Mission:
The mission of the Phoenix Paleoecology Project (PPP) is to proivde online access to paleoecological data from Hohokam sites in the central Arizona region.
Rapid population expansion and construction in the Phoenix area over the last few decades has led to an explosion in archaeological information for the area, making it one of the most intensively excavated culture areas in the US. The successes and failures of the indigenous Hohokam people who lived in the area for centuries can provide modern decision-makers with lessons about environmental variability in this arid landscape.
Much of this valuable information, however, are in "gray literature" reports with limited distribution, and most are at least obscure and inaccessible to the general public. Synthesizing data from different projects can also be difficult, since the way data are collected, analyzed, and reported can vary from project to project, and can change over time as techniques become more sophisticated.
History:
Beginning in Fall of 2001, Steve Swanson and Peggy Nelson began organizing the Phoenix Paleoecology Project, working closely with the Archaeological Research Institute (ARI) and the Center for Environmental Studies (CES) at Arizona State University. Funding from ARI and from CES' NSF IGERT Urban Ecology program allowed us to hire a Research Assistant (Scott Ingram) as well as an undergraduate under NSF's REU program (Rebecca Calonico). We immediately set Scott to work, travelling across Arizona to gather reports and datasets from various contract firms and institutions. As a result of Scott's hard work and the overwhelming support we received from contract companies, we were able to assemble a library of sources at ARI. At the same time, we devised a bibliographic system to evaluate and track hundreds of different data sets that were available in these sources--Rebecca worked hard to get all of the information into the bibliographic database that facillitates access to the data.
In Fall 2002, Peggy Nelson, Ann Kinzig and Steve Swanson held a PPP workshop on "Archaeological Landscapes," which brought together an interdisciplinary group of students from various departments at ASU to begin examining the data collection that we had put together. Six participants from three departments decided to work together to look at changes in the Hohokam Sedentary-Classic periods. (Destiny Crider, Michelle Elliott, Kris Gade, Cathryn Meegan, Hoski Schaafsma, and Steve Swanson). After a semester of hard work, the group presented posters on this research at the Fifth Annual CAP-LTER Poster Symposium. Work on the issues raised in that workshop continues, most recently with the posters presented at the 69th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology which are on this website.
We currently have a Research Associate entering palynological data from several projects into an electronic database, and expect to continue this for other data sets (faunal, macrobotanical, etc) as funding permits. Staff at ARI have a great deal of experience in the integration of numerous archaeological projects from "paper" into electronic format. As data sets become available electronically, we will begin posting them on this digital library site. We hope to eventually have a spatially and temporally referenced, searchable data set that can be used for high-quality archaeological research.