Culturally Modified Trees in the Mountains of Northern New Mexico: Trees as Material Expressions of Contemporary and Historic Mountain Culture

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This presentation examines culturally modified trees from the mountains of Northern New Mexico in order to understand historic and contemporary culture. New Mexico is home to the southern Rocky Mountains as well as host to numerous other mountain ranges and verticality and elevation begets a relative abundance of trees in it’s semi-arid climate. Yet, here, there has been a steep decline in the extractive use of trees over the last three quarters of a century. Widespread timber harvesting and processing operations have all but ceased on private and tribal lands and government forestry is increasingly focused on regeneration, ecosystem health, and responses to increasingly common catastrophic wildfires. Examining trees as material culture produces a wide catalog of artifacts—arborglyphs, trail blazes, descansos, medallion trees, witness trees, and wickiups—whose form and quantity show the state’s trees as a repository and reflection of a mountain culture rather than an extracted resource. These artifacts indicate New Mexico’s trees are conceived less as something to be harvested and are, instead, formulated more as de facto permanent features both on the physical landscape and in conceptions of deep history around which contemporary peoples organize and express themselves.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52107