Extending the Use-Lives of Ancestral Pueblo Kivas and Great Kivas: A Tree-Ring Perspective

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Tree-Ring Materials as a Basis for Cultural Interpretations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The archaeological concept of "architectural continuance” refers to the extended longevity of selected buildings and, especially, to the efforts made by those structures’ owners or caretakers to keep them in service over time. Archaeological evidence for the continuance of ancestral Pueblo kivas and great kivas shows how these buildings could be repaired (to maintain their existing architectural fabric and internal features), remodeled (involving the redesign or replacement of that fabric or those features), re-roofed (possibly with coordinated changes in structure design), returned to service after periods of abandonment, and replaced with newly built, descendant buildings. This paper examines the contributions of dendroarchaeological evidence to documenting these efforts to extend structures’ use-lives, particularly those involving the repair and replacement of the buildings’ wood-based roofs and superstructures, to estimating typical repair and replacement intervals for those efforts, and to measuring the lengths of extended, multi-decade structure use-lives. In so doing, it revisits and expands on the authors’ existing model for interpreting tree-ring date distributions from Pueblo structures.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Tree-Ring Materials as a Basis for Cultural Interpretations   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51025