Technological Knowledge And Migrations Of Ancestral Pueblo Communities Of Practice In The Northern Rio Grande Of New Mexico

Summary

This paper seeks to evaluate how successive migrations of ancestral Pueblo people from pre-hispanic villages (AD 1250 – 1400) on the Pajarito Plateau of New Mexico restructured potter communities of practice and community identities as ethnic groups joined their Tewa-speaking relatives at the earliest historic period Rio Grande settlements. Oral histories from descendant communities dating to the 19th and early 20th centuries recount how remaining members of these villages resettled to the south with kin groups at the extant pueblos of Santa Clara (Kapo), San Ildefonso, and Cochiti due to farming difficulties in periods of drought. Laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) is used to characterize the chemical composition of clay paste material and slip recipes of local white wares and polychrome vessels to trace complex patterns of "multi-ethnic" interaction and exchange among distinct potter groups crafting within a contiguous technological tradition, effectively bridging the prehistoric and historic period divide. 

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018   •
• Seeing Ethnicity?: Parsing Hybridity, Creolization and Ethnogenesis in The Archaeological Record

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 478