Much of this research is still ongoing, and not all of these questions can be definitively answered without more excavations. Several questions can be partially addressed. The excavations established that the groups that lived in the area were very diverse. Artifacts, including pottery, arrow-points, and the types of foods eaten, at archaeological sites that are only about 15 miles apart look very different. This suggests that political groups were small and that there was not anything like a centralized government. This makes it harder for goods and people to move long distances with ease. We know from the early records of Coronado and others that there was a lot of warfare in this region. Now we can estimate that this may have taken place on a much smaller level of organization than previously thought. Specifically small groups of villages were potentially allied for warfare, but probably not whole river valleys or larger regions. Researchers also used a variety of techniques to measure how different kinds of materials moved through exchange networks. Surprisingly, it looks like there were significant boundaries between the kinds of materials traded by elite people and the kind of plain commodities traded by commoners. The commoners tended to trade their goods, like plain pottery, across local political boundaries. Elite goods, like obsidian used to make fine arrow-points, did not cross these same boundaries. Again this suggests the kinds of long distance trade imagined by previous researchers are unlikely and also suggests that commoners may have come up with unique solutions for how to deal with unstable political and social situations. They seem to have used trade as a way to facilitate making connections with nearby neighbors, possibly as a way of reducing risks by having friends in places where conditions where likely to be different from their own village. These observations provide a unique model of social organization that is different from many contemporaneous groups in the Southwest U.S. These and other findings will go a long way towards answering many long-standing questions. Working in Mexico also provided a number of unique academic experiences. Both undergraduate and graduate students from the University of Arizona participated in the research and gained valuable international experience. The project also included a Mexican archaeologist and was visited by many more professional Mexican archeologists. This sort of international collaboration is very useful for both sides since the Native American groups we work with spanned both sides of the border.
