Advances in the Understanding and Interpretation of Ceramic Offering Caches in Great Kiva Contexts

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent investigations at the LA8619 Point Great House Community Great Kiva, have documented a ceramic offering cache of six hundred artifacts. Two previous caches were documented in 2016 and 2021, also associated with the Southern cardinal direction in the Great Kiva. Drawing on ethnographic analogy evidence, an economies of destruction political economy theoretical basis, and site wide novel ceramic analyses, an interpretation of the 2023 cache's ideological and cosmological function within Great Kiva monumental architecture in the ancestral Pueblo world is suggested. Analyses of the ceramic assemblage suggests that the cache is a directed deposition of animated objects which are capable of acting as agents of change. The 2023 offering cache is interpreted to be a closure or decommission event associated with a change in a late AD 1200's cultural tradition influence in the Middle San Juan region of the US Southwest.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39356.0