Gendered Identities and Room Conversions at Homol’ovi

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the Pueblo Southwest, architectural spaces often take on the identities of the groups who own and use them. Gender, in particular, plays an important role in differentiating structures within a site. In this poster, I examine the strength of gendered identities in room use through an examination of the conversion of spaces at the Homol’ovi Settlement Cluster, a group of Ancestral Hopi villages in northeastern Arizona. Room conversion, or when a space is demonstrably changed from one use to another through architectural alterations, occurred in about 10% of the excavated structures at Homol’ovi. Analyses reveal that changes to use rarely involved a switch in the gender associated with a given space. Further investigation of the few cases that do cross this line reveal intermediary stages that served to neutralize potential conflicts prior to the final conversion from male to female or female to male. Continuity in the gender associated with structures speaks to the importance of this identity as an organizing principle at Homol’ovi and suggests further investigation of differences in the treatment of structures associated with each gender in the Pueblo world is warranted.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23334