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Evidence of a Mesa Verde Homeland for the Tewa Pueblos Scott G. Ortman 10 One of the most enduring and compelling questions of southwestern archaeology is what happened to the many thousands of people who lived in the Mesa Verde region in the AD 1200s. By the middle decades of that century, Ancestral Pueblo people had lived in the region for more than six hundred years, the Montezuma Valley itself was home to approximately twenty thousand people (Varien et al. 2007), and many thousands more lived on Mesa Verde Proper and in southeastern Utah (Glowacki 2006). Yet by AD 1285, the entire region was empty (see Varien, this vol.). Current research suggests that final depopulation of the region was preceded by several decades of population decline (Duff and Wilshusen 2000; Varien et al. 2007) and that a portion of the late–AD 1200s population perished during the final depopulation of several villages (Kuckelman , this vol.; Kuckelman 2002; Kuckelman, Lightfoot, and Martin 2002; Lightfoot and Kuckelman 2001). It is unlikely, however, that the entire Pueblo population died in place or reverted to hunting and gathering , so a sizeable portion of the AD 1200s Mesa Verde–region population must have relocated to other areas of the Southwest, where the archaeological record indicates coeval population increase. By this measure , a likely destination for at least some Mesa Verde migrants was the northern Rio Grande region of New Mexico. This region was inhabited long before the Mesa Verde collapse (Dickson 1979; Kohler and Root 2004a; Lakatos 2007; McNutt 1969; Marshall and Walt 2007; Orcutt 1999; Wiseman 1995), but in-migration is a plausible explanation for the dramatic increase in the number and size of new settlements established there between AD 1200 and 1325 (Anschuetz 2005; Crown, Orcutt, and Kohler 1996; Fowles 2004a; Hill, this vol.; Snead, Creamer, and Van Zandt 2004).1 Many thousands of people appear to have moved into the Evidence of a Mesa Verde Homeland 223 northern Rio Grande region during the same period that many thousands of people were also leaving the Mesa Verde region. In this chapter, I summarize a range of studies I have pursued as part of my doctoral dissertation research (Ortman 2009) to further investigate this hypothesis. This research brings together multiple lines of evidence to suggest that the homeland of at least one Rio Grande ethnic group, namely, the Tewa-speaking pueblos, was in fact in the Mesa Verde region. The basic hypothesis of this chapter is not new, but it is by no means universally accepted. Indeed, despite more than a century of research, there is still no consensus on how the historic pueblos of the Rio Grande relate to earlier archaeological cultures of the San Juan drainage (Boyer et al., this vol.; Cameron 1995; Collins 1975; Cordell 1995; Davis 1965; Dutton 1964; Ford, Schroeder, and Peckham 1972; Lakatos 2007; Lekson et al. 2002; McNutt 1969; Mera 1935; Reed 1949; Steen 1977; Wendorf and Reed 1955). I focus here on evidence related to the ancestry and language of the Tewa people because genes and language bind more tightly to people and are less subject to social manipulation than material culture. Thus, evidence related to these aspects of human inheritance should provide more reliable indicators of population movement than the materialculture indicators that have been the focus of previous argument. Lipe considers the archaeological dimension of the problem in his contribution to this volume. For a fuller treatment of the analyses presented here, and for my analysis of the archaeology of Tewa origins, readers should consult Ortman (2009). The Tewa Pueblos There are seven contemporary pueblos in which Tewa is the dominant language spoken today. Six of these (Ohkay’owinge, Nambe, Pojoaque, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, andTesuque) are located in the northern Rio Grande region of New Mexico, and the seventh (Tewa Village) is located on Hopi First Mesa, in Arizona. Based on evidence from place names, oral tradition, historic Spanish documents, and archaeology (Anschuetz 2005; Harrington 1916; Marshall and Walt 2007; Mera 1935; Schroeder 1979), it is clear that Tewa-speaking peoples once occupied a larger portion of the northern Rio Grande region. In the north, ancestral Tewa 224 Scott G. Ortman sites occur throughout the area bounded by the Santa Fe divide on the south, the Jemez Mountains on the west, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains on the east, and the lower Rio Chama drainage in the north. This area is known to archaeologists as the Tewa basin (Anschuetz 2005). To the south...

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