A New Take on Cultural Identities at Chilili Pueblo and the East Mountains Villages

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Hill People: New Research on Tijeras Canyon and the East Mountains" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this presentation, we explore how group identities were constructed and experienced at the northernmost Salinas pueblo, Chilili, and among the villages of the East Mountains area during the late prehispanic and early colonial periods (ca. AD 1300–late 1600s). We examine artifacts from recent excavations at Chilili to consider the manners in which residents of these communities were engaging local and extra-local groups or cultures in ways that may have been the “raw materials” of making, transforming, and experiencing cultural identities. In particular, we focus on data from obsidian objects, faunal remains, and ceramic types, alongside proportions of different Glaze Ware attributes, to map engagements with other regions of New Mexico. Generally, archaeologists have conceived of places like Chilili and the East Mountains as “peripheral” somehow to “core” areas like the Galisteo Basin and the Rio Grande Valley—they are often seen as derivative or hybrids. Rather, we argue that the East Mountains area and Chilili simultaneously engaged with these “core” areas while remaining distinct from them. Their inhabitants had identities and cultural lives that were complex, rich, and imaginative, and that were built from the larger cultural or social worlds within which they were embedded.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Hill People: New Research on Tijeras Canyon and the East Mountains   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36361.0