Ritual Landscapes , Population , and Changing Sense of Place during the Late Prehistoric Transition in Eastern Colorado (original) (raw)

Toward an Archaeology of Pueblo Ritual Landscapes

Pueblo ritual and blessing features have been a focus of cultural anthropologists since the late nineteenth century. Archaeologists, especially those working in the Tewa Basin in collaboration with Native communities, are increasingly incorporating the identification, documentation, and evaluation of ancestral Pueblo blessing features in their studies. From the archaeologists' perspective, this work possesses the potential to contribute to broadening our collective understanding of the development and elaboration of increasingly distinctive cultural community identities between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries throughout the Pueblo World. For Tribal communities, this archaeological research is proving useful to their interests in demonstrating the spatial extent-and the cultural-historical continuities-within the cultural landscapes in which their forebears harvested water for growing crops, collected plants and minerals, and hunted game animals for their material livelihood. The archaeological traces of blessing features also relate to how Native communities came to understand their place in the cosmos and their obligations to sustain physical and spiritual relationships with the

Prehistoric land use, site placement and an archaeological legacy along the foothills of the Colorado Northern Front Range

2021

2021 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.This research takes place in the Colorado Front Range foothills in Northern Colorado. Previous artifact collections were recovered in past decades from sixty-six prehistoric sites and isolated finds within a bounded geographical area that includes the Dakota and Lyons hogbacks west of the city of Loveland in Larimer county. The first part of this thesis presents the artifact collections used in this analysis of Edison Lohr (1947), Lauri Travis (1986; 1988), Calvin Jennings (1988), and the work of the Center for Mountain and Plains Archaeology (2015-2017). The second part of this thesis explores the cultural chronology of the region and that of the study area. The study area reflects mostly the ephemeral behavior of indigenous groups along with small diverse activity sites that date between the Folsom period and Protohistoric era, with most sites dating between the Early Archaic and the Early Ceramic periods. Environmental variables tha...

The Effects of Environment and Culture on the Distribution of Prehistoric Dwellings at Chimney Rock Mesa, Colorado

This study examines the roles of cultural change, social status, and natural resources in influencing both the siting and occupance of prehistoric (10th-12th century) pit house and pueblo dwellings in the Chimney Rock Archaeological Area (CRAA) in south-western Colorado. The study first demonstrates a prominent bimodal clustering of riverine pit house and mesa-top pueblo settlements, and then presents a number of hypotheses to account for the eleventh century pit house to pueblo transition which resulted in these disparate dwelling distributions. It is concluded that: indigenous social factors (population growth and craft specialization) initiated the housing transition; on-going population increase and the arrival of colonists from nearby Chaco Canyon by the mid-eleventh century perpetuated the building of upland dwellings; and the thin soil layer of the mesa top restricted construction to only surface pueblos, which contrasted spatially with the older pit houses of the lower alluvial plain.

Community Landscapes, Identity, and Practice: Ancestral Pueblos of the Lion Mountain Area, Central New Mexico, USA

American Antiquity

Landscape archaeology has been widely used as a framework for understanding the myriad ways in which people lived in their natural and built environments. In this study, we use systematic survey data in conjunction with ceramic chronology building to explore how residents of the Lion Mountain area in Central New Mexico created and sustained community landscapes over time as memories and stories became linked with specific places. We combine practice theory with the concept of social memory to show that these residents used their community landscape to both maintain and transform community identity over multiple generations. To strengthen our argument, we use a dual temporal approach, considering our data both by “looking back” and “looking forward” in time relative to the residents living on the landscape. Ultimately, we argue that residents of the Lion Mountain Community lived and died within a community landscape of their making. This community landscape, which was maintained and ...

Ancestral Pueblo settlement structure and sacred landscape in Castle Rock Community, Colorado, USA

Antiquity, 2020

Since the 1890s, archeologists have been studying the cliff dwellings of the Mesa Verde region, southwestern Colorado, seeking to uncover factors that drove the Pueblo Indians from these once vibrant communities. In this paper, the authors describe their examination of connections between the landscape, architecture, and rock art of the Castle Rock Community in the thirteenth century AD, immediately before the total depopulation of the Mesa Verde region. The investigators employed new technologies and collaborated with modern Pueblo people—the Hopi—to paint a richer and more nuanced picture than has previously been available of the community’s last days.

Identifying Socialized Landscapes in the Bridger Mountains, Montana

Master's Thesis, 2017

Archaeologists, working in the Rocky Mountains and throughout the world, have long recognized that people, regardless of time and space, invest social meanings into the landscape around them. Based on de Certeau’s (1984) “Spatial Stories,” these “socialized landscapes” consist of two archaeologically identifiable components: espaces (or practiced spaces) and tours (or practiced paths). I operationalize these ideas by creating archaeological expectations for six socialized landscape types, inspired by Scheiber’s (2015) mountain landscape tropes: resource, symbolic, wilderness, refuge, recreational, and composite. In doing so, I ask what types of socialized landscapes we can identify from a largely lithic archaeological record in the Rocky Mountains. I test my expectations with a pilot study in the Bridger Mountains of southwestern Montana. By controlling for time period using projectile point types found at sites throughout the mountains, I conduct a series of four analyses by time period to determine what types of espaces and tours people there created in the past. I then compare those results against my archaeological expectations. My results indicate that people in the Paleoindian Period created a resource socialized landscape, whereas groups from the Early Archaic through to the Late Pre-Contact Periods created composite socialized landscapes of resources and symbolic place-markers. Although this pilot study reveals areas of the methodology and analyses that can be improved in future studies, my study suggests that we can use this approach to study past socialized landscapes created by hunter-gatherers both in the Rocky Mountains and throughout the world, even when we lack oral traditions to better understand these spaces.