Forever Home, Foundations of an Identity: Where Acoma's Ancestors Left Their First Footprints

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Reemerging from the Ancient and Current Pasts: Recent Archaeological and Ethnographic Research in Southeastern Utah" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Southeastern Utah encompasses an archaeological record of thousands of years of Pueblo Indian, Ute, and Navajo history. A compelling site assemblage dates to the Early Pueblo period (650-950 CE). This time was when and where small Ancestral Pueblo family groups began to settle into centralized locations and built the first villages.

Modern-day Pueblos, including the Pueblo of Acoma, consider southeastern Utah to be a vital part of their respective ancestral homelands. This region is where the First Ancestors emerged onto the natural world. They lived here for countless generations before embarking on migrations to reach their permanent homes after learning the rudimentary lessons for living in a Pueblo cultural landscape of their construction. For Acoma, present and future generations must return to southeastern Utah to protect and defend the Pueblo’s cultural inheritance.

This paper tells two interrelated stories: 1) Acoma’s First Ancestors’ emergence into this world and their first steps on their journey of becoming, and 2) how archaeological and cultural landscape conservation in “The Lands Between” (named for its position between Bears Ears and Canyons of the Ancients National Monuments) contributes to Acoma’s goals of building a healthy and sustainable future for coming generations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Reemerging from the Ancient and Current Pasts: Recent Archaeological and Ethnographic Research in Southeastern Utah

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51752