Archaeology of Bandelier National Monument

Village Formation on the Pajarito Plateau, New Mexico

Edited by Timothy A. Kohler

Publication Year: 2004

The essays in this volume summarize the results of new excavation and survey research in Bandelier, with special attention to determining why larger sites appear when and where they do, and how life in these later villages and towns differed from life in the earlier small hamlets that first dotted the Pajarito in the mid-1100s. Drawing on sources from archaeology, paleoethnobotany, geology, climate history, rock art, and oral history, the authors weave together the history of archaeology on the Plateau and the natural and cultural history of its Puebloan peoples for the four centuries of its pre-Hispanic occupation.

Published by: University of New Mexico Press

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The principles of Gothic style were being worked out near Paris amid large-scale forest clearance in western Europe. Bantu speakers controlling rich gold mines were building a kingdom along the Limpopo around Great Zimbabwe. Rapid developments in agriculture, transport, and manufacturing technologies in Sung China heralding a precocious industrial revolution...

1. Introduction

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pp. 1-17

The Pajarito Plateau, a name meaning “little bird” proposed by Edgar Lee Hewett and in common use by the early twentieth century (Hewett 1906), is a series of highly dissected mesas extending some 50 miles south from the Chama River between the Rio Grande on the east and the Jemez Mountains on the west. Overwintering in the “Tiguex” province near present...

2. Ecological Patterns and Environmental Change in the Bandelier Landscape

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pp. 19-68

This chapter provides the environmental context for the archaeological descriptions and interpretations presented in the rest of the book. I begin with a sketch of local history, then describe present environmental conditions in and around Bandelier National Monument, and finally review what is known about historic and prehistoric environments in this area.Historic and prehistoric...

3. History of Archaeological Investigations on the Pajarito Plateau

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pp. 69-116

The Pajarito Plateau has been home to ancestral Keresan and Tewa Indians for several centuries. Their oral history points to a prehistoric line dividing them somewhere north of the Rito de los Frijoles (Bandelier 1892; Harrington 1916a:287,...

4. The First Hunter/Farmers on the Pajarito Plateau (A.D. 1150–1250)

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pp. 117-172

For 200 years, from the early 900s to the early 1100s, the Puebloan world looked to Chaco Canyon for spiritual and political leadership. Throughout the San Juan Basin and even beyond—from the Mesa Verde region in the north, to Cedar Mesa in southeastern Utah, to the Rio Puerco of the West in east-central Arizona—large sites can be found...

5. The Late Coalition and Earliest Classic on the Pajarito Plateau (A.D. 1250–1375)

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pp. 173-213

This chapter discusses the radical changes taking place during periods 5 (1250–1290), 6 (1290–1325), and 7 (1325–1375) as recognized by the Bandelier Archaeological Survey (BAS). The last of these is the first portion of the period traditionally called the Early Clas...

6. The Rise and Fall of Towns on the Pajarito (A.D. 1375–1600)

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pp. 215-264

If we define villages as small aggregates of, say, 50 to 200 rooms, the era in which they represent the largest settlements was short-lived on the Pajarito Plateau— roughly corresponding to the period covered in the last chapter. By the mid-1300s the plaza pueblos that are our most characteristic local representative of this size...

7. Rock Art on the Pajarito Plateau

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pp. 265-291

Ancestral Puebloan pictographs and petroglyphs may offer glimpses into aboriginal thought, into a collective mindset of a culture long gone, but archaeology only now has developed the means to understand what some of those ephemeral views might have been. Intangible worldviews are obtainable through graphic images, such as Egyptian...

8. Bandelier from Hamlets to Towns

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pp. 293-303

We began the survey and excavation projects in Bandelier with a particular interest in understanding why larger settlements (eventually including towns such as Tyuonyi) appeared out of local precedents that included only much smaller settlements. We organized the research to collect data that...

APPENDIX

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pp. 305-309

REFERENCES CITED

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pp. 311-348

INDEX

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pp. 349-356

E-ISBN-13: 9780826330840
E-ISBN-10: 0826330843
Print-ISBN-13: 9780826330826
Print-ISBN-10: 0826330827

Page Count: 374
Illustrations: 39 halftones, 70 motif drawings, 32 maps
Publication Year: 2004