Evidence of Moieties in the Prehistoric Southwest? The Case Study of Sapa'owingeh

Summary

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

Meaning is assigned to spaces by the individuals who inhabit them. Individuals give spaces meaning many different ways, including through the placement of objects. This poster focuses on the use of kivas and rooms at an ancestral Tewa site in the Southwestern United States. Using ethno-historical data and zooarchaeological techniques to explore and better define the roles of mammalian and avian fauna, this research highlights the possible development of moieties at Sapa’owingeh (LA 306), located in the northern Rio Grande region of New Mexico. Because kivas and rooms are generally assumed by archaeologists to have different functions, they were tested by comparing faunal data. Linear regression analysis was conducted and the fauna from kivas and rooms were evaluated for nestedness. The values indicated a significant relationship between NISP and NTAXA with moderate effect size in room contexts and no relationship between NISP and NTAXA in kivas with a weak effect size. For nestedness, it was clear rooms and kivas were subsets of one another, yet in kivas, specific sets of animals were recovered, implying perhaps kivas are representative of summer and winter moieties at Sapa’owingeh. This line of evidence opens the door for larger archaeological discussions regarding space-use prehistorically.

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): 26176