The Meaning of Water: One Mountain’s Tale of Water Politics and Heritage in Northern New Mexico

Summary

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

Jicarita Peak, a looming shoulder of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico, is a convergence of disparate peoples, cosmologies, and politics. The mountain is a crucial part of a vast watershed that extends from its 12,000′ slopes down to the Rio Grande and is home to Picuris Pueblo, North America’s oldest continually inhabited settlement. Over the past three centuries, the watershed has become home and life source to a range of communities, both Indigenous and settler-colonial, introducing questions of heritage, belonging, and acknowledgment of ancestral and contemporary presences. This project considers the role archaeological heritage plays in current and future struggles around water sharing and the urgency to document a cultural landscape that will be irrevocably changed as global temperatures rise and access to water becomes ever more critical.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36410.0