The San Juan Basin Archaeological Society invites the public to a presentation in the Lyceum at the Center of Southwest Studies and on Zoom on Wednesday, April 8th at 7:00 pm. At 6:30 we will have social time in the foyer. Then after a brief business meeting, Dr. Angela Huster, a Senior Archaeologist at Chronicle Heritage, will present a discussion on the Hohokam Culture of Southern Arizona titled “Cotton, Intra-regional Specialization, and the Hohokam Northern Periphery“. For log-in information, go to SJBAS.ORG.

Cotton, Intra-regional Specialization, and the Hohokam Northern Periphery: This talk addresses evidence for within-region specialization among the Hohokam of the Salt-Gila area (modern Phoenix), using evidence for cotton cultivation and textile production as a case study. The Hohokam of southern Arizona are best known for their large-scale canal systems, but during later periods, their settlement system expanded into areas that relied on rainfall and runoff farming. Prior studies of ceramic production and exchange have demonstrated that the region had a well-integrated market system, but less work has been conducted on the production and movement of non-ceramic resources within that system. Cotton textiles were a prestige good traded across the Southwest, and required significant labor to produce, making them a good candidate for specialized production.

BIO: Dr. Angela Huster is a Senior Archaeologist and Principal Investigator for Chronicle Heritage specializing in Central Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. Her research focuses on the ways that everyday people at the edges of cultures dealt with their changing lives—whether those changes were being conquered by the Aztecs, the collapse of the Teotihuacan state, or the reorganization of the Hohokam market system. Her work research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Society for American Archaeology, the Register of Professional Archaeologists, and the Rust Family Foundation, and is published (among others) in PNAS, the Journal of Field Archaeology, Antiquity, and Latin American Antiquity. She loves that archaeology is a “magpie” science that draws on everything from computer programming to art and encourages interest in the field through Skype-a-scientist K-12 classroom outreach and managing Chronicle’s Arizona internship program.