21st-Century Preservation Archaeology
Archaeologists in the current decade stand on the shoulders of generations of researchers working in academic, field school, and (importantly) government-funded data-recovery contexts. More specifically, what we have inherited are the large, complex datasets from over a century of field and lab work. These days, most of the new knowledge generated by archaeologists comes out of efforts to integrate, repurpose, and ultimately ask new questions of old data. The cyberSW program at Archaeology Southwest facilitates research by preserving and constantly updating the largest database of sites and artifacts in the Southwest region.
Archaeology as Computational Social Science
Archaeology is primarily an observational science: We excavate sites and carefully document what we find, and apply various analytical and theoretical toolkits to interpret any observed patterns. It’s doubly difficult because traces of past human behavior are incredibly subtle and hard to interpret after a thousand years or more. What we have is very different from the experimental sciences… we simply have no laboratory for controlled experiments! Computational science, on the other hand, uses modeling and simulation methods to allow social scientists to design a laboratory in a computer. With data-informed and well-designed models of complex human systems, we can explore processes such as the development of market-based economies or changing land use in the context of domesticated animals.
Origins of Market-Based Economies
Simply put: Around the world, over the past five or six thousand years, interesting stuff happened in desert valleys crosscut by rivers. The Nile, the Fertile Crescent, coastal Peru… and the Phoenix Basin in central Arizona! Warm environments and irrigable land with reliable water from rivers have incredible potential through the introduction of irrigation, and these places encouraged specialized production in agriculture and a variety of utilitarian and prestige goods depending on comparative advantage. Markets were an important mechanism for exchanging those goods and a key component of emerging complex societies. This talk will offer a deep dive into the organization of the Hohokam economy as a case study.