Conceptualizing Cultural Contact And Transmission Across International Boundaries

Suny At Binghamton, Binghamton NY

Investigators

Abstract

Researchers have increasingly questioned the concept of viewing the world in terms of bounded, self-reliant social units such as nation states. Instead they see the world as culturally, economically and politically interconnected with massive movement of people, goods and information. In this highly fluid context people create and recreate ethnic, cultural and racial identities. The study of these processes is key to understanding social change and cultural conflict. Archaeology is particularly well positioned to study connectivity, movement, and ethnogenesis over the long span of human history. Dr. McGuire of Binghamton University, along with Mexican colleagues will study these processes among prehistoric peoples in northwest México and the southwestern United States. The project focuses on the Trincheras Tradition of northern Sonora, Mexico to examine connectivity, movement and ethnogenesis linking central Mexico with the southwestern United States. The project transcends the U.S. - Mexico border to establish contemporary research connectivity and to foster international cooperation. It integrates research with education to promote teaching, training and learning. It is a bi-national project that employs US and Mexican students in a cooperative research program. It introduces these students to existing networks that link North American and Mexican archaeologists in northern México. The public education component of the research includes lectures in the US and México and field trips for interested public groups from both nations. The researchers publish their results both in México and the United States using scientific outlets, popular journals, and museum exhibits. Dr. McGuire and his colleagues examine how pre- AD 1200 Trincheras Tradition people participated in a series of cultural traditions that connected the prehistoric Hohokam peoples of southern Arizona with the prehistoric cultures of West México. The project?s transnational, collaborative research evaluates three alternatives for processes of movement, connectivity, and ethnogenesis in the Trincheras Tradition. The Trincheras as Hohokam model proposes that the Trincheras Tradition was the southernmost extension of the Hohokam. The Mexican Migration model envisions a common culture across northern Sonora and southern Arizona that Hohokam migrants displace in southern Arizona. The West Mexico model argues that before the AD 1200s the Trincheras Tradition was part of a series of cultural traditions that connected the peoples of southern Arizona with the prehistoric cultures of West Mexico. The project gathers the data to test these models by doing the first intensive excavations in Trincheras Tradition sites dating before the AD 1200s. Evaluating these three alternatives helps archaeologists to better understand processes that spanned the U.S. and Mexico. In doing so, the research contributes to our understanding of social change and cultural conflict at a continental scale. Such understanding generates new insights into connectivity, movement and ethnogenesis as universal aspects of the human condition.