Fleeced Landscapes: Colonial Herding Practices in Northern New Mexico

Summary

Investigating how the presence and use of herded domesticates shaped life and the landscape in the Rio Grande gorge, this paper draws on a particular case study to explore the interactions between the endemic and the introduced within colonial herding practices. One strand of analysis will involve zooarchaeological and taphonomic data from colonial domestic contexts—predominantly based upon excavated midden deposits from selected sites in the Embudo Valley. This will be coupled with a consideration of archaeological survey data pertaining to herding encampments identified across the broader northern Rio Grande region. By combining both these distinctive, but complementary, lines of evidence we will offer a multi-scalar account of the impact of colonial modes of pastoralism within a New Mexican context. Themes to be examined will include changes in dietary practices within the home and village, patterns of labor and movement with respect to herding economies, and transformations in entire landscapes wrought via the large-scale introduction of new species of domesticates. Each of these themes will be brought together in order to think about the impact of colonial herding on the deep ecologies of the broader 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): 21355