Archaeology in the Distribution Division of the Central Arizona Project: Thoughts on the History of the Hohokam Culture of Southern Arizona, and on the Practice of Archaeology in the 1990s

Description

Authors: Marmaduke, William S. and Henderson, T. Kathleen

Publisher: Northland Research, Inc.

Pub Date: 1995

Binding: Paperback

Condition: Fair to Good.  Ex-corporate library.  No tears, bends or folds.  Previous owner’s stamp on upper front cover corner and upper corner title page.  Library label covered by tape on spine foot.  Light edge and corner wear.  Smudging to bottom text block.

Notes: “Along with a copy of our contract for the Distribution Division work, we received a nine-inch (22.9cm) thick three ring binder, within which all potential CAP water-users (governments, corporations, and special districts), their proposed use, and their probably means of taking delivery were described…These end-users and their means for transporting water from aqueduct to end-use constitute the Distribution Division of the Central Arizona Project.” (From the Prologue).  The Santa Cruz Flats, an area between Phoenix and Tucson, turned out to be the most archaeological significant of this study, 157 sites discovered, almost all prehistoric.              As for the “Thoughts”–“One might reasonably question why so many southwestern archaeologists have failed to question the integrity of the ‘classical’ Hohokam chronology?  One answer, which we suspect is partially true, is that acceptance of the edifice is easier than questioning it, because acceptance makes research less work.  The traditional chronology, if you accept it, allows ceramic sherds to be used as infallible marker fossils.  Chronology, never the simplest of matters, becomes a cipher in the consideration of questions which we have all gullibly accepted as being really important: the evolution of complex society in prehistoric southern Arizona–itself a phenomena, however, that has been nowhere proven to have actually occurred.” (page 42)  VERY RARE.