Through Tewa Eyes? Exploring the Diversity and Universality of Pueblo Sacred Landscapes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Pueblo worlds are remarkably similar, yet completely distinct. This paradox has challenged Southwestern anthropologists: how do Pueblo people, from Hopi to Taos, share similar worldviews and beliefs, but maintain unique histories of their paths of becoming? Elsie Clews Parsons and Edward Dozier characterized Pueblo ceremonialism as essentially identical among communities, but it is the emphasis of the elements of belief that distinguish the Pueblos from one another. We argue that this view extends to Pueblo sacred geography through the ways that the people define, remember, and live in their traditional homelands. Pueblo shrines, a major component of these landscapes, have similar morphology across space and time. Nonetheless, it is the context and placement of these places that distinguish and define individual Pueblo worlds. Archaeologists have begun to identify Pueblo shrines in earnest. Investigators have used select ethnography, especially broadly accessible accounts of Tewa landscapes, as guides to interpret past worlds. We laud these efforts, but we caution against overgeneralizing ethnographic accounts. We grapple with the questions that Parsons and Dozier raised: how can we identify crucial elements of Pueblo worlds while accounting for unique historical and cultural difference? We highlight ancestral Tewa and Keres landscapes in our argument.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23268