Alliance and Landscape: Perry Mesa in the Fourteenth Century

Description:
Compelling evidence for endemic warfare during late prehistoric times has been documented in many areas of the American Southwest, and some models postulate hostilities at a macroregional level. Among them is the Verde Confederacy, which has been described as a highly coordinated alliance that encompassed 10,000-13,000 people at 135 sites in the middle Verde River valley, Bloody Basin, and Perry Mesa. This confederacy is believed to have been aligned for conflict against a larger Hohokam polity in the Phoenix basin to the south. Did macroregional warfare perpetrated by large-scale alliances truly exist during the1300s in central Arizona? If it did, how was the Verde Confederacy organized and what was the web of relations within it? If it did not, at what scale(s) did alliances develop in the increasing hostile landscape of the late prehistoric period?

This project evaluates the scale at which conflict and alliance took shape in central Arizona during the 14th century. To address these questions, a three-component strategy is formulated, using ceramic, architectural, and paleoclimatic data. By tracing ceramic transactions, this project investigates the local, regional, and macroregional networks of social interaction among members of the proposed Verde Confederacy, and between them and their postulated Hohokam enemies. The Verde Confederacy model predicts numerous social and economic ties and the transfer of goods among the confederacy members. A ceramic compositional study, aided by petrographic thin section analysis and chemical assays with an electron microprobe, categorizes the pottery from different portions of the confederacy according to provenance, providing the means to trace the movement of pots across central Arizona.

In addition, architectural and paleoclimatic evidence is used to evaluate the extent to which the local and regional settlement patterns were dictated by a defensive strategy implemented by a large-scale confederacy. According to the Verde Confederacy model, numerous settlements were newly established in the late 1200s on Perry Mesa to guard the alliance's western flank. This project determines if settlements were constructed as a unit to accommodate a population moving en masse to take up defensive positions. It also considers an alternative model for the Perry Mesa occupation by examining paleoclimatic indicators to determine if Perry Mesa was more conducive to farming at that time, as compared to deteriorating conditions in an abandoned foothills zone immediately to the south.

The intellectual merit rests on the unprecedented opportunity to evaluate the scale at which alliances were formed in late prehistoric times in central Arizona. Two years of pilot archaeological research by Arizona State University (ASU), coupled with paleoclimatic reconstructions for the region, have set the stage for the comprehensive ceramic, architectural, and environmental analyses that we propose. Furthermore, the macroregional, regional, and local scales at which the inquiry is focused address a key question in Southwest archaeology: What was the maximum scale at which polities organized themselves, and what were the forces and constraints that drove those developments?

The broader impacts come from enhanced interaction with Native American communities, the integration of education and research, and knowledge exchange with BLM and Tonto National Forest land managers who administer the Agua Fria National Monument (AFNM) and its immediate surroundings. The Hopi Tribe and the Yavapai people have expressed interest in scientific research into the past occupation of Perry Mesa in the AFNM, which is part of their ancestral territories. The project continues a highly successful ASU field research seminar involving both undergraduate and graduate students, in which students collect, analyze, write up and ultimately publish research. Finally, it improves land management and interpretation for the public about the history and nature of the prehistoric occupation in the AFNM and the regional and macroregional-scale processes that helped shape it.