When Is Healing?: An Archaeological Case Study of the Chacoan and Post-Chacoan American Southwest

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Medicine and Healing in the Americas: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For the Ancestral Puebloans, Chaco Canyon (ca. AD 800-1180), in what is now northern New Mexico, brought disparate communities together under a common cultural system by adjoining religious ceremonies, pilgrimages, and exotic goods with astronomical events, striking topographical features, and other socionatural phenomena. While the presence of artefactual fossils and other exotic lithified material deposited at Chaco is well documented, the relational and semiotic meanings of these objects in the context of an ancient Chacoan cosmology remains largely under explored. We consider here how practices of healing, being fundamentally rooted in the optic, haptic, and auditory senses of the body, are bundled together with assemblages of material culture evoking a prototypic Pueblo cosmology at Chaco. Pairing museum collections and survey and excavation work with oral traditions, place lore, geomyths, and creation narratives from Pueblo and Navajo cultures, we present evidence for healing at Chaco Canyon and Post-Chacoan migrant sites through the pragmatic hypothetical identification of "medicine stones" by a broad consideration of morphological features and within a contextual relationship connecting these artifacts to subterranean structures known as kivas.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Medicine and Healing in the Americas: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Perspectives   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26238