The Interpretation of Archaeological Floor Assemblages: A Case Study from the American Southwest

Abstract

Analyses of the assemblages from the floors of Upland Mogollon pithouses show that variation in artifact frequencies may be attributed to differences in the intensity of abandonment and post-abandonment formation processes, such as caching, scavenging and trash dumping. The proportion of pithouses that contain caches or de facto assemblages is provocatively constant across sites—roughly 18 percent. This observation may be useful for refining estimates of the populations of sites or regions, for recognizing the size of social groups, or for identifying the abandonment sequences of pithouse villages. Prior studies that attribute variation in the frequencies of different classes of artifacts to functional differences in the uses of pithouses are rejected on the grounds of methodological inadequacy.