Dating Stylistic Change in Ancestral Pueblo Building Mural Traditions in the Southern Bears Ears and Across the Northern Southwest

Summary

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

Mural decorations on buildings can be used to express shared identities and cosmologies at a variety of scales. Stylistic links between murals at sites can reveal connected networks of practice within and between regions. Most prior studies focused solely on murals from a single structure or site that are dated at a relative-scale using ceramic cross-dating. Additionally, few prior studies compare murals across large social landscapes over time. This study focuses on the development of spatial and temporal seriations of Ancestral Pueblo mural styles across the northern Southwest using newly-developed methodologies for dating the creation and use of building decorations. Based on recently obtained and legacy dendrochronological data, and using the Cedar Mesa area of the Bears Ears National Monument as a case-study, I demonstrate the methods used to create mural-stylistic seriations at the site- and subregional-scales. Then, I apply similar methodologies to legacy data at the regional-scale to develop spatial and temporal stylistic seriations of murals for the larger San Juan River Drainage. Using these data, I revisit previous theoretical frameworks, combined with ethnohistoric accounts relating indigenous perspectives, to explain the role of building murals during the mid-Pueblo II (AD 1050–1150) and Pueblo III periods (AD 1150–1300).

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40077.0