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ven as some farmers lingered in a few upland villages located in favorable settings, such as Tyuonyi at Bandelier, others were displaced by the droughts and moved on as the thirteenth century drew to a close. The decline of upland society and the transformation to stable streamside villages was extraordinarily complex. This period, usually called Pueblo IV, spanned the years from about A.D. 1290 to 1500.1 The riverbank villages passed from prehistory into history when they were described in the journals resulting from Coronado’s expedition of 1540–1542.2 Because archaeological research has focused on excavation at a few very large pueblos of this period, there is still much research to be done in order to complete our picture of the details.Nonetheless, the fundamental changes are clear. Another Transformation The thin arc of surviving Puebloan settlements shifted to the east and south of the areas where most upland villages had been built in the 1200s. As in the decline of Chacoan society, the first to depart the uplands escaped turmoil but suffered isolation. These settlers started new farmsteads near points where side creeks and arroyos joined the larger, permanent watercourses that emptied out of the uplands.And again as in the 1100s, they built pit houses before constructing their pueblos. This time the pit houses were dug in lower elevations, typically about 5,700 feet (1,805 meters) above sea level. They were both shallower and more rectangular than earlier ones, and these settlements were larger than those of the midchapter eight The Creation of Pueblo Society 147 E 148 / chapter eight 1100s. Averaging about nine pit houses apiece, they contained combinations of late upland pottery and new lowland styles decorated with lead glaze paint.3 Nearly 20 years ago, a team of archaeologists from the University of New Mexico partially excavated a number of pit-house sites typical of the Pueblo IV period in what is now Cochiti Reservoir.4 One of these sites, LA 12522,now under Cochiti Lake, contained late upland Santa Fe Black-on-white and two varieties of early-fourteenth-century glaze-painted pottery,Cieneguilla GlazeYellow and Espinoza Glaze Polychrome, a black-on-red ware. The settlement contained both shallow pit houses and surface rooms. Later Pueblo IV rooms were built atop several of the pit houses.5 Another nearby site in the Cochiti district, LA 6455, at 5,300 feet in elevation, contained 10 to 12 pit rooms arranged in an L-shaped alignment that partially enclosed a small central plaza. These pit rooms were 1.0 to 1.2 meters (just over a yard) deep. The site faced east and sat adjacent to a stream that flowed into the Rio Grande.6 Surface storage rooms of poles and adobe were also constructed at this site. Probably built a few years later than LA 12522, it contained a wider variety of early glaze wares in addition to Galisteo Black-on-white and Biscuit A, two types of black-on-white pottery that superseded upland styles. Biscuit A, which became common after the upland trade network collapsed,was manufactured during the 1300s and 1400s in the area between Cochiti and Taos,7 where the Tewa-speaking Pueblo Indians now live. Collectively, these sites tell us an important story. By the time they were built in the early 1300s, St. Johns Polychrome was no longer being produced and imported from the Zuni area. It was being replaced in the Rio Grande district by new bowl designs in lead glaze paints—black, yellow, and red, or black, white, and red. The lead-bearing ores used to make the glaze paint were ground up into a slurry, painted on, and fired at a high temperature. They were mined from scattered local deposits along the Rio Grande. Some of the early glaze designs were stylized copies of the defunct St. Johns Polychrome patterns.8 The people who lived at these early Pueblo IV sites ate corn, beans, squash, turkeys (both wild and domesticated), rabbits, and other rodents such as pocket gophers and mice. A few years after the brief pit-house phase, most of these creekside settlements were renovated into above-ground pueblos.9 This pattern is reminiscent of the practice of Anglo-American “sod-busters” who homesteaded the Oklahoma and New Mexico territories in the 1880s and 1890s. They built dugout houses and planted crops for a few years before erecting their typical Midwestern frame and clapboard houses. To the south of the Cochiti...

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