Matthew Pailes

Social Network Analysis of Early Classic Hohokam Corporate Group Inequality

Network analysis provides a unique approach for archaeologists to identify structural relationships between the emergent properties of social interactions and the trajectory of corporate groups. This article presents the results of a survey of architectural features and a network analysis of walkways between house clusters at the thirteenth-century Hohokam site of Cerro Prieto, located in the Tucson Basin, Arizona. Statistical measures suggest that nascent inequality was developing at this site, making it an excellent case study of the factors that led to the emergence of economic and social differentiation. Network analysis provides a means to explain how corporate groups were able to leverage social connections in their struggle for ascendance in these spheres of interaction. Regardless of the strategy of social ascendance, a simple increase in the opportunity to influence others appears to explain a large portion of differential corporate group success.

Greater post-Neolithic wealth disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica

How wealth is distributed among households provides insight into the fundamental characters of societies and the opportunities they afford for social mobility. However, economic inequality has been hard to study in ancient societies for which we do not have written records, which adds to the challenge of placing current wealth disparities into a long-term perspective. Although various archaeological proxies for wealth, such as burial goods or exotic or expensive-to-manufacture goods in household assemblages, have been proposed, the first is not clearly connected with households, and the second is confounded by abandonment mode and other factors. As a result, numerous questions remain concerning the growth of wealth disparities, including their connection to the development of domesticated plants and animals and to increases in sociopolitical scale. Here we show that wealth disparities generally increased with the domestication of plants and animals and with increased sociopolitical scale, using Gini coefficients computed over the single consistent proxy of house-size distributions. However, unexpected differences in the responses of societies to these factors in North America and Mesoamerica, and in Eurasia, became evident after the end of the Neolithic period. We argue that the generally higher wealth disparities identified in post-Neolithic Eurasia were initially due to the greater availability of large mammals that could be domesticated, because they allowed more profitable agricultural extensification, and also eventually led to the development of a mounted warrior elite able to expand polities (political units that cohere via identity, ability to mobilize resources, or governance) to sizes that were not possible in North America and Mesoamerica before the arrival of Europeans. We anticipate that this analysis will stimulate other work to enlarge this sample to include societies in South America, Africa, South Asia and Oceania that were under-sampled or not included in this study.

IDENTIFYING THE ORIGIN OF SOUTHWESTERN SHELL: A GEOCHEMICAL APPLICATION TO MOGOLLON RIM ARCHAEOMOLLUSCS

Archaeological marine shell artifacts moving over long distances may reveal the remnants of social networks, social currency, and the nuances of exchange. For the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, potential sources of marine shell are predominantly the Gulf of California and Pacific Ocean. There exists some taxonomic overlap between molluscan communities of these regions and the Gulf of California, necessitating non-biogeographic methods to distinguish their origins. Combined oxygen and carbon stable isotope ratio measurements demonstrate that modern shells from these water bodies have distinct isotopic ranges. Molluscan isotopic composition within the Gulf of California varies, which allows for the identification of distinct source regions. Archaeological marine shell from Pueblo III and IV sites in the Mogollon Rim region of east-central Arizona are sourced, demonstrating that archaeological shell was obtained from a northeastern subregion of the Gulf of California. This is the closest source for the Puebloan communities, but it is not consistent with previous hypotheses concerning the origin of marine shell in the Colorado Plateau and Mogollon Highlands, which suggested an exchange route via Paquime originating south of Isla Tiburon. We discuss the implications of these results in the context of previous research and draw conclusions about the meaning of shell use in the region.

Exchange economies of late prehistoric eastern Sonora, Mexico: A re-evaluation based on provenance data analyses

This paper presents provenance data on mundane and rare artifact classes from eastern Sonora in order to revise interpretations of the political economy of late prehistoric Northwest Mexico. Previous researchers have argued that long-distance exchange was a predominantly elite activity utilized to generate economic wealth as a means to political ascendance. Data presented in this analysis contradict these previous models and indicate that all segments of society employed exchange to forge relationships for diverse reasons. Aspiring leaders rarely utilized unequal access to regionally acquired goods to attract local supporters. There is no evidence that foreign objects or symbolism imported from Mesoamerica were a component of aspirant leader strategies. Commoner households exchanged mundane artifacts to bank social capital with groups unlikely to undergo simultaneous social depredations. Overall, exchange and other data indicate a fairly balkanized landscape with few signs of elite offices.

Corrigendum: Greater post-Neolithic wealth disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/nature24646

Not So Far from Paquimé: Essays on the Archaeology of Chihuahua, Mexico. JANE H. KELLEY and DAVID A. PHILLIPS, editors. 2017. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. xiii + 234 pp.

and protohistoric periods. The most well known of these is the Belcher site in Caddo Parish. This site’s mounds are composed of a chronological series of burned and buried structures, which were excavated by Clarence Webb and numerous volunteer laborers off and on between 1936 and 1954. The final two chapters of the book deal with the effects of European colonization and American expansion. Following a rapid influx of American settlers in the decades following the Louisiana Purchase, the Caddo of Louisiana sold their lands to the US government in 1835. After a brief stay in Texas, most Caddos moved to Oklahoma, where many of their descendants live today. This book is a testament to the value of Louisiana’s regional archaeology program, in which the author served as the northwest regional archaeologist until his retirement in 2015. Due to state budget cuts, however, this program was recently disbanded—an unfortunate occurrence since much of what we know about Louisiana’s past is a result of the efforts of the state’s former regional archaeologists. The impacts of amateurs and interested locals are also apparent when reading about the sites mentioned in the book. It is often these individuals who identify and help preserve archaeological sites, and in many instances, they have collected valuable data from sites that are in the process of being destroyed. Finally, it is clear that archaeologists in the Caddo area work well with the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma and that these two groups routinely benefit from each other’s knowledge and expertise.