Mining the Database: How Can Shifting Units of Analysis Shift our Understanding of the Agricultural Landscape of the Southern Pajarito Plateau?

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.

From 1987-1991, a National Park Service team of archeologists systematically surveyed over 45% of Bandelier National Monument. The research goal of the survey was to examine the process of community aggregation on the southern Pajarito Plateau during the late ancestral Pueblo periods. Toward that end, feature-level archeological data and extensive environmental data were collected and entered into a relational database. The resulting analysis led to key insights into the process of aggregation on the plateau, including how settlement, demography, and agricultural pursuits interplay with aggregation. This paper will use that database, plus more recently collected park data, to explore how shifts in units of analysis can help understand the agricultural landscape throughout the Coalition and Classic periods in new ways. First, we redefine field houses as 1-2 room structures, and we also examine 1-2 room cavates for evidence of seasonal occupation. Second, we increase the spatial resolution of the database to more precisely map agricultural features onto the landscape to address geographic differences in feature type and placement. Lived landscapes are complex and contextual, and although archaeological datasets are woefully incomplete and coarse by nature, high resolution survey data allows us flexibility in the ways we analyze these landscapes.

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): 51913