Sacred vs Secular: Pre-Hispanic Village Landscapes in Southwest New Mexico
Author(s): Steve Swanson; Andrew Vorsanger
Year: 2015
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.
Cite this Record
Sacred vs Secular: Pre-Hispanic Village Landscapes in Southwest New Mexico. Steve Swanson, Andrew Vorsanger. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 397144) ; doi:10.6067/XCV8VD70RT
This Resource is Part of the Following Collections
Keywords
Culture
Ancestral Puebloan
•
Mimbres
•
Mogollon
•
Rio Grande Culture
Site Name
Sato Pueblo
•
Yarborough Site
Site Type
Ancient Communal / Public Structure
•
Ancient Structure
•
Artifact Scatter
•
Cairn
•
Petroglyph
•
Rock Art
•
Room Block / Compound / Pueblo
•
Shrine
General
petroglyph
•
sacred
•
Secular
•
Village
Geographic Keywords
New Mexico
•
North America - Southwest
Temporal Keywords
Pueblo III Period
•
Pueblo IV period
Spatial Coverage
min long: -108.984; min lat: 32.064 ; max long: -103.008; max lat: 37.02 ;
File Information
Name | Size | Creation Date | Date Uploaded | Access | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Sacred-vs-Secular.pdf | 4.98mb | Jun 20, 2015 2:04:33 PM | Public |