Swords into Ploughshares: Revisiting the Roundel Staffs of the United States Southwest

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Fiber and Perishables in Archaeology and Beyond" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The wide range of perishable objects that early researchers in the United States Southwest recovered includes several types of wooden staffs. These include both crooks and flat, bladed types, as well as a more unique form variously described as a roundel paho, roundel staff, or ferrule staff. The most elaborate versions of these roundel staffs incorporate a mushroom-shaped pommel and a spool-like element (the roundel) that gives the appearance of having been turned on a lathe, and some are decorated with zigzag lines. The largest quantities of roundel staffs come from Western Mogollon shrine caves and Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon. Images of roundels staffs also appear on Mimbres Black-on-white ceramics and in rock art. Roundel staffs have received little systematic study, and researchers usually identify them either as a form of prayer stick (Hopi: paho), or as weapons. In this paper, I present alternative evidence that roundel staffs, as well as the other staff varieties, were employed in agricultural ritual. The distribution of these artifacts is intriguing given the strong differences in material culture and ritual apparatus between the Ancestral Puebloan and Mogollon regions during the Pueblo II period when roundel staffs appear to reach their apogee of abundance.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Fiber and Perishables in Archaeology and Beyond

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53677