Seeking New Metaphors for Communities and Households in the Ancestral Pueblo Southwest

Summary

Investigations of households and communities have long been strengths of archaeological research in the American Southwest. As the spatial breadth and temporal resolution of these studies has improved, the archaeological record has raised key challenges to our preconceptions of the scale, stability, and structure of Ancestral Pueblo communities and households. Newer models must reconcile evidence for the frequent movement of individuals and households with contrasting data attesting to long-term use of residential and non-residential locations and the complexity of local economies. These new models must also directly confront the fact that the archaeological record has a temporal and spatial depth that is rarely present in models of community and household derived from ethnology. In this paper, I explore multiple examples of community organization and household strategies in the Western Pueblo region in order to illustrate the benefit of shifting the spatial scales of our analyses and argue for the adoption of models that more fully embrace the temporal rhythms of the archaeological record.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• From Households to Communities: Bridging Scales in Search of Conflict, Coalescence, and Communitas

Keywords

Spatial Coverage