Nuute’owingeh: Complicating Our Understanding of Historic Period Pueblo Settlement in the Northern Rio Grande

Summary

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

Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the settlement patterns of the Pueblo world of northern New Mexico fundamentally shifted. The "abandonment" of much of the Pueblo’s traditional homeland, and the subsequent coalescence of people in large villages along the Rio Grande and its major tributaries, has long sparked interest from archaeologists and historians. Was this movement the continuation of a centuries-long process of Pueblo coalescence, or rather a response to early Spanish contact and colonization? If the latter, what kinds of negotiations and tensions arose in the contestation of landscape between these disparate peoples? And, how have Pueblo people maintained ties with their sacred places in the face of dramatic changes in land access and ownership? I explore the complicated history of Nuute’owingeh, an ancestral Tewa village located in the Rio Chama valley, thought by many archaeologists until recently to be lost to development. The village offers a unique opportunity to address these questions because it appears to have sporadically housed Tewa people from the thirteenth through eighteenth centuries, spanning prehispanic life, the time of Spanish contact and initial colonization, and the Pueblo Revolt and its aftermath. I specifically focus on architecture and pottery and lithic material culture.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33190