Katsinam, Clouds, and Kivas: Evidence for the Origins of the Katsina Culture

Summary

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

Katsinam are an iconic symbol of the Native American southwest, but the origin of the religion, sometimes referred to as the Katsina cult, has been elusive. In this paper I review earlier research on the origin of the Katsina culture and the conclusions these researchers came to, taking into account the theoretical constructs and assumptions these earlier researchers used. I review more recent research that explores imagery on ceramics, rock art, and kiva murals, and the movement of trade goods containing these images, coupled with research on Puebloan oral history. This includes current research on migrations and landscapes, and their association with aspects of the Katsina culture. Finally, I use this evidence to support the hypothesis that the Katsina culture is an indigenous creation of the Ancestral Puebloan Southwest which dates back at least as far as the Pueblo II period, and that our conception of the Puebloan world needs to be expanded northward to include the Fremont area in order to fully explore the ancestral beginnings of Katsinam and Puebloan ritual practices.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23664