The Tonque Agrarian Landscape Project: Small Structures, Field Houses, and the Organization of Rural Settlement in the Eastern Sandia Foothills

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Field Houses and Traditional Agricultural Landscapes of the Northern US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Between 2012 and 2024, portions of a large parcel of private land near Placitas, New Mexico, were investigated as part of four seasons of the University of New Mexico field school and several CRM projects. This area, located south of Tonque Pueblo along the eastern Sandia foothills, was found to contain a high density of small structures dating to the Classic period, particularly the fourteenth through early sixteenth centuries. Both survey and excavation reveal that these structures exhibit significant variability in size, construction, occupational span and intensity, and association with agricultural features and natural hydrologic features. This calls into question the utility of the monolithic category of “field house,” as well as our understanding of the use of the landscapes surrounding large Classic period communities in the Middle Rio Grande Valley.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Field Houses and Traditional Agricultural Landscapes of the Northern US Southwest   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51917