Interaction and Connectivity in the Greater Southwest

Introduction

Karen G. Harry and Barbara Roth

The chapters in this volume are the outcome of the 14th Southwest Symposium held in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2014. Inaugurated in 1988, this biennnial conference was established to provide a venue in which Southwestern archaeologists could present new research findings that "contribute to methodological, theoretical, and substantive issues in archaeology" (Nelson and Strawhacker 2011:1). The theme of the 2014 symposium was social interaction. In this volume, authors explore different kinds of social interaction that occurred prehistorically across the Southwest. The authors use diverse and innovative approaches to address how interaction took place and to examine the economic, social, and ideological implications of the different forms of interaction. Social interaction is examined from three perspectives: (1) its role in the diffusion of ideas and material culture, (2) the way that different social units, especially households, interacted within and between communities, and (3) the importance of interaction and interconnectivity in understanding the archaeology of the Southwest's northern periphery. By approaching the topic of interaction using a variety of different data sets, the authors present new ways of examining how social interaction and connectivity, at a variety of scales, influenced cultural developments in the Southwest. Although hardly a new subject matter, the chapters provide fresh perspectives on this enduring topic. In this introduction, we address the three approaches to social interaction — diffusion, social units, and the northern periphery — that organize the volume's chapters. The discussion in the present essay sets the stage for the more detailed presentations in the chapters that follow.

Part I: Rethinking Diffusion

The chapters in part I reintroduce the concept of diffusion to Southwestern archaeology. Although once a dominant paradigm in the discipline, diffusion fell out of favor during the rise of processual archaeology in the 1960s and 1970s. Loss of interest in the subject resulted not so much from a lack of belief in diffusion, but from a conviction that such studies were unable to contribute to the types of questions considered important at that time. The diffusion studies that dominated North American archaeology in the early twentieth century had been largely restricted to identifying the origins and distributions of cultural traits; because early scholars considered the spread of behaviors to be an inevitable byproduct of cultural contact, they made no effort to explain why individuals might have been motivated to adopt practices with which they came in contact. With its emphasis on systems theory and on identifying the function of objects and behaviors in sustaining the social group, processual archaeology eschewed diffusion as having little to offer the discipline's new anthropological orientation.

More than 50 years have passed since the advent of processualism, and the focus of Southwestern archaeology has long since moved beyond the functionalist approaches of that era. As well, methodological advances (e.g., chemical sourcing techniques and the application of social network analysis) have made it possible to examine the transmission of behaviors in the archaeological record with greater nuance and detail than ever before. Despite these changes, the concept of diffusion has remained largely ignored and theoretically underdeveloped. In chapter 2, Catherine Cameron challenges us to reconsider the utility of this concept and to develop new approaches that investigate not only whether diffusion occurred but how and why it happened.

The case studies presented in part I provide examples of how, when approached through a more comprehensive and contemporary lens, the study of diffusion can stimulate new ways of thinking about the archaeological record. One useful contribution from these studies derives from their focus on the mechanisms by which diffusion occurred. The chapters consider both the nature of the social groups involved in the transmission and the contexts in which the encounters took place. In some instances transmission accompanied the relatively large-scale relocation of people into new areas. In chapter 3, Barbara Mills and Matthew Peeples argue that this was the case for the spread of Salado polychrome ceramics, which they suggest were introduced into the central and southern Southwest by migrants from the Kayenta/Tusayan region. Settling in scattered locations, these migrants maintained broad social connections that contributed to the diffusion and widespread adoption of Salado polychromes.

In other instances practices appear to have been transmitted...