Often the Victims, Occasionally the Aggressors: The Role of Women in Warfare and Raiding in the Ancestral Pueblo World

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Discussions about warfare in the pre-contact Southwest tend to focus on lethal interactions between male combatants or the capture of women during raids; much of our own research has focused on the latter. What is overlooked most of the time, however, is the roles that women played in hostile encounters in the region, especially in supporting, engaging in, and socially sanctioning acts of violence. Archaeological and bioarchaeological data collected in the Colorado Plateau dating to between AD 800-1300, informed by ethnographic accounts, provides a means of assessing the ways women engaged in warfare and raiding among the Ancestral Pueblo. Mortuary context and human skeletal remains were analyzed in the Colorado Plateau from sites that include: Aztec Ruins and Black Mesa, and multiple pueblos in Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, and throughout southern Utah. Taking a temporal and regional approach, this research considers the agency of women in times of conflict. The intent is to identify how women were more than just victims of violence, but also occasionally aggressors, defenders, or even supporters of warfare and raiding.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24860