Vapaki : Ancestral O'Odham Platform Mounds of the Sonoran Desert

This volume presents a far-ranging conversation on the topic of Hohokam platform mounds in the history of the southern Arizona desert, exploring why they were built, how they were used, and what they meant in the lives of the farmers who built them.

Vapaki brings together diverse theoretical approaches, a mix of big-picture and tightly focused perspectives, coverage of the variation in mounds that provides depth for specialists, breadth for those working in other areas and on other topics, and a rich corpus of research ideas and theoretical perspectives.

Contributors grapple with questions about platform mounds, including the social, political, ideological, symbolic, and adaptive factors that contributed to their development, spread, and eventual cessation. The differing perspectives presented here about what motivated Ancestral O’Odham populations of the Hohokam Period to build these monuments, whether as displays of status, identity, political ability, membership in regional networks, and as architectural models of the cosmological order, offer insights to researchers studying monumental architecture in other contexts.

O’Odham knowledge of the history and uses of mounds is combined with archaeological data to understand the place of platform mounds in the lives of the Ancestors and as a continuing presence among their modern descendants.