Rachael Byrd

Architectural construction underwent a significant transformation from the Hohokam Pre-Classic (A.D. 700-1150) to Classic period (A.D. 1150-1450); from ball courts and pit house groups to platform mounds and adobe-walled compounds.  These changes reflect the partitioning of social, political, and religious space to facilitate differential access within sites.  At University Indian Ruin (AZ BB: 9:33), a Classic period platform mound site in the Tucson Basin, mortuary features were commonly located within rooms or along walls outside of rooms, and often in discrete clusters.  We therefore hypothesize that there is a direct association between interments and architectural units at University Indian Ruin (UIR)—a pattern that legitimized inheritance among house members inhabiting partitioned space.  Chi-square results reveal that the frequency of mortuary features associated with architecture (66.1%) is significant.  Further analysis of characteristics of these mortuary features (Spearman correlation) identify significant relationships between 1) burial type and site locus, 2) burial type and grouping of individuals, 3) burial type and artifact (ceramic) type, and 4) site locus and artifact (ceramic) type.  Overall, our results demonstrate a significant association between architecture and mortuary features at UIR and we suggest that decisions made by the living when burying the dead reinforced social distinctions and corporate inheritance within Hohokam sites.

The Early Agricultural period (EAP) encompasses the protracted transformation from foraging to settled agricultural village life in the Sonoran Desert from approximately 2,100 B.C. to A.D. 50.  Las Capas [AZ AA:12:111(ASM)] is one of the earliest, best preserved, and most intensively investigated EAP sites in the region; documenting the transition in social organization from community to household resulting from the adoption of, and increased investment in, agriculture.  Underlying a regional uniformity in material culture and subsistence practices is evidence for significant social transformation that includes a shift from large houses and external storage to smaller houses and internal storage, the formation of house and burial groups, and the appearance of community structures and cremation burial.  Here, we utilize the well-preserved (and dated) stratigraphy at Las Capas to consider patterns in biocultural signatures (mortuary and osteological) over the duration of the occupation at the site and how they fit into broader patterns of social development during the EAP.