Agriculture and Landscape Change in the Tesuque Valley

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From Collaboration to Partnership in Pojoaque, New Mexico" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The relationships of people with their land over time leaves visible and invisible traces. As archaeologists we are confronted with landscapes that are the resulting accumulation of these traces over time, such that they may no longer resemble the place that people of the past interacted with. Place is not just a geographic location but a complex network of human and non-human actors coming together to constitute a set of geomorphological, ecological, and social relationships. To better understand those relationships and past land use choices, we must first reconstruct what the past landscape looked like.

This paper presents preliminary results of a geoarchaeological and microbotanical study to address this problem in the Tesuque Valley in northern New Mexico. The Tesuque Valley hosted the ancestral settlement at Cuyumungue and the ancestral and current settlements at Pojoaque. In cooperation with Pojoaque Pueblo and the Cuyumungue project, samples were taken from geological sections in Tesuque Creek and its tributaries to reconstruct the environmental history of the area in relation to varied historic agricultural and land use practices over time. This paper presents the preliminary analysis of those samples.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• From Collaboration to Partnership in Pojoaque, New Mexico

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24381