E. Charles Adams – Deposits and the Stories They Tell: Social Practice, Social Identity, and Social Power at Homol’ovi I, a 14th-century Ancestral Hopi Pueblo in Northeastern Arizona

Lecture by Zoom. The lecture is free and open to the public but you must pre-register. Click here to pre-register. 

Since the 1980s, many archaeologists have thought of objects/artifacts as having social lives meaning they have important roles in human activities that can change through their existence. The same is true for structures. Importantly, these lives do not end when an object is “discarded”, or a room is no longer used. They simply enter a new chapter, what we call the archaeological record. To interpret and understand this new social role, we need to examine the context of the object – with what other objects are they associated, what is the nature of the deposit within which they lie, what lies above and below them, where are they situated in the room or, for that matter, the village, and how was the room used before and during deposition?

To evaluate the value of this approach, an examination of deposits and objects within excavated rooms at Homol’ovi I, a fourteenth-century ancestral Hopi village having 1100 rooms, was conducted. Complex interactions between these “abandoned” spaces and nearby occupants were identified, and these reveal their continued active social roles with nearby households and the community at large. These interactions involve cultural deposition, often including ash, and rare or unusual objects, sometimes over the course of decades. Comparisons among rooms reveal that differences in intensity and types of objects and cultural deposition are patterned and likely related to the social roles and status of the occupants who used and filled these rooms. 

E. Charles (Chuck) Adams received his PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1975. He directed the Walpi Archaeological Project for the Museum of Northern Arizona from 1975-1982, which involved living at Hopi First Mesa for 18 months while excavating and documenting 100 rooms in Walpi village. This work informs his research at the Homol’ovi villages as part of his direction of ASM’s Homol’ovi Research Program since 1985, retiring in 2020. The work at Homol’ovi has been done in collaboration with the Hopi Tribe and Hopi Cultural Preservation Office. More than 100 publications, including ten books/monographs, and 25 theses/dissertations have been the fruit of this research program. As an emeritus curator at ASM, he remains active in research and publication of this material, as well as sharing his research with the larger community through presentations and tours.