Under the direction of Dr. Barbara Mills, MS Sarah Herr will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will conduct archaeological research in the Mogollon rim area of Arizona and supplement this with the analysis of museum collections. Her focus will be on the period between the 10th through 12th centuries AD. Kivas are large, usually well constructed partially underground structures with wooden roofs and were used for religions purposes. Because they serve as a central focus for a community, by determining a kiva's size, care expended on its construction and its internal organization it is possible to gain insight into the structure of the community which built it. MS Herr, will coordinate her work with the University of Arizona field school and excavate the kiva at the Hough's Great Kiva site. She will study the ceramics and other materials collected and augment these data with analyzes of materials from other Mogollon rim sites. On this basis she will reconstruct the social organization of the region and compare it to that in neighboring areas. The Southwest has long served as a focus for archaeological attention because of the imposing ruins present and the roads which linked many of them. Clearly prehistoric people achieved a significant degree of social complexity in a harsh desert environment. Most researchers have concentrated their efforts on the largest sites and the areas which contain them and relatively work has been done in what appear to be underpopulated regions. Thus little is known about how communities in these latter areas functioned and how they were integrated (or not integrated) into more `central` areas. The Mogollon Rim has traditionally been viewed by archaeologists as a peripheral area and it forms the focus of MS Herr's study. She has proposed an original perspective - frontier theory - from which to view this area and to examine its relationships with more `central` regions. This work will provide the data to test her idea. This research is important for several regions. It will provide data of interest to many archaeologists and shed new light on the American past. It will serve to develop the application of a very powerful theoretical approach and will assist in the training of a promising young scientist.
