Fashions and Fabrications of the Fanciest Footwear: Two Millennia of Stability and Change in Twined Sandal Use in the US Southwest

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Archaeological Footwear" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Twined sandals were the most long-lived yucca-cordage sandals used by Ancestral Pueblo people in the US Southwest, bridging the Basketmaker II (100 BC–AD 550) through Pueblo III (AD 1150–1300) periods. They were among the most technologically complex, ornate, and resource-intensive textiles ever produced in the region and also a key feature of Ancestral Pueblo dressed identities. Over the two millennia when they were produced, their woven structures, stylistic attributes, and uses changed, sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly, suggesting that they functioned as both modish and fashionable expressions of hierarchy and community. Native American collaborators and cross-media studies suggest that these sandals served as ritual paraphernalia that simultaneously functioned as symbols of conservatism and progress. Unlike most types of clothing and other textiles made in the region, several thousand examples of these sandals have been recovered from archaeological contexts and are available for analysis. Based on recent studies and using a newly acquired dataset of 53 AMS dates, we outline this footwear’s stylistic and technological stability and change and discuss how they served to signal social identities within and between groups, with particular focus on developments associated with the Basketmaker, Chaco, and post-Chaco eras across the Ancestral Pueblo world.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Approaches to Archaeological Footwear   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35923.0