Settlement Clusters: A Different Way of Conceptualizing Community

Summary

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

The Velarde Valley of the Northern Rio Grande, New Mexico, has received only limited attention from researchers. The area is known to have been home to several Classic Period Tewa communities, some of which were inhabited right up to the time of Juan de Onate’s settlement of San Gabriel in A.D. 1598. The area is also dense with historic and modern settlements which have a long history of irrigation agriculture along the Rio Grande. Based on ethnographic studies of recent Pueblo communities, archaeologists have typically presumed that Classic Period settlements represent socially and politically independent communities. However, careful attention to the traditional knowledge manifest in these village sites suggests that they shared a culturally based perspective of the surrounding regional landscape and viewshed. This paper builds on these observations and suggests that these settlements represent a larger interconnected community. I focus on Indigenous ontological perspectives of community that give us a different way of understanding settlement clusters. This view offers a new perspective on how we might interpret other clusters of pueblo village sites.

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): 37058.0