The Migration Panel: Rethinking Acoma’s History in SE Utah

Summary

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

Near the summit of Comb Ridge, an imposing monocline that rises above the dry landscape of southeastern Utah, is a great series of petroglyphs that archaeologists call the Procession Panel. The panel depicts four lines of anthropomorphic figures converging on a central double circle. Dating to Basketmaker III/Pueblo I transition (ca. A.D. 650-800), the panel was created at a time when dispersed households were coming together to create a new kind of Pueblo village social life. Archaeologists propose that these petroglyphs commemorate coalescence event(s).

We agree that this rock imagery records epic histories. Nonetheless, our paper complicates the archaeological narrative by incorporating the beliefs and experiences of Acoma Pueblo colleagues. Over the past three years, our team, consisting of Acoma tribal members, preservation advocates, and archaeologists, has built a partnership based on collaborative site visits and discussions. Our Acoma colleagues believe that the movement of people depicted in the panel is one of migration and records their Pueblo's story of emergence in Utah and subsequent movement south to their present home in New Mexico. We seek to show how centering Indigenous beliefs and viewpoints can expand archaeological interpretation while simultaneously reestablishing and strengthening claims of tribal sovereignty.

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): 40267.0