Building Back Past Diné Communities: Ricos, Pobres, and Naat’aanii Status in Pericolonial New Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the mid-1900s, American anthropologists characterized Diné society as a four-tiered social organizational structure with “natural communities” at the highest level. Often referred to as regional “bands,” these geographically defined, economically self-sufficient, multifamily social entities were loosely organized under the nominal leadership of local naat’áanii (“headmen”). The unifying structure of these otherwise dispersed communities would have been shaped by repeated marriages among localized lineages that in turn served to structure traditional farming and herding-focused land use practices mediated by traditional k’é kinship ties (i.e., k’éí). This concept has been most thoroughly developed in the intensively pastoral context of Reservation-era Diné society (AD 1860–present; Kelley and Francis 2019); however, questions abound regarding the structure of Diné land tenure in earlier centuries. In the spirit of improving our knowledge about early Diné social organization, this paper endeavors to extend the tenets of the k’éí system into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where Spanish records hint at the enigmatic sociopolitical and economic roles of Diné “capitanes” on the colonial New Mexican frontier. How can a Diné-focused archaeology help us to better understand Diné organizational logics in a world where numerous changes, including widespread fortress building and apparent pastoral growth, were well under way?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeology of Property Regimes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39670.0