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14 Cordell and Gumerman do not have evidence that would suggest social and economic stratification in the more usual sense (again, see Johnson, this volume). Rather than seeing our stand as one that begs the question altogether, we suggest that southwesternists need to be more open to a wide range of ethnographic cases and situations and expect to find parallels in a diverse range of ethnohistoric and ethnographic records. Furthennore, this approach might help to discover and explain many different types ofvariation in the archaeological record. The issue of organization during this period emerges as one of major and continuing importance on more than one level of inquiry. We do not know why settlement size increased to such an extent at this time. In some areas there seems to have been settlement with a defensive posture, but there are also cases where warfare or raiding does not seem to have conditioned settlement placement (see Cordell, this volume; Fish, this volume). There is also heterogeneity in site layout, with some sites consisting of masses of roomblocks oriented toward central plazas and others without central plazas. Some sites are surrounded by low walls; others are not. At this point, we do not know precisely how these reflect differences in community organization (Reed 1956). Significantly, many of the areas inhabited during this period ceased to be occupied into the Historic period. The paleoenvironmental data indicate a period of low water tables, expanding arroyo systems, and deficient and temporally highly variable precipitation from about A.D. 1475 to 1500. How many communities failed because of environmentally related factors and how many because of problems attendant upon social coordination oflarge numbers of people in the same village is unknown. The seminar considered the possibility that sites appearing to have been abandoned in the late prehistoric period, as determined from tree-ring dates, may actually have been inhabited into historic times when they may have been deserted due to the impact of Europeans, specifically European diseases. It is not uncommon to discover beams that have been cut hundreds ofyears ago in villages that are occupied today. For the period from A.D. 1400 to 1600, which brackets the first contact with Europeans, the issue of dating the abandonment of individual villages is crucial. The seminar considered A.D. 1540 the beginning of the transition into the Historic period. Until this time, all the cultural systems under consideration were entirely native. From A.D. 1540 onward, these were variously disrupted and altered by external factors, among them European diseases, the introduction of new crops, and livestock, in addition to new fonns of political and social interaction. Our discussion addressed the problem of our Cultural Interaaion in the Prehistoric Southwest 15 current inability to adequately identify various nomadic groups that should have been in the area at about the time of contact, if not slightly before. The primary difficulty is that we do not have methods to appropriately and unambiguously identify such groups. As is often the case, the seminar raised as many questions and issues as it resolved. Many of the unanswered questions, however, have been brought into sharper focus with the result that they are more likely to be answered in the future. Those areas that wefelt needed immediateattention were developing a less provincial ethnographic perspective, developing techniques and refining means of estimating prehistoric population size and structure, and working toward finer chronological control. In many ways, the Southwest is far ahead of other regions of the world in the precision and resolution of its data, but the nature of the problems we attempt to resolve requires even greater efforts. We are pleased that the seminardid reach major agreement on the broad outlines ofsouthwestern prehistory. The novelty ofthe view incorporated by the papers in this volume is that each paper is regionally spedfic and detailed, however, each also acknowledges the impact of pansouthwestern factors. Those ofenvironment have been partofthe southwesternist 's intellectual baggage for many years, but have only recently attained the remarkable level ofdetail reflected here. The influence oflarge, regionally based systems on local developments, we see as new in its current form. The influence was universally recognized but the manifestations across the areas represented, and interpretationsofthatinfluence, were diverse and intellectually interesting. We look forward to having the opportunity to explore them further in the future. REFERENCES Benson, Charlotte, and Steadman Upham (editors) 1986 Mogollon Variability. University Museum Occasional Papers No. 15. New Mexico State University, Las Cruces. Cordell, Linda S. 1984 Prehistory ofthe Southwest...

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