Religious Transformation in the Late Pre-Hispanic Pueblo World

9. The Materiality of Religious Belief in East-Central Arizona

9 The Materiality of Religious Belief in East-Central Arizona Scott Van Keuren A variety of novel or refashioned religious beliefs and practices emerged across the Pueblo Southwest during the late pre-Hispanic period. These traditions appeared during a remarkable period of change, triggered by major migrations and population resettlement that eventually resulted in postmigration landscapes of large towns built around central plazas. In addition to the expansion and formalization of these ceremonial spaces, Pueblo peoples in some areas of the Southwest began to convey religious concepts through the use and display of new pottery forms. One might argue, in fact, that the most salient markers of religious change in this period are both plazas and pots. Because modern Pueblo religion is often participatory, cohesive, and devoted to enhancing the broader social collective, we assume that these archaeological signatures relate to activities that emphasized solidarity and communalism during the late pre-Hispanic period. Both a “Southwestern Cult” (Crown 1994, 1996) and early forms of the Katsina cult (Adams 1991, 1994; Hays 1989) have been associated archaeologically to the presentation of iconographic imagery on polychrome bowls and other media, the convergence of certain ceramic styles, and the expansion of plazas (Adams 1991; Chamberlin, this volume). The suggestion that pottery icons and plaza ceremonies functioned to reinforce or evoke communalism has broadly influenced scholarly work on the late pre-Hispanic period (e.g., Adams and Duff 2004:4; Crown 1998; Doyel 2000:290–291; Kantner 2004:228–232; Kohler 1993:297–298). I believe we can assume that late pre-Hispanic Pueblo religious practices were designed to reinforce communalistic ideals. These religious movements were also syncretic, melding the beliefs and rituals of the diverse groups who aggregated together at large towns throughout the Southwest following the demographic upheavals and ecological crises 176 Scott Van Keuren that marked the end of the 1200s (Bernardini, this volume; Ware and Blinman 2000). What makes the late pre-Hispanic period so interesting is that these new religious traditions were expansive, evidenced by widespread similarities in the design and use of plazas and painted ceramics . In this chapter, however, I question the notion that the spread of homogeneous pottery designs and color schemes, along with similarly configured plazas, all meant that religion was conceptualized and acted upon homogeneously everywhere that these key archaeological markers appear. The “cult models” advance this pan-southwestern point of view, and in doing so, they fail to account for historical processes at local scales. More important, the complex materialities of religious experience are overlooked in these big-picture models. Should we assume, for instance, that widely circulated ceramic forms, decoration, or even technology encoded religious subject matter that was comprehended and acted upon similarly by those groups who produced and used these containers? Were large plazas and the rooms that enclose them consistently made and occupied by communities who were applying pansouthwestern religious practices and beliefs? The answer to both questions may be yes but we need to examine how painted ceramics (or other objects) and plaza spaces manifest the diverse social practices through which understandings (or misunderstandings) of religious knowledge were expressed. In my view, late pre-Hispanic painted pottery did not merely transmit religious canons but deeply resonated the ways in which bodies of knowledge were communicated, learned, and ultimately transformed. Individuals were agents in this process; they created, copied, and reconfigured. The same can be said of plazas, where the growth and configuration of ceremonial space were complex processes associated with the diverse experiences, motivations, and even memories of individuals and households. Whether we are talking about pots or plazas, the materiality of religion in the late pre-Hispanic period embodied the negotiation of power relations, social networks, identities , and perhaps differing interpretations of sacred concepts. In this chapter I assume that the meaning of things is never set in stone, but rather must be viewed as continually recreated through social practices (Boivin 2009). When speaking of religion, these practices defined in the broadest sense are always ritual (see Pauketat, this volume), and through ritual, the meanings of religious things are situational and The Materiality of Religious Belief in East-Central Arizona 177 contingent. Ultimately “ideology is embedded in social practices” (K. Thompson 1986:72), and it is these actions that inherently “construct particular types of meanings and values” (Bell 1997:82). My focus is on ceramic and architectural meanings in a cluster of fourteenth-century villages...