The Archaeology of Regional Interaction: Religion, Warfare, and Exchange across the American Southwest and Beyond

2: What is a Regional System?

Southwestern archaeologists need to reevaluate the utility of the regional system concept. When first proposed in 1979, this concept marked a paradigm shift for interpreting the remains of past societies, and in the intervening years it has become part of the everyday vocabulary of southwestern archaeologists. After almost two decades of application to a variety of cases, however, some difficulties are emerging in the concept’s usage. In considering these difficulties I begin with some historical background , identify some problems related to the issues of scale and interaction , and conclude by illustrating the research potential of a technique of network analysis known as hypergraphs. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND When first proposed, the regional system concept was intended to replace the culture area concept, which is based on the assumption that all members of a society share norms equally. For archaeologists, this assumption implies that the area encompassed by a particular culture should be culturally homogeneous. In Southwestern archaeology this expectation was first questioned by David Wilcox (1979, 1980) for the Hohokam case. Wilcox observed that the expanding Hohokam archaeological database refuted the uniformity predicted by the culture area approach (also see McGuire 1991; Neitzel 1991). Others have subsequently made this same observation for other parts of the Southwest, 25 WHAT IS A REGIONAL SYSTEM? ISSUES OF SCALE AND INTERACTION IN THE PREHISTORIC SOUTHWEST Jill E. Neitzel 2 26 Archaeology of Regional Interaction noting also that no theoretical justification exists for assuming that a culture’s members adhere to all norms equally (e.g., Speth 1988; Tainter and Plog 1994; Upham, Crown, and Plog 1994). As a result of these difficulties, Wilcox (1979, 1980) suggested that the label Hohokam culture area (Gladwin et al. 1937; Haury 1976) be replaced with Hohokam regional system. The origins of the regional system concept can be traced to Binford’s (1962, 1965) proposal that archaeologists employ systems models in their studies of past societies. Such models conceive of societies as composed of various components (or subsystems) and focus on the connections among them. The systems approach makes no assumptions about the sharing of norms and cultural uniformity; to the contrary, it expects that diversity will exist among societal members as a result of their differential participation in the society’s various components. Since first proposed, systems models have been widely adopted by archaeologists. Wilcox’s (1979, 1980) introduction of the regional system concept provided a significant analytical breakthrough not only for Hohokam researchers but for southwestern archaeologists in general. Wilcox’s proposal came at a time when the culture area concept was still being used but was becoming increasingly cumbersome. The normative thinking implicit in the definition of culture areas severely constrained the investigation of such emerging issues as ecological adaptations, sociopolitical complexity, and local and regional interaction. These issues all require the consideration of diversity, a topic that cannot be addressed successfully using the culture area concept. In contrast, the systemic perspective underlying the regional system concept not only allows for diversity but makes it the focus of research. Thus with the reconceptualization of the Hohokam as a regional system rather than a culture area, the investigation of new research issues became much more productive (see Gumerman 1991). Once the regional system concept had been applied to the Hohokam, it was soon adopted by archaeologists working in other parts of the Southwest as well. Probably the best-known case is Chaco. Formerly seen as a subdivision of the Puebloan culture area, the reconceptualization of Chaco as a regional system provided the intellectual framework for an unprecedented surge of new and extremely productive research (e.g., Judge and Schelberg 1984). The problem is that the regional system concept has done its job almost too well. Since first being defined almost two decades ago, regional systems have become ubiquitous. Today virtually no material remains encompassing any significant spatial extent in the prehistoric Southwest exist 27 Issues of Scale and Interaction in Prehistoric Southwest that have not been labeled as representing a regional system. As a result of this widespread usage, the regional system concept is beginning to suffer from one of the same difficulties as the culture area concept—it has begun to mask significant variation in the prehistoric record, variation that should be the focus of attention for any southwestern archaeologist interested in regional issues. SCALE Many of the difficulties with current usage of the regional system concept involve the topics of scale and interaction...