Landscapes, land use, and the history of territory formation: An example from the puebloan southwest

Territories are spatial units that encompass the broadest range of a society's land-use behaviors as well as the history of human interactions with the natural landscape. Drawing from published documents pertaining to the North American Indian Land Claims and to the prehistory and history of land use among the Hopi Indians of Arizona, this paper integrates spatial, material, and historical variables of land use behavior (1) to formulate an empirical definition of territory and (2) to develop a generalized life history of territory formation that can be applied explicitly to the archaeological record.