Emergent Economies in the Northern Rio Grande: Agricultural Intensification and the Picuris Pueblo Trade Network

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Northern Rio Grande History: Routes and Roots" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The first documented reference to Picuris Pueblos’ role in the growing farmer-forager exchange network of the northern Rio Grande is attributed to Gaspar Castaño de Sosa, who reported in 1591 that “a long arquebus shot from this pueblo there were foreign people [nomads] who had come to this [place] for refuge” and trade (Schroeder and Matson 1965:124). A few years later, a Spanish expedition to the Plains encountered a group of Vaqueros Apache returning to the Plains with corn obtained at Picuris and Taos (Spielmann 1991:8). While such documentary indicates that by the sixteenth century, Picuris was a bustling regional economic center, the origins of this trade network and its evolution prior to colonization remains largely unexplored. Recent fieldwork by the Picuris Pueblo Project—a collaborative research endeavor between Picuris, Southern Methodist University, University of Arizona, and Barnard College—has produced new insights into the size and complexity of Picuris' ancestral landscape over time. This paper will present the preliminary findings of two seasons of intensive landscape survey at Picuris, which suggest that Picuris may have been engaged in some of the earliest forms of terrace agriculture in the northern Rio Grande.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Northern Rio Grande History: Routes and Roots

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32611