This paper presents the results of a juxtaposition of archaeological findings on Hohokam irrigation and ethnographic research on the social organization of irrigation. There are no ethnographic or historic records pertaining to the Hohokam, so the comparative ethnographic approach is perhaps more productive than in other situations. Several forms of canal irrigation organization are considered, including politically centralized, acephalous, private, and several forms of communal. We find that politically centralized, acephalous, and private forms are implausible in the Hohokam context. Several of the communal forms are plausible. We find no ethnographic basis for positing a valley-wide management system.

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Archaeologically informed history is vital for examining the consequences of emergent colonialism in the nineteenth century and earlier, since documentary sources are silent on many facets of everyday life. Interpretations of contact and colonialism in Oceania often highlight rapid changes in the technologies and practices of its traditional island societies. In Hawai'i, the top-down imposition of indigenous elite power greatly influenced the rate and character of technological change, as commoner access to European and American goods was initially curtailed in this highly stratified society. Although indigenous elites purposively used imported goods and technologies to materialize their hybrid identity-and to expand their political and economic power-this phenomenon presaged the development of unrestrained colonialism by Euro-Americans in the late nineteenth century. This study illustrates the need to examine a range of cultural and historical contingencies in studies of technological change during periods of emergent colonialism.

Geochemical analyses of obsidian offer unexpected insights on the size and organization of the Hohokam regional system in the North American Southwest. Networks of obsidian circulation enlarged greatly during the Classic period as community centres with monumental architecture acquired non-local obsidian from a vast territory. This pattern confirms that prior models drastically underestimated the geographic scale of the Classic period regional system.

Debates concerning sociopolitical organization in the North American Southwest are clarified and confounded by the conclusion that craft specialization was not always a sufficient condition of complexity in the region. Understanding the relationship between varying dimensions of craft specialization (e.g., context, scale, and intensity) and sociopolitical organization in the region requires us to examine a variety of social institutions (e.g., leadership, gender, and ethnicity) that potentially generated differentiated economies. New research on middle-range societies in the North American Southwest and elsewhere in the world should focus on identifying and interpreting the archaeological signatures of specific social institutions and their linkages to craft economies.

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Archaeology provides a compelling perspective on the evolution of property rights and macroeconomy in precapitalist societies that lacked systems of writing. Most interpretations of macroeconomy in the Prehispanic Southwest have focused on interaction networks that emanated from "heartlands" where intensive agriculturalists were aggregated in towns along major streams. Although archaeologists are aware of communities in "hinterland" territories, they rarely consider their political economies. As a remedy, we apply common-pool-resource (CPR) theory to investigate hypothesized linkages between property rights and social identity in two hinterlands in Arizona: the Papagueria and the Grand Canyon. Our analyses indicate, first, that from circa C.E. 850 to C.E. 1350, local communities negotiated their social identities in a macroeconomy of fluctuating resource values and, second, that incentives for privatizing peripheral territories intensified in some areas during periods of economic competition. These findings underscore the critical role of archaeology in modeling property rights in precapitalist societies. [