Technological Knowledge, Migrations and Ancestral Puebloan Communities of Practice in The Northern Rio Grande of New Mexico

Summary

In the mid-late Classic period (AD 1250 - 1400), Ancestral Pueblo people living on the Pajarito Plateau of New Mexico experienced cultural change due to difficulties in farming during periods of drought. As a result, communities abandoned pre-contact plateau villages to join their Tewa-speaking relatives at the earliest historic period Rio Grande settlements. Oral histories from descendant communities from the 19th and early 20th centuries recount how the remaining members of these communities resettled at the extant pueblos of Santa Clara (Kapo), San Ildefonso, and Cochiti. In conjunction with ethnographic lines of evidence, this poster evaluates the possibility that the manufacture of ceramic vessels from sites in the Pajarito Plateau and the aggregating migrant sites of the Northern Rio Grande were crafted within crossing-cutting technological and belief based communities of practice that bridge the prehistoric and historic period divide. Time of flight-laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (TOF-LA-ICP-MS) was used to characterize the chemical composition of a large sample of white ware sherds from ancestral sites within both culture areas, which can be used to better define the organization of production, the exchange of technological knowledge, migration, and the transformation of social networks in the pre-contact and contact American Southwest.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21068