Investigating Possible Hopi “Neighborhoods” at Pottery Mound (LA 416), New Mexico

Summary

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

Hopi oral histories have a long tradition of migration and movement across the Greater Southwest and Mesoamerica. Archaeological evidence of the movement of Hopi people is well attested across the Middle Rio Grande Valley. Pottery Mound (LA 416) in the Lower Rio Puerco Valley has long been known to have connections with ancestral Hopi people through both oral traditions and archaeological evidence. This poster explores the possibility of discrete Hopi “neighborhoods” in Pottery Mound through spatial analysis of Sikyatki ware sherds located during the course of a 2014 surface survey of Pottery Mound. Kernal Density and Ripley’s K-Function analysis tools in ArcGIS is employed to statistically analyze the spatial relationship of these surface finds in an attempt to locate stronger than expected occurrences of these distinctly Hopi vessels. These analyses revealed higher than expected concentrations of Sikyatki ware sherds in the western and southwestern portions of Pottery Mound. While these results alone do not confirm distinctive Hopi “neighborhoods” they do analyses point to strong spatial clustering of surface Hopi artifacts at Pottery Mound hinting at potential movements of a subset of the population possibly towards the Hopi Mesas or of a group from Hopi settling at Pottery Mound.

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): 41639.0