Blue Birds and Black Glass: Traditions and Communities of Practice during the Coalition to Classic Period Transition on the Pajarito Plateau, New Mexico

Summary

Multiple lines of anthropological evidence demonstrate people moved from the northern San Juan region into the Pajarito Plateau in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries A.D. This Coalition to Classic period transition was a time of immense demographic and social reorganization that shaped the historical and cultural trajectories for future of Ancestral Pueblo people. As a consequence of the influx of diasporic households, how did this transformation affect traditions of obsidian source-use on the Pajarito Plateau prior to, during, and after the transition? I discuss the results of previous XRF analyses on obsidian artifacts from projects at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Bandelier National Monument to put the data into the larger social context of the northern North American Southwest. Using multiscalar perspectives, I demonstrate that people started new traditions of which obsidian to use after the transition in the northern Tewa-speaking region near Los Alamos, whereas earlier traditions persisted to the south in the Keres-speaking region in Bandelier. This could reflect changes in communities of practice as a result of transformations in circumscribed social and territorial boundaries of Jemez obsidian procurement and technological agency.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage