Beads, Myth, and Ritual Practice: Tracing Traditions of Ornament Use in Ceremonial Deposition and Costuming in the Northern U.S. Southwest

Summary

As early as the sixteenth century, Spanish explorers noted the abundance of turquoise and shell jewelry adorning the Pueblo residents of the Rio Grande Valley and southern Colorado Plateau. In addition to serving as aesthetically pleasing objects of bodily decoration, these ornaments figure prominently in Pueblo creation and migration stories and are vital to the performance of various ritual practices, including ceremonial dances and the making of offerings and prayers. Archaeological research reveals that some of these ornament traditions extend back over one thousand years to the earliest intensive agricultural occupations of the northern prehispanic Southwest, around A.D. 500 to 700. Continuities in the use of specific ornament materials and forms, particularly in ritual contexts, has implications for the persistence of certain ideological elements across time despite several episodes of dramatic population reorganization.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Adornment, Personal Ornamentation, and the Construction of Identity: A Global Archaeological Perspective   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14584