Fancy Threads and Tree-Ring Dates: New Chronometric Controls for the Development of Cotton Weaving Technologies and Ritual Textile Production in the San Juan Basin, A.D. 1150–1300

Summary

The introduction of cotton tapestry weaving traditions transformed Ancestral Pueblo ritual costuming traditions in the San Juan Basin ever after. After its introduction, documenting developments and changes of cotton-weaving technologies and ceremonial garment fashions is difficult because most of the associated materials are perishable. Arid conditions at the numerous cliff dwellings occupied in the Pueblo III period (A.D. 1150-1300) have fostered the preservation of abundant evidence of cotton-textile production in the form of loom anchors and spinning-and-weaving tools, but little synthesis of these data has been attempted in decades. Even less is known about spatiotemporal changes in weaving production technologies and the contexts where weaving took place. Newly developed tree-ring chronologies from rooms yielding weaving-related materials, cross-media stylistic studies of pottery and mural imagery, and archival documentation of weaving assemblages from cliff-dwellings in the region provide new data about the nature of cotton textile production in the region in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In this paper, I present the results of recent analyses that shed new light on the origin, development, and distribution of cotton-weaving technologies and ritual-garment production industries in the San Juan Basin.

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): 22519