Mapping Ancestral Hopi Archaeological Landscapes: An Assessment of the Efficacy of GIS Analysis for Interpreting Indigenous Cultural Landscapes

Abstract

The Homol'ovi region of northeastern Arizona was home to a dense prehistoric population with strong, archaeologically-visible ties to the Hopi Mesas. As an ancestral Hopi residential area, this region is an important part of the Hopi cultural landscape utilized contemporarily by Hopi people for religious and resource procurement purposes. However, while previous research indicates that the Cottonwood Wash drainage formed an important component of the Homol'ovi landscape, the archaeology of the wash and its adjacent uplands is poorly understood. This research adopts a two-pronged approach to assessing the efficacy of GIS analysis for interpreting the spatial distribution of archaeological sites within the Homol'ovi landscape. The deductive approach draws on principles of cultural landscape theory to construct a descriptive model of dimensions of Hopi land use on the basis of ethnographic documentation and Hopi traditional history. This model is applied to a database composed of survey data collected from the Cottonwood Wash vicinity and data from the Homol'ovi Research Program's survey of Homolovi State Park. The model is then operationalized through GIS analysis of site distributions, and the efficacy of the model for predicting the location of different types of prehistoric land use is evaluated. The second, inductive, approach examines site distribution relative to patterns of visibility and movement in the Homol'ovi region and identifies areas for the refinement of spatial data associated with shrines and petroglyphs in the region. On the basis of this two-pronged approach, a research strategy iteratively incorporating deductive and inductive analyses, coupled with the use of participatory approaches, is recommended for future research.