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This article investigates the context, dating, and character of Ancestral Pueblo building murals at multiple scales in one of the least-studied areas of the northern US Southwest. The study focuses on developing a diachronic seriation of Ancestral Pueblo mural styles in the Cedar Mesa area of the Bears Ears and Natural Bridges National Monuments in southeastern Utah. In this process, I evaluate prior discussions of the function and dating of murals in the region during the recent and ancient past. This seriation is built using a combination of newly developed methods for dating mural creation and use with dendrochronology and augmented with previously published data. Using the Cedar Mesa area as a case study, I demonstrate the methods used to create the mural seriation, using aspects of technological style to identify communities of building mural practice shared at the site and subregional scales over the 12th and 13th centuries a.d. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists have recently paid greater attention to gender and the division of labor in subsistence societies around the world. These studies have included Ancestral Puebloan societies in the United States Southwest, particularly on the Colorado Plateau. Based on ethnographic literature, women in this region have been responsible traditionally for a wide range of domestic activities, including child-rearing, farming, food preparation, cooking, pottery making, basket weaving, and collecting and transporting firewood and water. The present study presents a predictive model for prehistoric cooking energy systems on the Colorado Plateau. This model examines the causal links between environmental variables and fuelwood demand, acquisition, and use. These causal relationships have been delineated in contemporary cross-cultural research as well as studies of high-altitude cooking. Fuelwood collection, transport, and use form the core of women's workload. This preliminary study serves to predict women's annual workload based on the relationship between the number of fuelwood collecting trips and the elevation of Ancestral Puebloan settlements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corrugated vessels are ubiquitous throughout the US Southwest, and yet their research potential is often overlooked. This paper quantifies how much uniformity or variability goes into the process of manufacturing these objects. The paper focuses on the fundamental, early-stage technological choice of coiling direction. Does coiling direction determine other attributes visible on ceramic vessel bodies, specifically indentation angle? To answer this question, I closely examine whole and majority-intact ceramic vessels. The sample comprises 255 vessels with exposed coiling or corrugation. The goals of the study are twofold: 1) to resolve whether indentation angles on corrugated sherds are a good proxy for coiling direction, and 2) to define the distributional patterns of coiling direction across the Ancestral Pueblo and Mogollon regions of the Southwest. Results indicate 1) indentation angle is associated with coiling direction, but perhaps not closely enough to make indentation angle a wholly reliable proxy for coiling direction; and 2) coiling direction is nearly uniformly counterclockwise with clinal variation at the southern and northern bounds of the US Southwest and a temporal trend toward clockwise coiling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many Mesa Verde cliff dwellings were occupied during the thirteenth century in the final decades before the Four Corners region was depopulated. Deposits in such cliff dwellings offer unique opportunities to research motivations for migration and to understand living conditions in these unusual locations. In compliance with NAGPRA, bioarchaeological data were collected from Wetherill Mesa burials in 1995; this study is the first systematic analysis of these data. Skeletal health indicators demonstrate increased physiological stress for residents of Pueblo III cliff dwellings. Worsening health related to resource availability and distribution, aggregation, and unsanitary living conditions might have influenced migration from the region. Skeletal fracture data indicate decreased trauma during the Pueblo III, contrasted with the possibility of culturally mediated violence or violent attack at Long House. This pattern of violence was likely a response to insecurity during the late thirteenth century and ultimately might have provided another motivation for migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous American shield-making traditions are best known among the peoples of the Plains and Southwest cultural provinces, where shields were used in martial and ceremonial contexts. In these regions, shields are frequently represented in images cross-cutting a range of visual media including rock and mural paintings, and pictographs and petroglyphs, some of which exhibit considerable antiquity. Actual shields, however, are almost unknown archaeologically. This article presents new data resulting from an analysis of five coiled basketry shields recovered from archaeological sites in the northern Southwest. Digital image enhancement clarifies the nature of early shield decoration, while evidence for use in combat contributes to knowledge of shield evolution and function. Improved dating suggests the possibility that basketry shields predate the proliferation of shield imagery in the AD 1200s. These observations help reorient discussion of shield form, function, and iconography within the context of wider cultural developments during the AD 1200s and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across seventy years of research, the site of Tijeras Pueblo has become an important place for understanding the transformations that impacted Rio Grande Pueblo society during the fourteenth century A.D. During that time, the course of research at the pueblo has been guided in part by its changing ownership and management of the site. While the first investigations were conducted while the site was privately owned federal acquisition of the pueblo facilitated the major excavations that took place there in the late 1960s and 1970s. As federal objectives for research evolved with new legislation, the involvement of Native Americans resulted in a major shift in how the last excavations in 2000 were conducted. While sustained interest in Tijeras Pueblo has been driven by its role in addressing major questions about the course of Pueblo history, its ownership and management have shaped, and continue to shape, how we know this important place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of the Tijeras Pueblo archaeological site. Highlighting Tijeras Pueblo as a community located at a cultural, geographical, and temporal crossroad, the paper attempts to place Tijeras Pueblo within a broader academic and social context. The excavation history of the site will be discussed, along with previous research, and past and modern significance. In its current context, Tijeras Pueblo has become of center of archaeological and cultural education and a place where knowledge is both created and disseminated. Occupying a very public space in the community, the site and its collections have become teaching tools for a new generation of professional and avocational archaeologists and for the greater Albuquerque community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beads and other personal ornaments were recovered during excavations at Tijeras Pueblo (LA 581). In 2008, a volunteer project was begun (1) to identify potential jewelry artifacts from the site, and their contexts; (2) to develop criteria for classifying artifacts as jewelry; and (3) to make these data accessible to future researchers. Comparisons with other sites show that Pueblo IV jewelry consists mostly of beads and pendants, with a few unusual pieces at each site. The variety of ornament materials, styles, and designs in the Tijeras Pueblo assemblage suggests the flow of objects, ideas, and practices across the Southwest and Northern Mexico. A comparison of the contexts in which jewelry artifacts were recovered at Tijeras Pueblo and Pottery Mound (LA 416) indicates possible differences in jewelry use. This project highlights how volunteers with specific interests and expertise can significantly enhance the research value of legacy collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Tijeras Pueblo Ceramics Project was designed to explore how the origin and spread of glaze-painted pottery and technology among the Ancestral Eastern Pueblos of the middle Rio Grande was associated with inter-regional macro-scale social processes, such as immigration, population aggregation, and coalescent community formation during the Pueblo IV period in the American Southwest (AD 1275-1425). However, carbon-painted black-on-white ceramics make up over half of the decorated pottery from Tijeras Pueblo and these white wares have their own unique story to tell. In particular, this article argues that the diversity of traits that characterize local carbon-painted black-on-white pottery was directly associated with the context in which novice potters learned to make pots, how technological practices were transmitted and regulated within these communities of practice, and how such practices were related to strategies of coalescence and identity formation around the turn of the fourteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The appearance of Fourmile Polychrome in the AD 1320s signaled a shift in the decorative layout, use, and perhaps even value of red-slipped pottery in east-central Arizona. Bowls were often painted with iconographic-style designs that diverged from the geometric imagery of earlier White Mountain Red Ware. The type was circulated through the region and even copied in some localities. The provenance of Fourmile Polychrome has remained a mystery due to the lack of research at late Silver Creek villages. We integrate results of neutron activation analysis (NAA) with a large corpus of existing NAA data to shed light on the production and circulation of this iconographic-style pottery. The results illuminate the social networks of ceramic circulation in the Silver Creek drainage and surrounding areas during the fourteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines multiple lines of evidence to argue Ancestral Pueblo peoples engaged in pitched battle and thereby challenges the common view that warfare in the North American Southwest primarily took the form of raiding. Although various tactics likely coexisted in the martial repertoire of Prehispanic peoples, I highlight that raiding has generally been overemphasized by Southwestern archaeologists. After critically reflecting on how scholars interpret tactics, the bulk of this manuscript is devoted to examining evidence of battle among Prehispanic and post-Contact Pueblo peoples. I argue the earliest solid evidence of battle tactics dates to around AD 1300 and possibly as early as AD 1200. I develop a case for a shift in tactics tied to changes in weaponry along with groups aggregating for protection and the resulting spatial needs of large communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the 1988 SAA annual meeting in Phoenix, Margaret Lyneis presented a paper with the title Ceramic Production and Exchange among the Virgin Anasazi. In that paper, she presented evidence that much of the pottery found on archaeological sites in the Moapa Valley of southeastern Nevada was in fact produced 70–100 km to the east. This pottery was made from distinctive raw materials found near the north rim of the western Grand Canyon. That 1988 SAA paper inspired much subsequent research, including my doctoral dissertation, which examined ceramic distributions across the western part of the Virgin region. In this paper, I update and expand on my earlier study. This analysis adds detail to Lyneis's original arguments, but demonstrates that she was largely correct. From about AD. 1050–1125, small-scale Virgin region settlements were linked by intensive ceramic exchange networks that crossed long distances and rugged terrain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For over two decades archaeologists and bioarchaeologists have identified evidence to suggest that there was a system of captivity and subjugation in the American Southwest before the arrival of Europeans. However, to understand the practice of taking captives in the region, we must attempt to determine why people are subjugated and who is at risk of being enslaved. The focus of this paper is to understand the signs of captivity in the archaeological and bioarchaeological record, and parse out possible motivations for why slavery or raiding for captives was practiced among the Ancestral Pueblo. Using evidence from oral traditions and historical texts of the Spanish colonizers, archaeological evidence of environmental stress, changes in paleodemography at sites, and data obtained from human skeletal remains, this paper explores the likelihood that the practice of captive-taking was present among the Ancestral Pueblo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes several roads with apparent associations with the Bluff Great House site (42Sa22674) in southeastern Utah. These descriptions underscore the similarity of these features with other such features in the northern Southwest, including roads and road-related features in the San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico. The differing configurations and contexts of the Bluff Great House roads suggest opportunities to explore community organization and identity, Puebloan cosmology, and emergence narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we present evidence through a cross-media and contextual comparison approach that cotton textile production had major economic and ideological importance to Ancestral Pueblo peoples living in the greater Cedar Mesa area during the Woodenshoe and Redhouse Phases (A.D. 1165–1270). First, we present the current data available for direct evidence of cotton textile production from archaeological contexts. Then, we use a cross-media approach to look for evidence of cotton textile production in the media of pottery and kiva mural design motifs. Given the extensive nature of cotton textile production at several sites in the area and the pervasive cotton-textile-based designs on pottery and in kiva murals in the area, we argue that the greater Cedar Mesa area was an important gateway for cotton technologies and imagery between the Kayenta and Mesa Verde areas that afforded the peoples greater access and control over cotton textile production and distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]