Between Casas Grandes and Salado: The Establishment of an Indigenous Borderland in the Ancient American Southwest/Mexican Northwest

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Whereas archaeologists continue to investigate processes of culture contact and frontier construction in hunter-gatherer and small agricultural societies using models primarily originally created and applied for ancient states and modern geopolitics, historians have recently begun investigating Indigenous borderlands. My dissertation, which includes the systematic analysis of ca. 100,000 ceramic artifacts from over a dozen major village sites, compositional analysis of said artifacts, and analysis of other forms of material culture, assesses the formation and change in what archaeologists widely perceive to be a northern extension of the Casas Grandes culture, one of the most sociopolitical complex entities in the American Southwest/Mexican Northwest. In this paper, I summarize the key results from my research with respect to new theoretical models and suggestions regarding Indigenous borderlands. In so doing, I challenge prevailing interpretations of southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico, northeastern Sonora, and northwestern Chihuahua and advocate a more nuanced understanding of Indigenous power in small agricultural societies where only limited direct ethnohistoric data exist.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35991.0