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Fourteen. Negotiating the Village: Community Landscapes in the Late Pre-Historic American Southwest
- University of Hawai'i Press
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T he ancestral pueblo peoples, or Anasazi, of the American Southwest are noted for their exquisite masonry and adobe structures, silent edifices that were left to fall apart after their inhabitants migrated elsewhere. These early apartment complexes, built into cliff-side alcoves or commanding mesa-top locations, now provide mystery and elegy to packs of migrating tourists. Early anthropologists working among descendant populations , including the Hopi, Zuni, and other pueblo-dwelling peoples, depicted the historic Pueblos as the inheritors of a long history of peaceful , agrarian village life (Benedict 1934; Cushing 1974). Pueblo peoples have occupied the arid lands of the Southwest for centuries (Figure 14.1), over which time they have created a culturally inscribed landscape full of history, conflict, and migration. In this chapter I describe settlement and land use patterns utilized by ancestral pueblo peoples to create and reproduce social boundaries within and between largely agrarian communities between 700 and 1400 C.E. One substantial change over this time 200 fourteen Negotiating the Village Community Landscapes in the Late Pre-Historic American Southwest Michael Adler was the nearly wholesale movement into large, aggregated village communities following centuries of relatively “rural” settlement typified by geographically widespread occupation of small, dispersed agrarian communities. Despite this change in household settlement patterns, puebloan peoples recognized and expressed their community identity and integration through the construction of monumental architectural features, including great kivas, great houses, and formalized plaza spaces. These monumental products of community effort created long-lasting symbols of group history and identity that marked, and continue to mark, the Southwestern cultural landscape. This chapter investigates these built expressions of community organization and concludes with a discussion of intracommunity organization, specifically the architectural evidence for internal segmentation and social factionalism. My approach recognizes the important roles that the human-built environment plays in defining, constraining , and informing ongoing landscape use by human groups and individuals (Everson and Williamson 1998; Topping 1997). Cross-cultural research on land use and land tenure practices indicates that general regularities exist in the relationships between subsistence practices, community organization , group size, and boundary maintenance (Adler 1996; Netting 1982; Stone 1994). Archaeology provides valuable lines of enquiry through which we can assess the applicability and explanatory strength of cross-cultural generalizations. These assessments, however, rest upon our ability to identify pre-Historic social groupings, subsistence practices, and other variable states of past human strategies. Community Landscapes in the American Southwest 201 Figure 14.1. Map of the southwestern United States. The dashed line indicates the maximal extent of ancestral pueblo occupation at about 1050 C.E.. Sites and regions mentioned in the text are located on the map. [3.237.0.123] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:03 GMT) THE ENVIRONMENTAL SETTING: HOW TO MAKE A LIVING IN THE ARID SOUTHWEST My primary geographic focus here is the southern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the Rio Grande drainage (Figure 14.1). This region encompasses the arid canyons, mountains, and mesas of the northern Southwest, a rugged and varied terrain ranging in elevation from 5,000 to 13,000 ft (1,515–3,940 m). Yearly rainfall amounts average 8–16 inches (21–42 cm) in the altitudinal zones with sufficiently long growing periods to support corn and bean agriculture . Paleoclimatic records across this region are among the most precise in the world due to substantial amounts of dendrochronological, palynological, and paleoethnobotanical research (Dean 1988). Reconstructions of rainfall and temperature regimes indicate periods of significant drought, as well as long stretches of relatively low climatic variability and consistent levels of sufficient moisture. Averaged over the long term, paleoclimatic data show that at least one of every three years will not provide sufficient moisture to bring a crop of cultigens to maturity. In other words, the risk of running short of cultivated foods in any given year was high, so it is no surprise that ancestral populations employed a variety of technological and social strategies to reduce the risk of food shortage. The most obvious from an archaeological standpoint was a heavy reliance on storage strategies. Developed largely in concert with an increasing reliance on cultigens after about 1000 B.C.E., food storage in the form of subterranean pits and later aboveground storage rooms ensured that more than a single year’s supply of food was available. Based upon ethnographically derived estimates, agricultural peoples in the northern Southwest probably had a goal of at least a three-year supply of food. COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION IN THE PUEBLOAN...