MOBILITY, LAND TENURE, AND SOCIAL IDENTITY IN THE SAN SIMON BASIN OF SOUTHEASTERN ARIZONA

Abstract

Data from sites in the San Simon Valley of southeastern Arizona are used to explore the interconnections among mobility, land tenure, and social identity at the household and community levels. Through an examination of occupation history at three San Simon villages, I argue that these persistent sites represent heritable land tenure invested in the corporate group or community. Within these villages, the spatial and temporal patterns of dated structures and ceramics indicate that heritable land tenure was also operating at the household level. One site, Timber Draw, exhibits both usufruct and heritable land tenure operating contemporaneously, suggesting that differences may have existed between households in rights to resource access. However, the distributions of different kinds of ceramics, potential markers of social identity, do not suggest that the differences in household land tenure were ethnically meaningful. Rather, the ceramic patterns suggest that households maintained access to broad social networks through exchange or mobility.