Contextualizing the Differences Between Upper Gila and Mimbres River Valley Ceramic Design Elements

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Local Development and Cross-Cultural Interaction in Pre-Hispanic Southwestern New Mexico and Southeastern Arizona" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This poster updates our previous research that examined similarities and differences between upper Gila Valley and Mimbres Valley painted ceramic designs. That work focused on the identification and quantification of stylistic elements and demonstrated that there are some significant differences between the painted designs in the two river valleys. We begin this phase of our research by assessing when design element differentiation between the river valleys first emerged. In particular, we examine the hypothesis that the "Gila" elements we identified in our previous research appeared on bowls from Gila sites or with Gila NAA sources earlier than "Mimbres" elements on bowls from Mimbres valley sites or with Mimbres valley NAA sources. We use "strong cases"—bowls from burials or contexts that have been directly dated—to test this hypothesis. We then situate our data within broader Mimbres contexts, to explore how sociocultural transformations might help explain the patterns in design element distribution and timing we have identified. We focus especially on whether differences in pottery design elements might be associated with the apparent ritual/religious changes that occurred in the Mimbres Valley between the Late Pithouse and Classic periods.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Local Development and Cross-Cultural Interaction in Pre-Hispanic Southwestern New Mexico and Southeastern Arizona

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23984