In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

oNe The Toyah Phase in Texas aN iNtroductioN aNd retroSpective Nancy A. Kenmotsu and Douglas K. Boyd The greater central Texas region was home to hunter-gatherers for thousands of years. As such, the region presents an opportunity to study the economies of small groups, how they interacted with neighbors near and far, how they handled risk, the extent of their mobility, and perhaps how and why their cultures changed through time (Collins 2004). The archaeological record of this large region was first used to study cultural-historical units and their chronometric placements (Kelley et al. 1940; Sayles 1935). Today, there is increasing interest in using the patterns in that record to increase our understanding of social boundaries among hunter-gatherers by focusing on economics, migration, conflict, and interaction. That interest coincides with research in other regions across North America. For example, Stark and colleagues (1998) identified social networks among smallscale groups in the Tonto Basin through analysis of the technological variation in the dominant utilitarian pottery.Vehik (2002) looked at broader-scale patterns in the Southern Plains. She concludes that, as large horticultural village settlements formed after ad 1450, control of access to nonlocal resources became more important and resulted in revisions to trade relationships between groups in that region. Speth (2004) and his colleagues have used the subsistence data from Henderson Pueblo in southeastern New Mexico to investigate both intrasite social boundaries of public versus domestic contexts and boundaries between Henderson and other nearby sites with extraregional groups, especially those in the Southern Plains. These and other studies hold great promise for explaining social boundaries on the Southern Plains and in adjacent regions. Yet archaeological patterns and their interpretations are not always straightforward. Barth (1969) pointed out that social boundaries, though real, are also quite fluid, and Hitchcock and Bar- 2 KeNmotSu aNd boyd tram (1998:39) in their study of San groups in the Kalahari noted the presence of boundaries within boundaries: “Variability in technology that is seen archaeologically . . . may not reflect differences in the cultures or thought processes of the groups that produced the materials . . . but rather [reflect] the environmental , social, and economic contexts of behavior and problem-solving strategies of individuals within a single group.” MacEachern (1998), Stark (1998), and Welsch and Terrell (1998) also recognize that interpreting the causes of patterning in the archaeological record must be approached cautiously. Such caution notwithstanding , we agree with Stark (1998:9) that “the search for social boundaries in material culture patterning is a productive avenue of research.” The chapters of this volume represent an effort to use the Toyah phase to look at social boundaries through migration, hunter-farmer interaction, subsistence, and other issues of anthropological interest. In 1947, J. Charles Kelley (1947a) briefly described the Toyah phenomenon as a focus that rapidly spread across a broad expanse of Texas around ad 1200. Subsequent research, nearly all in the gray literature, has modified Kelley’s original descriptions, but the Toyah phase continues to be of keen interest to archaeologists interested in studying smallscale societies. In this introductory chapter, we provide a broad overview of the geographic extent of the Toyah phase and a brief retrospective of the phase from its beginnings to the present day based, in part, on the excellent summaries of Toyah by Johnson (1994) and Ricklis (1994). Figure 1.1 provides a map of selected Toyah and Toyah-related archaeological sites that are discussed in this volume, and table 1.1 provides a key to the site names, numbers, and references for the selected sites. Toyah in Geographic Perspective The archaeological pattern known as the Toyah phase is found in the central part of Texas including the Edwards Plateau and the Llano Uplift as well as adjacent portions of the Rolling Plains, Oak Woods and Prairies, Blackland Prairie, Gulf Coast Prairies and Marshes, and South Texas Brush Country (figs. 1.2 and 1.3) This portion of central Texas is within the Great Plains physiographic province as defined by Carr (1967) and thus constitutes the southern end of the Great Plains as identified by most geographers and anthropologists. Within this broad region there exists a collective of shared cultural traits (sensu Kroeber 1939) from approximately ad 1300 to 1700. The region contains enormous biotic, geological, and topographic diversity (fig. 1.4), particularlyon the Edwards Plateau (Ellis et al. 1995; see also discussions in Collins 1995, 2004). Comprehensive reviews of the vegetation, soils, climate, and other aspects of these natural regions can be found elsewhere...

Share