Sacred vs Secular: Pre-Hispanic Village Landscapes in Southwest New Mexico

Summary

In the pre-Hispanic Southwest, it is well known that certain places on the regional landscape were considered sacred or ritually charged, such as summits, springs, and caves. Less understood is the way that sacred and secular spaces were partitioned within prehistoric villages. In this paper we examine the relationship among secular and sacred spaces during the PIII/PIV periods at two villages along the Rio Grande. Each village includes roomblocks, agricultural features, resource processing areas, shrines, and petroglyphs. One village is the previously recorded Yarborough Site, on Tierra Blanca Creek, in the eastern Mimbres region. The second village, the newly recorded Sato Pueblo, is located just northeast of Socorro. Despite having only distant social connections, we find remarkable similarities in the organization of sacred and secular spaces. This suggests that there was a regionally shared cosmology that guided local village planning.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Atlantic crossing: side views on the rock art

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

File Information