Recent archaeological efforts to explain the emergence and persistence of social inequality have been hampered by little information about how wealth was transmitted across generations, and how it may have accumulated or diminished over time. Building on studies that have shown domestic architecture to be an excellent material expression of household wealth, we provide a method for reconstructing the amount of labor invested in house construction among the Hohokam of southern Arizona. We also account for different architectural styles from different time periods. To illustrate the utility of the method for addressing broader social issues, we investigate the relationship among population increases, resource shortages, and wealth differentials at Pueblo Grande—one of the preeminent settlements in the Hohokam region. Inequality at Pueblo Grande was tracked over time and compared to similar results at the Grewe site. High-status households at both sites were distinguished architecturally by larger and, in some instances, more elaborate houses. The proximity of these households to public areas for ceremonial expression further suggests that access to ritual played a key role in creating and maintaining inequality in Hohokam society.

Studies of domestic architectural variation are rare in archaeological research, possibly because the essential methods remain underdeveloped. To encourage a comparative approach to explaining the construction differences in household dwellings, we designed and utilized objective and easily applied means to calculate labor costs for constructing a variety of domestic architectural styles in Hohokam society. We applied Abrams's (1989, 1994) approach, labelled “architectural energetics,” which converts architecture into its labor equivalents for building structures. By doing so, we derived standard units of measurement that promote comparative analysis. To demonstrate the method's utility, we turned to the pithouses and adobe surface structures at Pueblo Grande. We wanted to test whether the history of construction was driven by environmental degradation, and, in particular, a depletion over time of wood resources for home building (see Loendorf and Lewis 2017). Our analysis indicated that factors in addition to wood depletion likely contributed to the architectural changes at Pueblo Grande and across the Hohokam world.

Laboratory experiments have shown a large difference in specific leaf area (SLA, leaf area: leaf mass) between species from nutrient-poor and nutrient-rich habitats, but no systematic difference in the construction costs (the amount of glucose required to construct 1 g biomass). We examined how far these patterns are congruent with those from field-grown plants. An analysis was made of the vegetation in a range of grasslands and heathlands differing in productivity. The SLA of the dominant species in 15 different habitats was determined, as well as chemical composition and construction costs of bulk samples of leaves. SLA in the field was generally lower than in the laboratory, but showed consistency in that the ranking across species remained the same. Species from highly productive habitats had higher SLA than those from sites of low productivity, although individual species sometimes deviated substantially from the general trend. Construction costs were similar for plants from different habitats. This was mainly due to the positive correlation between an expensive class of compounds (proteins) and a cheap one (minerals).