Stone Rings, Stone Piles, and Native Americans in Far Southeastern New Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

As part of the Permian Basin Mitigation Program, the Bureau of Land Management created a project to investigate sites that may be traditional cultural properties of interest to the Mescalero Apache tribe. The project was awarded to SWCA Environmental Consultant’s Albuquerque office. Most of the 18 targeted sites have stone-ring features, commonly assumed to mark the former presence of tipis or wickiups. Also found were small stone mounds that may be burial cairns. This poster examines basic data (such as stone-ring dimensions), potential temporal affiliations, landscape contexts, and some issues surrounding identification for some of these features. As for temporal affiliation, I explore arguments that tipis are a very late phenomenon in the region and across the southern Southwest and conclude that evidence for this claim is equivocal. One of the sites, with a cluster of so-called wickiup rings and an associated sheet midden with abundant artifacts, appears to be fully prehistoric and is similar to sites of the Cielo Complex to the south in west Texas except for the addition of ceramics.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32359