Landscapes, Memory, and the Pueblo World

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Landscapes are entangled with social meaning. Societies that live upon a landscape imbue it with both cultural meaning and use them as mnemonic devices in order to preserve their histories. In turn, these culturally constructed meanings and mnemonics act in a feedback loop as both formulation and preservation of culture. This is true for Indigenous societies around the world. In the Pueblo Southwest, shared landscapes continue to tie existent communities to those of the past. The Northern Tewa region of New Mexico with its highly varied topography of hills, valleys, and mountains, provide a perfect template for cultural landscapes of meaning and memory. Tewa people have been living on this landscape for at least 700 years and with such deep histories come rich cultural and mnemonic entanglements with that landscape and its viewsheds. Here I examine ancestral places of the Northern Tewa region within the context of their shared landscapes with those of living communities. I suggest that these shared landscapes can provide for long continuity of cultural meanings and memory that can inform about ancestral spaces.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39450.0