Scarred Traces: Trees as Artifacts on the Northern Rio Grande

Summary

In the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, at the confluence of the Rio Grande and the Red River, groups of ponderosa pine trees are dotted with peeled trees, scarred by surrounding animals and weather as well as by human consumption of the trees’ cambium. In most considerations of inner bark utilization, the threat of starvation is posited as the key motivation for bark-peeling. This landscape, however, lends itself to narratives that use trees as artifacts, among the full breadth of survey data, to consider its histories. Performing a landscape archaeology that takes these living artifacts of a visible food practice seriously raises questions for the process of looking at the landscape, by which trees become a powerful, if transient, player in a trajectory of landscape-based practices surrounding sustenance and sweetness on the northern Rio Grande.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20414