The Emergence of Tewa Pueblo Society

Summary

This poster explores the emergence of Tewa Pueblo society in northern New Mexico and uses archaeological methods to understand the ways in which disparate communities (of migrants and autochthonous people) coalesced to create a novel social, ceremonial, and residential organization – the hallmarks of Tewa village life – in the mid-fourteenth century. While recent research demonstrates where and when these changes occurred, archaeologists know little about why and how the ancestral Tewa collaborated, contested, and negotiated their new society. To address these questions I focus on the Wiyo phase (A.D. 1300-1350), a dynamic but poorly understood time period immediately preceding the coalescence of ancestral Tewa communities and the creation of village life. I attempt to determine the history of these small communities (their origins, identities, demographics, and settlement patterns) through synthesizing architectural, landscape, and pottery data to better understand how the historical contingencies of settlement and interaction led to the development of a homogenized, but unique, Tewa identity. Examining the Tewa’s early history provides an excellent case study for understanding how (and why) people converge to create new worlds and new social systems, not just in the American Southwest, but in small-scale societies worldwide.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage