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English Pages [292] Year 2005
Anthropological Papers Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan Number 94
Engaged Anthropology Research Essays on North American Archaeology, Ethnobotany, and Museology edited by Michelle Hegrnon B. Sunday Eiselt
PAPERS IN HONOR OF RICHARD Ann Arbor, Michigan 2005
1.
FORD
©2005 by the Regents of the University of Michigan The Museum of Anthropology All rights reserved Cover design by Katherine Clahassey The University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology currently publishes three monograph series: Anthropological Papers, Memoirs, and Technical Reports, as well as an electronic series in CD-ROM form. For a complete catalog, write to Museum of Anthropology Publications, 4009 Museums Building, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1079. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Engaged anthropology : research essays on North American archaeology, ethnobotany, and museology/ edited by Michelle Hegmon, B. Sunday Eiselt. p. cm. -- (Anthropological papers/ Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan; no. 94) "Papers in honor of Richard I. Ford." Papers originally presented at the Society of American Archaeology meetings in Salt Lake City (April 2004). Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-0-915703-58-6 (alk. paper) 1. Anthropology--Philosophy. 2. Ethnobotany--Philosophy. 3. Indians of North America--Ethnobotany--Southwest, New. 4. Indians of North America--Southwest, New--Antiquities. 5. Southwest, New--Antiquities. 6. Ford, Richard I. I. Hegmon, Michelle. II. Eiselt, B. Sunday. III. Ford, Richard I. IV. Anthropological papers (University of Michigan. Museum of Anthropology); no. 94. GN33.E64 2005 301 '.0 l--dc22 2005029690
ISBN 978-1-949098-78-5 (ebook)
The micaceous pottery vessel illustrated on the cover symbolizes the engaged anthropology of Richard I. Ford, his engagement with his many roles and with the many individuals and peoples he worked with and befriended, and the way he became a point of unity for all of these different realms. This pot was made by Felipe V. Ortega and was presented to Dr. Ford at the Society for American Archaeology meetings in Salt Lake City (April 2004), when the symposia on which this volume is based were presented. The pot, its materials, its form, and its decoration, represents the union of many perspectives and styles that are part of the northern Rio Grande micaceous ceramic tradition. The glittering clay is from Mowlownanana, the sacred clay pit of the Picurfs Indians, which was also used by Taos and Jicarilla Apache potters in the past. The design is inspired by Potsui'i incised ceramics, made by northern Tewa potters during the precontact era and defined today by archaeologists working in the region. The conical bottom is emblematic of Jicarilla Apache forms and the use of micaceous pot tery in outdoor campfires. The fluted rim, a technique long thought to be an introduction of Hispano potters, crowns this lovely piece. Mr. Ortega comments on an engaged approach to pottery making in the first chapter of this volume.
Contents List of figures, v List of tables, v Foreword, vi INTRODUCTION. Conversations with an Engaged Anthropologist: An Interview with Richard I. Ford, xiii B. Sunday Eiselt and Michelle Hegmon CHAPTER 1. CHAPTER 2.
CHAPTER 3.
CHAPTER 4.
CHAPTER 5.
CHAPTER 6.
CHAPTER 7.
CHAPTER 8.
CHAPTER 9.
CHAPTER 10. CHAPTER 11.
Ceramics for the Archaeologist: An Alternative Perspective, 1 F eUpe V. Ortega Collaborative Knowledge: Carrying Forward Richard Ford's Legacy ofIntegrative Ethnoscience in the U.S. Southwest, 6 Michael Adler Our Father (Our Mother): Gender Ideology, Praxis, and Marginalization in Pueblo Religion, 27 Severin M. Fowles Landscapes As Memory: Archaeological History to Learn From and Live By, 52 Kurt F Anschuetz Mestizaje and Migration: Modeling Population Dynamics in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico's Spanish Society, 73 Heather Trigg and Debra L. Gold The Art of Ethnobotany: Depictions of Maize and Other Plants in the Prehispanic Southwest, 89 Kelley Hays-Gilpin and Michelle Hegmon At the Other End of the Puebloan World: Feasting at Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico, 114 Paul E. Minnis and Michael E. Whalen The Beginnings of Plains-Pueblo Interaction: An Archaeological Perspective from Southeastern New Mexico, 129 John D. Speth Protohistoric Western Pueblo Exchange: Barter, Gift, and Violence Revisited, 148 Stephen Plog Ritual, Politics, and the "Exotic" in North American Prehistory, 155 Katherine A. Spielmann and Patrick Livingood "Darkening the Sun in Their Flight": A Zooarchaeological Accounting of Passenger Pigeons in the Prehistoric Southeast, 174 H. Edwin Jackson
CHAPTER 12.
CHAPTER 13.
CHAPTER 14.
CHAPTER 15.
Why California? The Relevance of California Archaeology and Ethnography to Eastern Woodlands Prehistory, 200 David G. Anderson The Value of Material Culture Collections to Great Basin Ethnographic Research, 226 Catherine S. Fowler The Next Generation: Museum Techniques at Penn State's Matson Museum of Anthropology, 238 Claire McHale Milner Dick Ford as Friend, Colleague, and Mentor: 1963-Present, 255 Jeffrey R. Parsons
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Figures 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 5.1. 6.1. 6.2. 6.3. 6.4. 6.5. 6.6. 6.7. 6.8. 6.9. 7.1. 7.2. 7.3. 7 A. 8.1. 10.1 11.1. 11.2. 11.3. I1A. 11.5.
Location of Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo, Bernalillo County, New Mexico, 12 Aerial photo of Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo showing Main Mound and locations of the north and east roomblocks, 14 Architectural details of the adobe rooms in the north and east roomblocks, 16 Map of T'aitOna highlighting the rooms and surrounding features, 33 Variation in ritual architecture at T'aitOna, 36 Examples of female figurines from the northern Rio Grande, 41 Northern Rio Grande region, 55 World Quarter shrine at K'uu?6wlnkeyi, 63 Boulder shrine with pecked and ground cupules, 64 Female population growth, 84 Mimbres Classic Black-on-white bowls, 92 Historic and late prehistoric petroglyphs depicting corn plants, 94 Maraw dance wands with corn ear, 95 Ears of corn and flowers on Antelope Mesa mural basebands, 97 Pottery Mound mural with women, baskets, and com, 99 Flower Mound with colored com and lightning, 100 Corn personified at Pottery Mound, 102 Potsherds with com and flowers from Awat'ovi, 103 Dot-in-square pattern on human figures, 105 Casas Grandes, 116 Unit 9 oven and associated platform mound, 118 Unit I ovens with associated mound, 120 Photograph of an excavated elaborate oven, 123 Location of Henderson Site and Bloom Mound, 132 Map of cultural areas and sites, 156 Pleistocene. Paleoindian, Archaic. and Early and Middle Woodland sites with passenger pigeons, 184 Late Woodland/Emergent Mississippian sites with passenger pigeons, 185 Mississippian sites with passenger pigeons. 185 Mississippian si tes lacking passenger pigeon, 188 Protohistoric and historic Native American sites with passenger pigeons, 188
Tables 5.1.
5.2. 5.3. SA. 11.1. 11.2.
Colonists arriving in New Mexico before 1605, 79 Life table for eighteenth-century espafioles, 80 Fertility and mortality rates for the eighteenth-century Spanish New Mexicans, 81 Fertility and survivorship data for five-year intervals used in the simulation, 82 Sites with passenger pigeon identified in faunal assemblages, 179 Sites examined that lacked passenger pigeon, 182
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Foreword B. Sunday Eiselt and Michelle Hegmon
Richard 1. (Dick) Ford's career defies easy labels. He is a professor of both anthropology and botany. He speaks fondly and favorably of his college days in a truly interdisciplinary department of anthropology and sociology at Oberlin College. His work in museum studies reaches well outside the traditionally defined field of anthropology. He trained as an archaeologist, he has done and is continuing to do extensive and important archaeological research, and most of his students have been archaeologists. But his dissertation was based primarily on ethnographic research, and many of his greatest contributions have been in the field of ethnobotany. At the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology (which is focused on archaeology) he was the curator of the Ethnology collections and the director of the Ethnobotany Laboratory. Ever since his first field experience in the U.S. Southwest, he has been deeply involved with the native communities whose ancestors created much of the archaeological record. He maintains long-standing ties with these communities and has often helped them with land claims and other legal matters. One of the greatest lessons he teaches his students is the importance of maintaining these relationships, not because they enhance careers, but because they become true friendships and sources of joy. The best single word we can find to describe Dick's approach is "engaged." Talk with him for five minutes and you will see that he is deeply engaged with his work; he loves it. He is engaged with the people whose ancestors he is studying and the people who live in the area where he works. He cares about them and has made life-long commitments to reciprocate some of what they have shared with him. He is engaged with his administrative work, and he undertakes difficult and potentially onerous tasks because he believes he has the responsibility to try to make things better. He is engaged with his teaching; he clearly loves it, and he also views it as a serious responsibility. He is engaged with his students; he cares about their work and lives, and even supports them when they strike out in new directions. "Engaged" has many positive connotations in normal English usage, including to pledge or bind through promise, to interlock, or to be active. It also has a specific meaning in anthropology. Dick's friend and colleague Roy A. (Skip) Rappaport used the word in his 1993 Distinguished Lecture to the American Anthropological Association (Rappaport 1994) in which he urged anthropologists to become engaged
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in the larger world and to intervene in the field of public policy and decision making (see also Messer and Lambek 2001). This call for an engaged anthropology fits well with what Dick has done throughout his career, not so much in programmatic policy statements, but in his practice, especially his work with and for Native People. Dick Ford is an engaged anthropologist. He is informed by and involved with the lives and cultures of people, both past and present. In the interview that constitutes the Introduction of this volume, Dick's own words express his engagement with his work, his passion for research, and the strong bonds he has forged with students, colleagues, and friends. In order to complement this personal perspective, we briefly outline several more academic ways in which Dick's research subjects and publications constitute engaged anthropology, both in the sense intended by Rappaport and more broadly. Dick's engagement with the whole of his profession, including the seriousness with which he takes his teaching and administrative responsibilities, is manifested in both his biography and his publications. Of the thirty-six years he spent as a faculty member at the University of Michigan, he was an administrator for twenty-seven of them. Specifically, he was (twice) the director of the Museum of Anthropology, and he served as chair of the Department of Anthropology and as associate dean for research of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. He has also been active in numerous national and international organizations including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (chair of Section H), Society for American Archaeology (executive committee), Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association (including a term as chair), the Society for Economic Botany (including a term as president), and the Council for Museum Anthropology (including a term as president and founding newsletter editor). In all of these positions, Dick has helped to shape the dialogs, debates, and public opinions surrounding anthropology. Furthermore, he devoted part of his writing to issues of education and administration, including undergraduate and graduate training, collections management, and research ethics (see for example Ford 1977a, 1977b, 1984, 1999a). These are just a few of Dick's administrative accomplishments that speak to an engaged anthropology. This service also demonstrates Dick's dedication to transdisciplinary research. His earliest field experiences at San Juan Pueblo in the 1960s showed him how important it is for archaeologists and other anthropologists to become knowledgeable about plants, which included learning from the indigenous groups who use them and the botanists who study them academically. He also saw the importance of adding the perspectives of social anthropology to the archaeological studies of plants. As a result, Dick engaged archaeology with these other disciplines and hdped develop the transdisciplinary field of paleoethnobotany. Not all of Dick's achievements or contributions have been confined to the realm of academia. He is also clearly engaged in the work he has done with and for native communities, and he has written extensively about the implications of this work. Anthropology involves what he calls "transferable knowledge" (Ford 2001 :6) such as information about plant and animal use, traditional agricultural practices, and resource management practices. For many years now, this kind of knowledge has been critical to Native American communities seeking to gain control over their resources, land claims, and other legal matters (Ford 2001 :6,
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1999b). Many archaeologists, historians, museum specialists, and ethnobotanists now assist these communities by providing documentation and giving expert testimony to support these claims (for examples see Dogngoske et al. 2000; Ferguson 1984; Fowler et al. 1994; McManamon and Hatton 2000). Dick began his own "expert witness" career as a consultant for Zuni and Hopi land and water rights claims during the 1980s (Ford 1984). In doing this work, Dick and other researchers like him are returning something to the communities who have shared their knowledge (see for example Adler in Chapter 2, Anschuetz in Chapter 4, and Fowler in Chapter 13 of this volume). Dick refers to this process of engaging native communities as "reciprocity anthropology." Reciprocity anthropology, especially when it involves legal cases, often creates a new kind of relationship between anthropologists or other researchers and Indian communities. In these cases, the parameters of research are defined by a subject group in order to achieve a specific goal. The anthropologist's boundaries are made clear and their temporary position within the society is situated and sanctified by an internal governing body. The resulting research is topically-based and service-oriented. Some might argue that this process limits or restricts open-ended research (see Asad 1973; Erve 1987; Purcell 1998 and references therein for examples), but Dick has shown how it actually opens up new realms of knowledge and collaboration. Reciprocal work, done in the context of well-defined and long-term professional and personal partnerships, yields new and sometimes surprising information that extends well beyond the legal case. The resulting political uses of the information are defined by the community and not the researcher. Researchers thus do not become political advocates for the group, but rather, their information is used by the group as an advocacy tool. This is the essential form of an engaged anthropology. Dick's true engagement with native communities has given him a perspective on their social and economic situations, insights that have shaped his theoretical approach and topical interests in archaeology. He has long argued that archaeologists should study issues of race, gender (including multiple genders), class, ethnicity, and how these categories structure society and thus affect people's lives (Ford 1973). In considering how native people are popularly portrayed, he has asked "which western mission depicts the harsh surroundings of the Indian neophytes, or which frontier outpost, now a national monument, shows the economic parasitism it exerted nationally?" (1973:87). He also noted that museum "diOl·amas and displays often omit the presence (no less the contribution) of other ethnic groups" (1973:87). These sentiments preceded by nearly a decade the critical and Marxist theory that became popular in the Postprocessualism of the 1980s, and they speak clearly to a vision of the past that redresses colonial agendas, power relations, and the production of contemporary social values. This perspective infuses Dick's anthropological practice, a practice that emphasizes cultural pluralism, the contingency of human action, and the historical nature of our preconceived categories. Probably as a result of his involvement with native communities as well as his personal perspective, Dick has always been aware that he is studying people and not just their materials and biology. Archaeologists' recent interest in issues of agency and practice came as no surprise to him. It simply assigned theoretical labels to issues he long considered important. Furthermore, initial archaeological interest in these theories focused primarily on social and
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ideational issues (e.g., Hodder 1982; Miller and Tilley 1984). Only very recently have many archaeologists begun applying these theoretical perspectives to environmental and ecological issues (e.g., Carmichael et a1. 1994; Darling et a1. 2004; Fisher et al. 2003; McGlade 1995; van der Leeuw and Redman 2002). But this is where Dick began; starting with his earliest work at San Juan Pueblo, he realized that humans play an active role in creating their natural, social and cultural worlds. His view has always been one of an ecology that includes humans, an approach with links to some of Rappaport's work (see especially 1968, 1971,1990). As Parsons (Chapter 15) notes, Ford's work anticipated what is today called "landscape archaeology." It also helped to transform archaeobotany into paleoethnoecology, thus making it an important avenue of theoretical inquiry, one that includes the engagement of people with their environments over time. Dick's ethnographic approach led him to emphasize native perspectives and their rules about adapting to the environment (see Ford 1994: xxii). The oft-cited article, "The Color of Survival" (1980), is just one example. In it, he considered how the Puebloan ritual requirement for ears of corn of different and pure colors is related to Puebloan cosmology, and how it also has important ecological implications. Pure color strains could only be maintained by planting separate fields in distant and ecologically diverse locations. Ritual and ecology are one and the same within this encompassing system. In another example from the Tewa Pueblos (Ford 1976), he showed how cultural classifications relate to rules about illness and healing, including the circumvention and eventual change of those rules. His most recent work considers expressions of nature and metaphor in prehistoric and historic rock art at Mesa Prieta in northern New Mexico. This project not only involves minority youth and local schools but also brings together the Bureau of Land Management, private land owners, and the Vecinos del Rio, a community action group made up of Anglos, Pueblos, and Hispanics. In sum, reading what Dick has written regarding the field of ethnobotany gives us some insight into his general approach to material studies and his hopes for the future of American Archaeology. He states, Despite efforts to the contrary ... the scope of ethnobotany remains hard to define. It is articulated by a semi-distinctive collection of epistemologies, varied theories, and accepted methodologies. If anything, ethnobotany is best distinguished by its paradigmatic pluralism. Its vagueness, like a world view, leaves it open to diverse influences that are equally frustrating to comprehend but keep it intellectually challenging; that is its nature. [Ford 1994: xxii)
As postprocessual approaches have become integrated into traditional archaeological practice, and as the ramifications of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 have spread through the museum world, American archeology has become more like its sister field of ethnobotany. What promises to unify the discipline, as Dick points out, is precisely the native perspective as well as the ongoing relevance of heritage research to local communities. The uniting factor for Dick, once again, is engagement, an engagement with anthropological subjects as well as the lives of people, their concerns, and their perspectives as an ongoing source of inspiration for the discipline.
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As students in the Museum of Anthropology in the 1980s (Hegmon) and in the early twenty-first century (Eiselt), we found that Dick Ford's engaged anthropology involves a great openness. He is open to working with students whose committees he is not chairing. He is open to all kinds of work: teacher, administrator, academic researcher, expert witness, and so on. He is open to all kinds of perspectives: new theoretical developments, new technologies and sources of data, the half-formed ideas of students, non-western ways of viewing the world, and other disciplines. It is this openness that gives his work a stable basis and a dynamic quality. It grows and changes with the unfolding of new conditions of research and the larger world. Much more is yet to come. We regret our inability to include all of those whose careers and lives have been touched by Dick Ford in this festschrift and in the Society for American Archaeology symposia on which it is based (held March 31, 2005, in Salt Lake City). In many ways, these omissions are antithetical to an engaged anthropology. We can only hope that future volumes, in any format, will honor Dick's long and distinguished career. What follows is just a small example of work inspired by an engaged approach. We are enormously grateful to all the people who are honoring Dick with the substance and quality of their contributions to this volume. We are grateful to the chapter authors, for demonstrating the practice of engaged anthropology. Wes Cowan was an invaluable part of the SAA symposium, and although he could not contribute a written chapter, his spirit is with us. Sally Mitani and Jill Rheinheimer turned rough manuscripts into finished copy with lightning speed. Andy Darling contributed in many respects, providing everything from logistical help to intellectual insights. The interview which follows, and which we hope many readers will enjoy, grew out of Andy's suggestion. Finally, thank you Dick, for the inspiration and the raison d'etre for this volume.
References Cited Asad, T. 1973 Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. New York: Humanities Press. Carmichael, D.L., J. Hubert, B. Reeves, and A. Schanche 1994 Sacred Sites, Sacred Places. New York: Routledge. Darling, J.A., J.C. Ravesloot, and M.R. Waters 2004 Village drift and riverine settlement: modeling Akimel O'odham land use. American Anthropologist 106(2):282-95. Dongoske, K.E., M. Aldenderfer, and K. Doehner 2000 Working Together: Native Americans and Archaeologists. Society of American Archaeology, Washington, DC. Erve, C. 1987 Applied anthropology in the post-Vietnam era: anticipation and ironies. Annual Review of Anthropology 16:309-37.
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Ferguson, T.J. 1984 Archaeological ethnics and values in a tribal cultural resource management program at the pueblo of Zuni. In Ethics and Values in Archaeology, edited by Ernestene L. Green, pp. 22442. New York: The Free Press. Fisher, c.T., H. Pollard, I. Israde-Alcantara, Y.H. Garduno-Monroy, and S.K. Banerjee 2003 A reexamination of human-induced environmental change within the Lake Patzcuaro Basin, Michoacan, Mexico. PAN 100(8):4957-62. Ford, R.I. 1973 Archeology serving humanity. In Research and Theory in Current Archeology, edited by Charles Redman, pp. 83-94. New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. 1976 Communication networks and information hierarchies in Native American folk medicine: Tewa Pueblos, New Mexico. In American Folk Medicine: A Symposium, edited by Wayland D. Hand. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1977a Systematic Research Collections in Anthropology: An Irreplaceable National Resource. Peabody Museum, Harvard University. 1977b Training in anthropological archaeology at the University of Michigan. In Teaching and Training in American Archaeology: A Survey of Programs and Philosophies, edited by William P. McHugh, pp. 23-38. Illinois University, University Museum Studies, no. 10. 1980 The color of survival. In Discovery, pp. 17-29. Vol. 1. School of American Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico. 1984 Ethics and the museum archaeologist. In Ethics and Values in Archaeology, edited by Ernestene L. Green, pp. 133-42. New York: The Free Press. 1994 Preface to second edition: ethnobotany 1994. In The Nature and Status of Ethnobotany, Second Edition, edited by Richard I. Ford. Anthropological Papers, no. 67. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. 1999a The forgotten undergraduate. In Transforming Academia: Challenges and Opportunities for an Engaged Anthropology, edited by L.G. Basch, L.w. Saunders, J.w. Sharff, and J. Peacock, pp. 161-68. American Ethnological Society Monograph Series 8. 1999b Ethnoecology serving the community: a case study from Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico. In Ethnoecology: Situated Knowledge/Located Lives, edited by Virginia D. Nazarea, pp. 71-87. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 2001 Introduction: ethnobiology at the crossroads. In Ethnobiology at the Millennium: Past Promise and Future Prospect, edited by Richard I. Ford, pp. 1-10. Anthropological Papers, no. 91. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. Fowler, c., M. Dufort, and M. Rusco. 1994 Residence without Reservation: Traditional Land Use Study of the Timbisha Shoshone of Death Valley National Monument. National Park Service, with Historic Preservation Committee, Timbisha Shoshone Tribe. Washington, DC. Hodder, I. 1982 Symbolic and Structural Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGlade, J. 1995 Archaeology and the ecodynamics of human-modified landscapes. Antiquity 69:113-32. McManamon, P.P., and A. Hatton Cultural Resource Management in Contemporary Society: Perspectives on Managing and Presenting the Past. New York: Routledge.
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Messer, E., and M. Lambek 2001 Thinking and engaging the whole. In Ecology and the Sacred: Engaging the Anthropology 0/ Roy A. Rappaport, edited by E. Messer and M. Lambek. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Miller, D., and C. Tilley 1984 Ideology, Power and Prehistory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Purcell, T. 1998 Indigenous knowledge and applied anthropology: questions of definition and direction. Human Organization 57(3):258-72. Rappaport, R.A. 1968 Pigs/or the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology o/a New Guinea People. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1971 Nature, culture, and ecological anthropology. In Man, Culture, and Society, edited by H. Shapiro, pp. 237-68. New York: Oxford University Press. 1990 Ecosystems, populations and people. In The Ecosystems Approach in Anthropology: From Concept to Practice, edited by E. Moran, pp. 41-72. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1993 Distinguished lecture in general anthropology: the anthropology of trouble. American Anthropologist 95(2):295-303. van der Leeuw, S., and c.L. Redman 2002 Placing archaeology at the center of socio-natural studies. American Antiquity 67(4):597605.
Introduction Conversations with an Engaged Anthropologist
Based on an interview Sunday Eiselt and Michelle Hegmon conducted with Richard Ford on November 13,2004, in Gilbert, Arizona. It was transcribed by Donna Glowacki, and references added. Eiselt: You have worked in the American Southwest for over forty years. Could you tell us a little bit about how you came to be there and some of your early experiences? Ford: In the summer of 1962, after my junior year at Oberlin, I went out to the Southwest with the University of New Mexico field school at San Gabriel Yunque Oweenge, on the San Juan Pueblo reservation (Anonymous 1987). It was taught by Florence Hawley Ellis, and the field school was huge. There were graduate students from New Mexico, who were running this thing, and there were people they'd hired from San Juan Pueblo as workers. One of the teaching assistants was Alfonso Ortiz. So, I got to know Al really well, and through him, I got to know his family in San Juan, whom I continue to visit. At the end of the field season his family said, "Well, why don't you stay and live here." And told them I had no money and it would be really hard. And they said, "We'll try to help you get a job." In the meantime, Florence Hawley Ellis had arranged with the man whose land she was leasing, his name was Lee Montoya, to make adobes to put over the Spanish walls that we'd been excavating to protect them. Little did I know, no Indian would ever work for Lee Montoya. But I worked for him, and I worked for the same rate that the locals did: four dollars a day for twelve hours of back-breaking work making adobes. And so along with a couple of Hispanic kids, I worked for Lee Montoya, and we made adobes twelve hours a day. But, we did other stuff too. Lee Montoya would have us make chicos-dried sweet com - in the outdoor oven, the horno. So there were all of these little things that were going on as part of this education. I would walk from where we were at the site into the pueblo, and I'd have lunch at Al Ortiz's family house, and then I'd have to walk back. Well, this one day I got back exactly on time and Lee Montoya says to me, "You're late. You can't work anymore, I'm firing you." I said, "Well, wait a second. It's exactly one o'clock." "Nope," he said, "You're late," and he fired me. So, that was the only job I was ever fired from, making adobes for Lee Montoya. The house I stayed at in San Juan is still there. It's a dilapidated adobe, right on the main road, that belonged to Al Ortiz's xiii
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father. Nobody was living there, so I moved in with my sleeping bag and my suitcase. It had no electricity and no indoor plumbing. I felt like Abe Lincoln doing my field notes at night under a kerosene light. As part of the field school we had to do a paper for Florence Hawley Ellis. I did mine on intertribal trade, which was eventually published in the Ed Wilmsen volume on trade (Ford 1972a). I continued to work on this paper while living in the Ortiz adobe. After being fired by Lee Montoya, I started working in the fields. I worked for a man we called Uncle Stephen. Steve Trujillo was his name. And, so I would go out and work in the fields, and Steve Trujillo was telling me about all of this trade stuff while I was working for him, and then all of a sudden I was learning ethnobotany too. From Steve and others at San Juan I was learning about all these plants in the fields and along the irrigation canals, and I'd been reading archaeology as a result of the field school. That was when it all began to come together, that archaeologists don't understand (a) people in a what we would now call an agency perspective, the kinds of decisions people make and how they impact communities; and (b) the full nature of subsistence, in terms of production, preparation, consumption, and the social dimensions surrounding it, including families and how they interact. I never read about any of that in an archaeological text. And I thought, "Well, gee, ethnobotany really is a way to enlighten the social dimension of archaeology," which at that point in time was sorely lacking. The articles that were just taking over the field, like Binford's article about archaeology as anthropology, still had a compartmental aspect to them (1962). It really wasn't an integrated system, and even as an undergraduate, I was seeking that integrated system, a way to avoid taking apart social science and keeping archaeology separate. That was the way that it got started. I went to Michigan for graduate school in 1963 precisely because of the combination of the archaeologists and Volney Jones. When I arrived, Volney got a National Science Foundation grant to interpret the archaeological plant materials from Jemez Cave and other sites in our collections like Awotovi and Hopi. He built me into the grant to investigate some of the archaeological plants in order find out how they were used in this contextual way of family life and community living. That grant paid for my research on the ethnobotany of San Juan, and that then turned into my dissertation, which was an ecological study. I also was learning from Skip Rappaport, who had come to Michigan by then. Volney was a very good ecologist in his own right but not really a cultural ecologist the way that Skip was. So I was learning from both of them. And then to a certain extent I was pursuing kind of a new approach to ethnobotany-a field that was eventually called paleoethnobotany - but I was looking to include more social dimensions and trying to interpret archaeological material by building models that would be ground-truthed by what people were actually doing.
Eiselt: Who else would you say had an influence on what you were doing at the time? Ford: Well, to a certain extent you've got to remember that the person who was the model for doing fieldwork among Native Americans at Michigan was really Misha Titiev. His work at Old Oraibi was really exceptional, especially for its day, and especially the way he did it. But there also was Jimmy Griffin and his good friend, Fred Eggan. They were
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very different. They were real people anthropologists. I went to Hopi on a couple of occasions with Fred Eggan, and he would walk into communities and people just loved him. I subsequently modeled my work after the kinds of things he did. He returned to the people with his professional knowledge. He helped them with their land claims case, and when other law cases came along, Fred was right there. He defended Hopi in the Black Mesa mine case. He was very much a people anthropologist. Hegmon: There were a lot of women working in the Southwest, some of whom were your teachers. Do you have any comments on gender issues in the profession, then or now? Ford: Well, the women that we were working with were wonderful because they were very self-confident. They were tough, but they were nice and they really treated people well. But as role models they stood out because they exuded confidence and expertise in their own right. In terms of both of these qualities, they didn't have to take a back seat to anyone. But in terms of discussions offeminism, there wasn't a lot of theorizing of that sort with any of them, although the interest was there, manifested in their work. It just wasn't articulated into a theoretical agenda when I was working with them. But, they were great role models for men and for women both, because they were both so knowledgeable as well as so confident. Eiselt: As far as ethnographic work in the Rio Grande, it just doesn't seem like there is the same level of activity going on now as when you were starting out. Ford: No, and I can help explain that. To a certain extent, I feel very lucky career-wise. The people in the late 60s-including AI Ortiz, Ed Dozier, Don Brown, Sue-Ellen Jacobs, and myself-were working in the pueblos. All of us worked in the pueblos. We all had friends in the pueblos, and it was a kind of an open-type effect. Then, once the Civil Rights Movement got started, AIM set some pueblos into defensive postures. If you were going to work there you had to get permission from the Tribal Council. That is their right; I don't think anthropologists have rights to anything, we should have to negotiate. But this means anthropologists who might have gravitated in that direction ended up going abroad. If you look at ethnology, not in the Southwest but across the country, most of the people who are currently doing broad-based work are from the older generation. Kay Fowler, for example, came at the end of that generation. So in actual ethnographic fieldwork, there is a whole generation that is missing in the literature. At the same time, the upshot for the Rio Grande, as well as other places, is now we've gone into the legal side. Legal work requires anthropologists and historians as third-party expert witnesses. Your expel1 witness work, which I have done for several pueblos now, stems from your anthropology. So, these communities in some way need the Sue-Ellen Jacobses and the Kay Fowlers of this world who-and this is where archaeologists like Florence Hawley Ellis came in-who could go and tell the cOUl1, "I used to work with them, and here's what they used to farm. Here's where the headgate used to be, and this is where they used to let the water into the field." This is ethnographic and archaeological information that isn't secret, but that can help to sustain these communities today. A lot of them are looking for anthropologists who can answer these questions because they need those answers for legal cases. And yet there is a generation of ethnologists that is missing.
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Now we are beginning to again get some people who are working in the pueblos. But it's no longer a very broad ethnography; it's very compartmentalized and topically based. For example, Marilynn Norcini is working for Santa Clara Pueblo at the request of the Council on a project that they have defined. The tribe wants to know about how their constitution came to be, and so she's doing what they asked. It is very decent ethnography. It is theoretically relevant regarding how the political situation evolved, but she is not asking every question that anthropologists can possibly imagine. My work at Zuni as an expert witness was similar in terms of using ethnobotany to investigate land use as part of their legal case. TJ. Ferguson worked with us, as did Richard Hart and Dana Lapofsky. We were a team whose work was defined by the Council. But at the time people said to me, "You can't do good 'science' (a terrible word), and do applied work because you have to be open in terms of what you want to inquire about. They're going to constrain you." Well, they're going to constrain you anyway. People are smart. They will tell you some things, and they will self-edit what they don't want to tell you. But when the Council says, "Here are your parameters. Here's the work we need you to do. And we're going to have a meeting where we're going to tell everyone in the community that you're working for us, and here's why we need their information, and here's what you're going to ask about." This is different. What happens with this is that they initiate the anthropology, and you end up learning things you wouldn't have known otherwise. Sure a lot of ethnologists could care less about some of these things, the plants and their management for example, but in all four places that I've done expert work-Zuni, Taos, Hopi, and San Juan- I've learned things that I never would have learned had I gone in with an open-ended questionnaire. Eiselt: So, what do you tell students who want to study in the Southwest today? Ford: You have to be open. Any place in the world, not just among Native Americans, but any place, you have to be very open. You have to tell people what it is you are interested in knowing. Some people will tell you quite frankly, "I don't know anything about that," and other people will say, "Well, that's really neat. I was wondering when you were going to come and ask me." But you have to be ethical, that's the bottom line, anthropological ethics. You just tell people what it is you are interested in, and they will figure out whether they want to help you or not, and whether what you have learned is useful for them. But, if a graduate student came to me and said, "I want to work in a Rio Grande pueblo like you did" I would tell them what the pitfalls are and how that process works. Sometimes this discourages them, but I tell them that the best way to do good work is to take your skills, and let them use your skills, and make your friendships, and you will find the door will open to you in these communities. But I never add that the footnote is, "unless you're a total jerk." Pueblo people have a level of tolerance and intolerance for jerks, just the way we do. So anyway, this is how it works. Now, to get back to the specifics of the question. If a student came in and said to me "I want work there," knowing what I do now I would say, "Well, what are you doing this summer?" I would give them the name of one of the local education programs and I would say, "You know they have a tutoring program for their high school kids in math and science in the summer." Contact these people and volunteer, and
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that way, you'll meet the people, and you will be giving them something right off the bat, and you will make your friendships. Just don't go and say, ''I'm interested in your plants." You go, and you show them that you have something that you can give. And then you start talking to them about things that you're curious about. And that way, you begin to learn. Not exactly what you intended because it is all going to be negotiated, but at the same time you won't have the door slammed in your face before you even get there. So, give them something. Use their programs. Respect these people.
Hegmon: This gets us to the central theme of our volume, "engaged anthropology." Do you have any comments on the term, or on applied anthropology in general? Ford: To begin with, I don't really like the term applied anthropology. What it is is a kind of "reciprocity anthropology," in which you are returning to people some of the knowledge that they taught you, or something you possess that they think they need. I like Skip's [Rappaport] term the best, "engaged anthropology." Skip started using that term a couple years before he became president of the American Anthropological Association. He gave a talk about engaged anthropology when he received a number of grants for the AAA to study homelessness, to study AIDS, to study poverty. He formed a task force and he used that term, "engaged anthropology," to describe the work. I think that term is broader than "applied anthropology," which still carries the implication that there are problems that we can solve, that we may be solving whether you want them solved or not. "Engaged anthropology" implies that we see problems and so do you, and we can work together for their solution. And, under those circumstances, ethnobotany has something to offer people. And so, although ethnobotany hasn't seen big theoretical advances in the last 20-25 years, it has increasingly become more of an engaged field in terms of expert witness work. It is precisely that engaged approach: taking what we know, and using it to help people who want to know. We're not talking down to them. It's not that. It's more that they need something we can provide, especially these days when they are engaged so much with the legal process. Hegmon: Thinking about ethnobotany and other subjects, do you have afavorite article or project? Ford: I think that my undergraduate and graduate student experience is what vitalized some of the papers that have been quoted so much. And I think part of it was because they were different. I think that the paper in the New Perspectives on the Pueblos that was on ecology (Ford 1972b) got quoted quite a bit, and a lot of people shared papers from around the world related to the ecology of religion. The paper that I did with Peckham and Schroeder on Puebloan prehistory in the same volume (Ford et a1. 1972) had considerable impact; yet 1 just can't believe that people are still citing that. There has been so much archaeology that's been done since then. People keep telling me, "You know how wrong you were?" And I keep saying, "1 know we were wrong. Why don't you write a new one?" The "Color of Com" article (Ford 1980) probably doesn't get cited as much as it deserves. To me, that was a really important paper because it took some of Brent Berlin's ideas about classification and gave them a dynamic quality. It gave them a quality that said that these categories and what they apply to are not fixed; they demonstrate how people adapt to their
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environment, as well as to the changing world. I was able to show how a classification could accept new genetic varieties, and how those genetic varieties, if they lose something, could then be elevated to a sacred level. I gave the example of what happened at Nambe where they lost their traditional yellow, and they elevated what they called at one time American corn, which is a dent corn that looks so much different than their original. But now it's a sacred com for them and nobody else because it works in this system. So that paper has a lot of vitality that still hasn't been exploited. Another good paper that came out of my early ethnobotany is the one that I did in the Wayland Hand book on communication (Ford 1976). In it I show how different families have priority for curing, but that there is an open network that allows people to get cures if they don't have the medicine in their house, because of the principles of Tewa curing. By referencing a higher level of classification, they can go next door and get the cure that those people have that they may not have known about, but that they trust because it fits within the more inclusive classification. I've always thought that was another little gem of a paper, but you know, all those were theoretical papers. Even the Picuris paper that dealt with the irrigation system (Ford 1977), which I felt was kind of a backhanded attack on Wittfogel, got cited a lot. The citation has stopped, but I still think it was a really insightful paper.
Eiselt: How then would you define theory? Is theory just an interpretation or is it more? Ford: No, I see it as a worldview. I see theory as the overarching set of propositions that link a whole series of procedures for solving problems. But the theory does not have to be narrowly defined, as long as those propositions are not contradictory. And so my theory is basically one that evolves from a cultural ecology. I don't see the mind as separate from the body, so, I don't see culture as separate from people as organisms. But I also don't see this as being a sociobiology explanation that says that we have to get to the genetic level because even culture is genetic. I see it more as the dialogue between genetics and environment. The environment includes what people do in terms of behavior. We as individuals have beliefs that are cultural, but yet at the same time we also interact with the larger population who mayor may not share these premises. And this larger population does things that affect other groups as well as the physical environment. This is my line of theoretical reasoning. I see a series of nested propositions that are very broad and vague at the most general level. But then they become more and more specific as you extend down to what is it you really want to know about this world. The propositions get translated into specific problems as you come down the line. Like the Pueblo colors of survival; it is really an ecological proposition, but it becomes more and more specific until we get down to the question of what is it that actually enables people to make a living from a very unpredictable and varied environmental situation in which they find themselves. And so that is how it works. I want to solve a problem, but in order to do it I have to go higher to see what it is that is going to enable me to solve it. Eiselt: How does some of what you are sayingfit into other aspects of your career, such as education and administration?
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Ford: Well, my feeling about graduate education has always been that I don't think that it is my place to clone myself. Every student that I have ever worked with, I also have learned something from. In the future I expect to learn even more, and I will accept anything that my students say that criticizes what I have said. The reason I say this is because I know that they've grown. It is a pleasure to read their work because they are not a clone of me. You shouldn't have to look back on a particular professor and say, "You know, gee, that person's doing such neat stuff, I think I'll do it the rest of my life." How awful. As far as my philosophy of teaching, again you have to know where I came from. I came from a hard-working middle class family. My mother and father both worked because we had to have the income. And when I went to college, I also worked. When I started teaching, one of the first things that I thought was, "Whoever is paying for my teaching, I am going to do the best that I can for them." I don't miss classes, and if I give papers or exams, I try to get them back as quickly as I can. All of this is related to the fact that those students are paying tuition. And even if only one student comes to class, I give them the same lecture that I was 'planning to give to one hundred, because I believe that they earned it. This is part of my background, and it is part of my belief that professors are not sacred cows. We are working for the public, and we are working for the students. My philosophy is that you have a contract and that when you give a course description, and you do a syllabus, that is what the students expect. The rest of it kind of builds from there. When I was at Michigan as a graduate student in the 1960's, American higher education was really expanding. The Baby Boom kids were filling every classroom. Universities started expanding the size of the faculty in virtually every department, and anthropology was a beneficiary of that. So, when I finished at Michigan, I had lots of job offers. I could have gone to Princeton, but I ended up going to the University of Cincinnati. Why'd I go there? Because the kids that were there really were sacrificing to go to school. In many cases, they could not go any place else. They couldn't afford it. They had families that they were taking care of, or they were taking care of other people, older parents and grandparents. And I thought, "Well you know, I'm not an elitist person. I really want to cut my teeth on this kind of an experience." But we didn't have teaching assistants at the University of Michigan back then, so I was a terrible teacher my first semester. I'm from New Jersey, and when I get nervous I talk fast. So these poor kids! Here I am teaching introductory courses, shooting at 'em with too much material. Trying to get it in and just talking a mile a minute. My first semester course evaluations were awful. On the one hand they said, "The professor really knows the material. He has really given us a lot, but he talks too fast, doesn't give enough expression, doesn't give time to digest what he is talking about." I took all that to heart, and built my skills as a teacher. By the end of the second year at Cincinnati, I knew I must be doing something right even if my evaluations weren't exactly what I wanted, because we had eleven anthropology majors in our department, and at the end of the second year I was the advisor to ten of them. So the teaching philosophy goes from there, cutting my teeth teaching, but learning that I was doing okay because these students were attracted to something that I had to offer. I think the one thing that I learned to otfer was compassion for the students and trust of the students. Once I learned how to lecture, and slow down, and put some expression in there,
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my teaching became very good. I trust people to make good decisions about themselves, and I feel that as a teacher you're there to build up their confidence. You help them believe in themselves and when they do that, they learn much better than if they think they are in an adversarial position with the professor. I feel that the graduate students should be given opportunities and allowed to make up their own minds. When they leave, they should be at a point where I can say, "Boy, are they going to teach me something." The last thing that I ever wanted was to hear was that a student of mine plateaued, and what they did for their thesis was the best we were ever going to see. I always felt that they should leave graduate school with the tools, intellectual inquiry, laboratory skills, and field skills that they need to go forward, and that the Michigan experience was just a point of departure. Eiselt: And Administration? How does this philosophy fit with your work as an administrator? Ford: Well, the answer has to be rela.ted to a question that you didn't ask which is, "Who are your role models, and why have they been important?" Probably, the most important role model in my life has been my mother. My mother was involved politically. She was always a doer and would not accept the world the way it was if she felt something was wrong with it. She ran the Sunday school for the whole church when I was a kid because she didn't like the way it was being handled before, and wanted to bring about something new, something more dynamic. Then when I was in high school, much to my chagrin, she became president of the PTA. She saw that the members were sending all of these dues to the national organization, but were not getting anything back, so she led a rebellion to get the PTA out of the national organization, and they became a PTO. Then she became the head of the PTO, and then darned if she didn't decide to put in a dress code. We couldn't wear jeans to school anymore, and the girls couldn't wear short skirts with crinolines that made their skirts stick up. What kind of liberal put in a dress code? Well, she did, and she did other things too, like take over the public assistance that helped families in need in Livingston where I grew up, and she, with the help of some other social workers, founded the Alzheimer's Association of Ann Arbor when my father came down with Alzheimer's in the early 1980s. She thought that people who really had to deal with the problems were the caregivers and founded the association for that. And after my father died, she stayed active, doing a lot of public speaking at the School of Public Health and the School of Social Work giving lectures about what it is like to live with and take care of Alzheimer's people. And now, even though she is in her 80's, she's still very active with the Turner Geriatrics Center. She's set up a bereavement committee for senior citizens who have lost spouses so they have someone they can relate to socially. So, my mother has been my role model because she has the attitude that if there is a problem, we can solve it. That has always been her attitude, and I inherited that, and I saw how she did it, and I learned from it. So, I sort of started early as the president of my class in high school, then I went on to college. By 1968, while I was at Cincinnati, we discovered I had MS [mUltiple sclerosis]. It was then that I began to lose some confidence in this working-class, help-the-student environment that I was in. I loved the students, they were very dedicated. But the administration
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did not feel that they owed these kids anything. When I got sick that summer in 1968 and was in the hospital, they terminated my contract. This was at the end of the fifth week in a six-week summer session. I had finished the course. I had all the lectures, and I had prepared the fi nal exam. It was all done. The chairman of the department, Gus Carlson, agreed to gi ve the final lectures, and Karen, my wife, was going to grade the exams, so everything was set. The semester ended on Wednesday. That week, on Monday, word had gotten out that Dick was in the hospital, and by Tuesday I received a letter from the head of the summer school. It was a simple one-liner: "Dear Professor Ford. Since you are unable to finish your contract obligation for teaching this summer, we are terminating your contract immediately." There was absolutely no compassion, and I thought: "Gosh, here are these kids that I want to do this for, and here's the administration treating the faculty this way." I also had asked Cincinnati for time off to get well and they wouldn't do it. That was the second straw that broke the camel's back. So, when Jimmy Griffin contacted me and said, "Why don't you come back to Michigan, and you won't have to teach the first semester of 1969," I said, "OK." Little did I know then that I would soon be the acting director. As soon as I came back Jimmy Griffin had his first serious heart attack, and since I wasn't teaching, he had me take over as the acting director of the Museum. So, I went back to Michigan in 1969, and then within a month, I am the acting director of the Museum, and that started it. But then, I found that this was really great, because I was like my mother, if there was a problem, I could help solve it. After Jimmy retired, I became Director of the Museum in 1975 but I left the directorship when I went out of remission again in the early 1980s. You've got to remember that I came to Michigan because I was ill, and so the whole time I've been there, I've had this damned disease, and I have always had to walk a very delicate line as to how I'm going to tax myself so I don't go out of remission. It takes a long time to get healthy again, and so I said, "I've got too much that I want to do to have this happen to me." I decided to give up being director. But then I got better, and I got dumb. Nobody told me that as you get healthier, you get dumb. I eventually got back into administration. I turned down several dean appointments, but there was one that I thought would really be fun and that was Associate Dean for research (College of Literature, Science, and the Arts), which I took in 1987. I did several things as associate dean that were very important to the College, that are still there now. I worked with the Office of the Vice President of Research to include the Humanities faculty to be eligible for a lot of the research money, and I wanted them to encourage our faculty to get more outside grants, like Guggenheims. To do this we got the College to put up money and the Vice President to put up money, so that if people got major grants, then we would be able to fill in the difference between their salary and what they got from the grant. This was a really important program for the Humanities because it enabled these people not to hesitate to apply for outside money. It gave them a whole year off beyond their sabbatical. The next thing was that I felt that we needed to give undergraduates opportunities that were similar to those that graduate students had. So, I created the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, which now is nationally recognized as the leading program of its type in the country. We started that on an experimental basis with private money. We really
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wanted to make an impact with this program, so I decided that we would do it to help minority students. This was before affirmative action. We wanted to do this for minority students because the minority kids were the ones on work study that were shoveling the hash in the cafeteria, or shelving the books in the Graduate Library while the more aggressive white kids were working in the Medical School doing experiments, or working in the Museum. And so I thought, "you know this isn't right. What we have to do is make a program that takes a group of minority kids, and we will have the faculty suggest projects, and we will make a book of the projects, and we will have the kids go to the faculty, interview, get these jobs, and in exchange, we'll give faculty members so much money as maintenance." Well, the program filled immediately. There were things we hadn't anticipated, but I had Peggy Westbrook as my secretary, and she was really great. We'd have kids who would come in, and if their paycheck wasn't waiting for them, and they wanted to go home to Detroit, and they needed money for the bus, Peggy would give them money for the bus. She knew these kids well enough that as soon as they got their paychecks, they would pay her back. So we were helping the kids to maintain this position so that they could work with us. And you always say when you start a program like this: "What is your measure of success?" We had two measures of success. One measure was that the kids stayed with the program. We didn't have a revolving door. We never had a kid drop out. So that was measure number one. Measure number two: We looked at the attrition rate for all of the minority kids at Michigan at the end of the first year, and compared it to the attrition rate of kids in our program. We asked, "Is this program so successful that the kids really are buying into higher education to the extent that they'll make sacrifices?" Attrition rate the end of the first year for the other minority kids, I think it was around twenty percent. Our program, zero. Hegmon: As you think about retiring, are there any dissertation topics that you think it would be nice to have students do or are there any projects that you are currently involved in that you particularly enjoy? Ford: There are subjects that I would like somebody, someplace to work on because they haven't really been fully addressed. And I could use a student to help me right now to wrap up this rock art survey that I am doing on Mesa Prieta north of San Juan Pueblo. We're currently working with a neighborhood association to record the rock art there. We've involved local Hispanic and Pueblo kids from five local high schools. The Pueblo kids are from San Juan, Tesuque, and Picuris. They're selected by their guidance counselors to come out and get a college-level experience oflearning by doing. The students learn geology, archaeology, something about art. They learn from artists how to draw and record rock art panels. We have a photographer who comes and teaches them digital photography. And then, we have a computer class that is taught by a professor at Northern New Mexico Community College; the students learn GIS, and how to input all of the recorded rock art panels into the GIS program. At the end of the class, every student gets a CD that they bum, that is a record of all of the material that all of the students recorded for the summer. We have recorded 8,000 glyphs this way, and based upon the space left to survey, we estimate there are about 20,000 glyphs that need to be recorded. So, it would be nice to have somebody with a really fresh mind and imagination to help out with this project.
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One of the other projects is being done through the Los Alamos National Laboratory under Brad Vierra. It started as an inventory of maize from some of the Caveate Lodges at Bandelier. People from San Ildefonso who were working with the project wanted to know more about the com, so Brad contacted me. Now we have expanded the project. We are doing the history of San Ildefonso maize at their request. We've expanded the study to include the earliest maize from northern New Mexico, at Jemez Cave, and we're adding other material that contract archaeologists have found, as well as what is at Bandelier. Our ethnographic collections at the University of Michigan Museum include maize that was collected every twenty to twenty-five years, from the tum of the century up to the present, and we have added maize donated by the current farmers at San Ildefonso. So we've got all this maize, and we have re-done the radiocarbon dating on a lot of the early maize that is archaeological, and now we've taken kernels from the early collections that we have, as well as the material that the San Ildefonso people gave us, and we're doing DNA analysis. We will be able to use molecular archaeology to get the history of when new genes came into the gene pool that constitutes San Ildefonso maize. The elders tell us the rules they use for selecting which maize they use in ritual and which they designate as food.
Eiselt: Do you know what they're going to do with the information? Are they just curious at this point? Ford: I think that there is a high degree of curiosity like, "How is it that some of our maize that is in a museum looks like this, and we have maize that looks like that today, and what happened in the interim?" Because, just like I talk about in "The Color of Survival" (1980) they know that there have been new kinds of com introduced, and yet their com continues to look like they think it should look. So how can we tell what has come in? Can we tell what they are selecting against or favoring? That's what the project is about, and they want to use it. There is the intellectual curiosity, but they also want to teach the younger people about farming, and how they can keep these favored varieties by farming and by recognizing this stuff. So I think it's intellectually a really neat project to take somebody's com from the time they first get corn up to the present. See all the changes. See what the Spanish brought. See what the Americans brought. See what the state agricultural agents brought, and how still they have this corn. And these guys, they're really getting a kick out of seeing this stuff and working with it too. I mean, they're really pleased. Eiselt: One of the other things that I've seen you and Kurt Anschuetz working on is getting people back in touch with some of the shrines or sacred places that they have either lost touch with or don't have access to anymore. Is this still an ongoing project? Ford: Well, part of that relates to the surveys that we have done. There are shrines in the Rio del Oso Valley that we found earlier and as part of Kurt's work in the 1990s. We called those to the attention of San Juan Pueblo at their request. All of this actually started in 1970 or 1972. Herman Agoyo and Al Ortiz were interested in some shrines that were named in their prayers that were in the Rio del Oso, but they weren't sure where they were. They knew that I was familiar with the Rio del Oso. Although I had never done a formal archaeological survey there, I had visited a lot of the places. So we took a trip up there with
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one of the caciques. We had the sheriff of San Juan come to protect us. We brought them to all these shrines, and then they brought out their cornmeal and and I sat in the car while they did their rituals and whatever else they were doing. But after they finished, they gave me a tour. They told me about the shrines and their associations so that we could begin to learn how to identify these for them in other places, and bring that knowledge back. I've also worked with the new owners at the Ojo Caliente hot springs to make the springs accessible to the Pueblos. They were already doing it with the senior citizens, so it was just a small step to get them to open up the springs for the religious leaders to come and get water and soil. And then of course every time we find shrines on the Mesa Prieta survey we make a map, and if Herman Agoyo doesn't have time to come out and see them, we gi ve them the location of where we found these things. But most of them, you see, don't have anything to do with San Juan. They had to do with the abandoned site of Fiogi just across the river, and I think most of the petroglyphs on the north end of the mesa that we're working with go with the people of Fiogi. Their descendants today are the Tewa at First Mesa at Hopi. They came over two years ago and they did a tour of the petroglyphs that were at the north end of the mesa and we showed them shrines as well. They toured Santa Cruz, and then they went to the Galisteo Basin where they are supposed to have come from according to history. They had absolutely nothing in their legends about that area, but they had legends of the Fiogi area. They really fell in love with the guys from San Juan taking them to all these places. When people at Santa Clara took them to Santa Cruz, they thought that this was nice, but you know, what does this mean? It was kind of interesting to see history, recorded history coming up against verbal history. And, to see where the verbal history won out and where the recorded history begins. Eiselt: We have talked a little bit about your approach to theory, some of the things you have done, some of the articles you have written, cared about, and liked. And it seems that one of the themes that runs through your work is a concern with cognition and culture. What is it that you like about the rock art project or other projects you're currently doing that is different than what you've done before with corn or trade, and what is similar? Ford: The rock art is different because it is a voice that people have that almost becomes a text. They are telling you things that you normally can't discover archaeologically without a written text. So, one of my fascinations, starting with Jemez Cave, has been with the Archaic. And, yet when you work on the Archaic, what do you know about the intellectual side of things? Very little. The rock art helps you to see some of the ideas that they had. Rock art does tell us a lot, but it's a challenge. It's really a challenge because you don't have a lot of analogs to it. And then there are things that you can do with it that involves traditional archaeological techniques, like working with spatial distributions and landscapes. The site of Fiogi, for example. What's around the site ofFiogi? It's not rock art with glyphs, but it is rock expression, and that rock expression is boulders with cupules and axe slicks. These are shrines. These shines are close to the site. But when you cross the river, you begin to get a whole lot of rock art that is close to the river, including more shrines. And then as you move away from the river, you begin to get representations that are different than the material by the river.
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So as you move out, you begin to find animals on the rock. And then as you move really far away, the rock art becomes very sparse, but very meaningful. And, yet if you follow the arroyos from the river up onto the mesa, the whole way along the arroyo there will be rock art. And then right where you could predict from what we've discovered, at the top of the arroyo where the water comes out from the spring from precipitation that seeped into the surface of the mesa, and where water comes over the top like a waterfall during a rainfall, we find enormous horned-serpents. We get that, again, and again, the horned-serpents associated with water. So that is a belief system that you can document statistically. Every time I find a spring, I find a horned-serpent. Are there horned-serpents in places where there aren't springs? Absolutely, but as a geological phenomenon, I find horned-serpents when I find springs. These archaeological surveying techniques allow us to find these associations that pattern on the landscape, and we don't have to rely on ethnographic analogy. We can say that there is an association here that is related to water.
Eiselt: So you are then relating that rock art to a living environment? Ford: We are. But what we're doing is really landscape archaeology. That landscape out there is a cultural landscape, it's not just lots of boulders. Gosh, you know, everybody who has ever lived in northern New Mexico could have a boulder on Mesa Prieta. We could say, "put your initials on this boulder." And, you know what? There would still be boulders without initials. So, now the question is, there are these boulders that people in the past saw. Why did they pick this boulder, and not that boulder? Is it because an eagle perched on that rock, and it gave that rock power? So to get that power and to mark it as a power place, they drew a petroglyph on it? We'll never know. But there are other things, particularly about rain that we do know about ethnographically, that help. We find rocks with foxes on them, and foxes are said to cry when it's going to rain. So, the rock art is intellectually challenging and at the same time, it's also insightful as a complement to what we know archaeologically and ethnographically. Eiselt: And then of course, you're doing the Hispanic rock art on the mesa as well. Ford: Yes. That's going to be really neat when we finish photographing that and get our exhibit set up, because we have basically rediscovered an early Hispanic folk art. No one has ever written about it, and no one has ever had a museum exhibit of it. You cannot believe all the different types of crosses that we have found out there. Who made this stuff? We suspect the bulk of it in the hinterlands is from shepherds because we find lots of it associated with lambing pens. And then closer to the river, we find more elaborate glyphs like one we found this summer that includes a church with three steeples, each with a cross on top and all carved with metal. We also have land grant boundary markers. One includes a lion with its paw up and a crown on its head. This is stuff that is not reported. People know about it, but they're all so interested in getting the Indian petroglyphs that they've ignored the Spanish material entirely. These projects are not trivial projects. I think they have parts to them that are of interest, not only to the profession of archaeology, but to all people. And, some the people initiated. San Ildefonso for example. I never would have studied their corn, but they initiated it. I
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would have been interested in seeing the petroglyphs, but I wouldn't have taken this on if the people in the Vecinos del Rio community organization hadn't said they needed an archaeologist to work with them. Hegmon: That's the engaged part . .. Eiselt: There you have it. Ford: And, they're of interest to these people. Eiselt: We haven't talked much about museums yet. Collections, NAGPRA, and those kinds of things. How has the museum world become more engaged and what has been your role in some of these projects? Ford: Well, the museum side of things is an interesting one. There was a committee on museums that was sponsored by the American Anthropological Association and funded by the Wenner-Oren Foundation. Rita Osmonson was the head of Wenner-Oren. She wanted to help museums. She saw the museum as a very important part of anthropology, and so she set up this program for people to study museum collections. At the same time, this AAA committee was running out of steam, and AAA really wasn't interested so, a group of people that had been part of that committee, and people at the Smithsonian Institution got together and we founded a new organization, The Council for Museum Anthropology. It was people like Stan Fried at the American Museum of Natural History, Steve Williams from Harvard, Bill Sturtevant from the Smithsonian Institution, and others like Phil Dark from the Field Museum who worked on getting this organization off the ground. I was the first president. Joe Ben Wheat was the second. And Steve Williams and I decided that this organization really had to do something. That was when we got money through Nancy Oonzalez at the Nationai Science Foundation and from the School of American Research to put together a workshop addressing some of the problems pertaining to research in museums. Steve and I published the monograph that outlined the problems financially that the museums were having. Then we made a pitch to the National Science Foundation that they fund a program on systematic research collections that museums could apply to. The ultimate objectives of the program were: (1) to improve awareness of cultural preservation because so much was disappearing through either improper or inadequate care; and (2) to make the collections accessible, to get them in a position so that students and researchers or other museums could study them. Those were the ultimate goals for this program, and it was really successful. It created the career of the collection manager, and collection managers have been a very instrumental new position for anthropologists. That came directly out of the Council for Museum Anthropology. I also started the newsletter for the organization that communicated studies about how to take care of objects. We did reviews of exhibits and advertised jobs to museums, and that has become a regular journal now (called Museum Anthropology). Although the Council was terminated by the NSF about five years ago, Don Fowler has been working on seeing if they can get it started up again. Eiselt: NAGPRA obviously has changed the way museums operate and has created a whole new approach to heritage management in terms of tribal heritage programs and tribal museums. Could you talk a little bit about what NAGPRA has done in those terms?
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Ford: Well, I'm not a detractor of NAGPRA. I think that NAGPRA did what museums and archaeologists should have been doing in the first place. That is, the skeletal collections that belong to groups should have been returned rather than sitting in cardboard boxes, unstudied, year after year. And, I think consulting with native groups-in the same way that archaeologists have long consulted with other countries-recognizes that Native Americans have sovereignty within the larger society. Because of my experience as an undergraduate, I never had any problem talking with Native Americans about any subject under the sun. But it seems that other people did, and we had to legislate talking. For example, when AIM came on the scene in the 1970s, there were some very untoward events in terms of breaking up excavations that were ongoing, like in Minnesota. But I don't think that would have happened if there would have been consulting in the first place. Under the circumstances, I think that NAGPRA achieved what should have been common practice. The rise of the tribal museums, on the other hand, is a wonderful benefit that came, in part, as a result of NAGPRA. Among other things, it gave responsibility to native groups to come to terms with their own heritage in their own ways, to formalize it and extend it into the realm of education for their own children, and for their adults. These things have been very positive. Even though there was a fear that somehow the Native Americans would come and empty out all the museums, and there'd be nothing left, that has never happened. There were some groups that didn't want anything back. There were others that wanted lots of things back, but then realized that they couldn't take care of them. So that as all of these events were taking place, it meant that there was a reality that eventually came into being and guided how NAGPRA would proceed. And that I think has been very beneficial. Issues like Kennewick that tend to overshadow the implications of NAGPRA never had to happen. That was wholly the responsibility of the Army Corps of Engineers, and if they had not overstepped their bounds, and had worked on this, the issues surrounding Kennewick could have been worked out and negotiated, and scientists and the Native Americans would have been able to work together, as Dave Thomas has pointed out in his book (2000). There are plenty of other models of how this works so that everybody gets something. And when you work on a win-win solution, which does mean there are some compromises on both sides, nobody gets hurt, and then these things are fully negotiable. So, NAGPRA, I think, has been a success. I think the great fear regarding NAGPRA is that events like Kennewick lead people to question whether it is necessary. What good it is? The last thing that NAGPRA needs is to be taken to court, even though there are parts of that bill that could be questioned. But it's like a house of cards. You stalt taking one part off and pretty soon it collapses. Parts of it do need to be refunded. Parts of it need more funding, like consulting for people to come and visit the museums. A lot of that started out with museums actually paying for people to come and work through grants applied to NAGPRA, but these procedures are encumbered by federal administrations. People began saying, "well we can't wait that long. We'll just get our casino to pay our way." So these things have transpired and it all needs to keep going forward, but NAGPRA hasn't cleaned out museums. It's created a whole new bunch of museums, particularly tribal museums, which never existed before. And that is healthy. It is very healthy for people to tell their own story. Museums have been telling other people's stories for a very long time. Native American communities need the right to be authorities themselves.
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Hegmon: Well, this probably concludes our interview. Are there any other things that you want to say before closing? Ford: I will say this. I have enjoyed my career very much, and of course, my career isn't coming to an end. It is just shifting locations. It's moving from Ann Arbor to New Mexico. I have worked with an awful lot of great professionals, who we've talked about, and I've enjoyed it. I have worked with a lot of really good people in my own Museum at Michigan, who are very, very fine archaeology professionals. I have worked with people who have helped with archaeology that are not professionals, but they abide by our professional code of conduct and are excited by our work, like Herman Agoyo and Felipe Ortega for example, or ranchers in New Mexico, or multi-ethnic community organizations, and these have been just wonderful experiences. The students also have been great in all my teaching experiences, not only the archaeologists, but all of the botany students, ethnologists, and biologists that we haven't had time to talk about. I've never felt that they weren't interested in what I could offer them, and I've appreciated that interaction. And as I've said several times already I appreciate the growth that the students have shown after they left Michigan or other institutions where I have taught. The last thing I ever wanted was for any student to say, "I'm a student of Dick Ford," but rather they'd say, ''I'm a student of the University of Michigan and I worked with these professors." And it's fine if I'm one of them. References Cited Anonymous 1987 When Cultures Meet, Remembering San Gabriel del Yunge Oweenge. Sante Fe: Sunstone Press. Binford, Lewis R. 1962 Archaeology as anthropology. American Antiquity 28:217-25. Ford, Richard 1. 1972a Barter, gift, or violence: an analysis of Tewa intertribal exchange. In Social Exchange and Interaction, edited by E.N. Wilmsen, pp. 21-45. Anthropological Papers, no. 46. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. 1972b An ecological perspective on the Eastern Pueblos. In New Perspectives on the Pueblos, edited by A. Ortiz, pp. 1-17. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 1976 Communication networks and information hierarchies in Native American folk medicine: Tewa Pueblos, New Mexico. In American Folk Medicine: A Symposium, edited by W.D. Hand, pp. 143-57. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1977 The technology of irrigation in a New Mexico Pueblo. In Material Culture: Styles, Organization, and Dynamics of Technology, edited by Heather Lechtman and Robert S. Merrill, pp. 139-54. 1975 Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society. St. Paul, Minnesota: West Publishers. 1980 The color of survival. Discovery 1-80: 17-29. Santa Fe: School of American Research. Ford, Richard 1., Albert Schroeder, and Stuart Peckham 1972 Three perspectives on Pueblo an prehistory. In New Perspectives on the Pueblos, edited by A. Ortiz, pp. 22-39. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Thomas, David Hurst 2000 Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity. New York: Basic Books.
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Ceramics for the Archaeologist An Alternative Perspective Felipe V Ortega La Madera, New Mexico
An engaged anthropology succeeds when a traditional practitioner begins to analyze and articulate his or her own practice. Felipe V. Ortega, a Hispanic and JicarillaApache Penitente Brother andfull-time potter, considers his own viewpoints on the cultural underpinnings of his craft in thefol/owing article. His viewpoints may be mirrored in the works of Morris Opler and other anthropologists but have never been directly tied to northern Rio Grande micaceous pottery traditions. As a potter who has helped and taught many archaeologists the art of micaceous pottery making, he has learned much of how we think about ceramics. Here he explains the meaning of micaceous clay and the relationship ofpollery to a living landscape and cosmos. This contribution is emblematic of an engaged anthropology in which native voices contribute to theorizing about place and craft. In creating the vessel pictured on the cover of this volume in honor of Dick Ford's many contributions to Southwest anthropology and archaeology, Mr. Ortega has succeeded in bringing this perspective to life. [The Editors]
Indian people view pottery not only as containers for food or other items, but also as containers and gi vers of life. They are beings, created by the union of clay and water through the potter's hands and thoughts, which are transferred into the vessel. They have a life and a history, and they can bring good or harm to people who use them or eat from them. When they are fired, they are born. When they are broken, they die and go back to Mother Earth. To understand the meaning of pottery from this alternative perspective, it is helpful to start at the beginning, with clay, rather than at the end, with the finished pot. Here at the beginning is where I will start my analysis of ceramics for the archaeologist: with clay and our connections to this land. By making reference to Anna O. Shepard's 1956 seminal volume of the same name, my goal is to honor this work while highlighting a complementary and, I hope, growing perspective among Rio Grande archaeologists. The specific clay that I will speak about is micaceous clay that is found eroding from rich mica schist deposits in the Sangre de Cristos and San Juan Mountains of northern New Mexico. This clay has been used for nearly 800 years to make cooking and other kinds of vessels
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and figurines. The fabric of the clay is more than 80% mica and the surface of a finished pot glitters like gold when it is fired. Nothing has to be added to the clay to make a good paste. It can be gathered, cleaned, and then shaped and fired. The mica acts as a natural temper, both strengthening the walls and making them resistant to thermal or other physical damages. The only decoration added to finished pieces is the occasional incised design, applique, or handle. Archaeologists typically refer to the finished pieces and fragments they find on the ground as "utility" wares and associate them with mundane cooking and trade. Prehistorically, micaceous pottery was made by several northern Tewa Pueblo pottery communities. Starting in the historic period, the Jicarilla Apaches, Taos Indians, and Picuris Indians began to make micaceous pottery. Soon after, Hispanic women, many of whom were descended from Indian people, started to make it. The Pueblos and Hispanics used the clays that were located close to their villages or they exchanged clay with their neighbors. The Jicarillas on the other hand used all of the regional clay pits and marketed clay and vessels with the aid of their horses to make a living from trade. Many of the same clay pits are still being used by these people today. The clay continues to provide for our people as our pottery has become popular in modem Indian and Spanish markets. We have come to share a tradition and a mutual understanding of our deeply held connections to our land through micaceous pottery. As this has happened, clay has taken on new political and economic roles in our society even though most of it is now located on federal land. In the northern Rio Grande of New Mexico, where I have practiced as a potter for ovu thirty years, the land cannot be owned no matter what the "legal" documents say. She is our Mother, and we care for her. The region is culturally diverse, but what people share in their common connections to this land is more important than what separates them on religious, cultural, or political grounds. I am, like many of my relatives, part of a heritage that has resulted from over four hundred years of life on this stage. We have lived in the small village of La Madera since the early 1800s and have Jicarilla Apache relatives at Dulce whom we visit often. I have traced my own genealogy back to my Jicarilla Apache great grandmother, Marfa Soledad Jaramillo, who was adopted by my family in 1864. My family remembers her relatives coming to visit from the reservation at Dulce. They would pitch their skin tents on the ridge above the village and sit on the floor in my great grandmother's house gossiping and laughing till the wee hours of the morning. I can still see their tent rings on the ridge above La Madera today. Frequently they came to get clay from nearby pits for making pottery during these visits, as they had done for generations before. The Jicarilla once lived in the mountains surrounding La Madera, which they considered sacred precisely because of this clay. When the Jicarilla were told to leave the area by the U.S. military in the 1890s, many refused, preferring instead to relinquish their tribal status and remain a part of the community and part ofthis land. I learned pottery-making from one of these women, Jesucita Martinez, who was 90 years old in 1969 when I began my apprenticeship. What I know of clay and the cosmology behind it comes from my Apache heritage. According to the Jicarilla, Killer-of-the-Enemies created the northern Rio Grande in the form of his mother White Shell Woman. The father of Killer-of-the-Enemies was the Sun. The Sun in tum was the child of Mother Earth and Father Sky. Killer-of-the-Enemies made the area around Taos White Shell Woman's heart. Four sacred rivers, the Rio Grande, the
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Canadian, the Arkansas, and the Chama, flowed from her heart. The RIo Grande also was her backbone. He made a mountain ridge for her neck and Pike's Peak for her head. The Sangre de Cristos on the east side ofthe RIo Grande formed one of her legs, and the San Juan Mountains formed the other. Pedernal Peak was one of her nipples. The other was located at Rock Bell Mountain. Within the body of White Shell Woman reside the Hactcin or Mountain Spirits. Every animal, bird, substance, or thing in nature has a Hactcin which represents its inherent power or qualities. The Hactcin are the spiritual advisors and providers for Jicarilla people, and the special rites and observances associated with the worship of White Shell Woman and the Hactcin provided for the Jicarilla on their long journey through history. Micaceous clay has a special place in this universe, for a specific Hactcin is the life force of clay. Long ago this Hactcin revealed himself to an old man and woman in their dreams. He took them to a place near Taos on the side of a mountain and showed them the clay. He told them how to dig it and told the woman how to make it into various shapes. He said that the Jicarilla should use this clay, dug from the body of White Shell Woman, to make their living; this clay would provide for them and their families. This is how the Jicarilla came to make micaceous pottery, and this is why they made so much of it. They worshiped this clay because it provided for them. They used many sources in their travels, and they provided finished pots and also raw clay to many households in exchange for food and other gifts.
The divine provides for the daily needs of you and your family. This is a core belief for the Jicarilla. Because micaceous clay is the body of White Shell Woman, blessed with the power of the clay Hactcin, every clay pit is taken care of by the community that uses it. These pits are part of the community and embody the health and status of that community. Offerings are made and brought to them as one would bring gifts to a relative. Whether words are spoken or not is immaterial since the act of the offering calTies the thoughts and sentiments of communication. The act of prayer reunites the spiritual world beneath us and our activities on its surface. Even one's identity is not separate but is part of the whole. All of the seen and unseen is intelTelated as one. The potter waits to sense whether the time is opportune to dig or whether more offerings should be made. Sensing that the time is correct, the potter has the responsibility to gather enough material to make his or her creations and no more. The structure of creation is tripartite. Clay babies are born of the union between White Shell Woman (the earth), Grandfather Sky (the water), and the hands and instruments of the potter. Many metaphors express the respect people feel for this union. Digging - with digging sticks or today with picks and shovels- is symbolic of the impregnation of clay with the creative intentions of the potter. Part of the verbal prayer at the clay pit states: "I want to pitch my tent here and dwell with you and create the clay babies with you, oh our mother the earth, and from your own belly you gift us with this time." In the past, Jicarilla Apache women made much of their pottery by pitching their tents near or around the clay pit. The men were not permitted to enter this ground while the women worked on pottery for fear that their weapons and power would upset the delicate moment.
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The potter must hold these thoughts carefully throughout the creative process. Before potters can "clean" the clay, they must wash their hands and refrain from contact with any contaminants that might spoil it. Washing is not for the benefit of the potter, but rather it represents a symbolic readiness to touch the "holy" body of White Shell Woman, a reverence for the otherness that is so powerful. This procedure ensures the continuity of all that is given for our well-being through clay. In the past, women cleaned clay either by picking out the larger stones with their fingers or by slaking the clay and drawing out the organic and other matter with water. Clay and water were often combined in a deerskin-lined depression in the ground. The heavy stones fell to the bottom and the clay and sand-sized particles floated to the top where they were mixed together as the water slowly seeped away. Today both men and women potters use cloth-lined vats or buckets, but the principle is the same. Once the clay was ready, the women sat on the ground near their tipi with com-husk rings covered in chamois placed between their legs. The rings held the puki, a fired clay saucer, which served as the form for the base of the pot. By working there and forming the vessels between their two legs, the symbolic act of birthing clay babies was affirmed. Even today, with our modem tables and chairs, much of the work still is done on the lap. Similarly, the com-husk ring is emblematic of the cosmic sipapu or opening through which we were brought forth into this upper world from the underground. A ball of clay was, and still is, formed in the hand, patted or pinched flat, and then placed in the puki to form the base. Coils are then made and added one row at a time until the desired height is reached. As coils are dropped onto the opening of the vessel- symbolic of underworld - the wonderful moment of conception is realized again and again. Water is added to the surface of the coils to smooth the clay and form the vessel, but this is not just any water. It is the gift of Grandfather Sky that contributes life to the pot. Corncobs were used in the past to smooth vessel walls, and again this is not just any remnant of food. The corncob is symbolic of the cycle of life and plenty. After the coils are fused through smoothing from the outside, shaping begins by smoothing from the inside, as we are all formed by beauty from within. A finished piece holds all beauty within it, even when it seems empty to the human eye. The vessel carries this beauty and shares it with its various users. After the pot dries, a knife or gourd scraper is used to remove any surface imperfections. A light coating of watery micaceous slip is applied to the sUlface and polished, first with a piece of leather and then with a smooth ri ver stone. These are the formative years of the clay babies. The firing celebrates the rite of passage for the clay babies and is much like the long-life ceremony of pubescent girls in Jicarilla ceremony. They become real beings - beings with beauty from within - and they can now go out into the world on their own or stay by the home fire with their makers.
All beauty comes from within . .. This is the final prayer of the blessing. With these words we pray before firing to all six directions, east, south, west, north, Father Sky and White Shell Woman. And we become the seventh direction, standing in the center and declaring finally,
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Beauty comesjrom within me . .. In the olden days, the vessels were taken care of as one would care for a revered member of the household. This may sound unlikely given the severe conditions in which mostJicarillas lived, but even though these vessels were "mundane" or utilitarian, they also sustained us in life and community. The traditional everyday living of licarilla Apaches looks very simple and void of high ceremony to us today. This is still true, but material simplicity belies a deep understanding of the spiritual realm. The deep-rooted and centuries old sensibility about the origin of clay vessels is permanently embedded in the consciousness of the clan that lives in harmony with all of creation. The creation of a ceramic vessel then is not just the execution of a set of skills and operations. It is a window into the soul, personality, and mood of the maker and his or her connection to an unbroken line of a remembered past. In drawing our material from Mother Earth we become one with our ancestors, who, having taken from the very same place, unite us with a timeless cosmological reality. As a result, it is the clay and not just the finished pot that defines a potter's core identity and tradition. The clay, in essence, is the physical manifestation of White Shell Woman and so is a living thing that must be respected and treated with care. A sense of self and place in a landscape is intertwined with this clay and becomes an expression of the union between us and our history when it is shaped into a vessel. The vessel, emblematic of this union, in turn creates a sense of community and family when it is used, given, or sold. Today as I teach archaeologists and other people the gift of making pottery, they too join us in this history and become one with this land. My own thoughts on this are that people in the distant past viewed clay and pottery in a way similar to what I have described here. The connections that are made today between clay and Mother Earth are very old and have continued up to the present. This is why some Indian people may object to the purely technical study of broken pottery found on archaeological sites without reference to the life-giving forces that bind these sherds to the living. But these same people forget that just as artifacts have returned to Mother Earth so shall we. For what these sherds teach us we remember to say thank you and offer a gift in return. That gift is knowledge.
Reference Cited
Shepard, Anna Osler 1956 Ceramics for the Archaelogist. Washington: Carnegie Institution of Washington.
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Collaborative Knowledge Carrying Forward Richard Ford's Legacy of Integrative Ethnoscience in the U.S. Southwest Michael Adler Southern Methodist University
Richard I. Ford's career in anthropological archaeology has consistently joined ethnographic and archaeological perspectives to deepen our appreciation of the links between past and present. Even during the New Archaeology's full-frontal scientism, Ford melded oral historical, archaeological and traditional knowledge in his work with indigenous groups in the American Southwest. Equally important has been Ford's mentoringfor those of us who sought to employ a similarly integrative approach in our research. This paper focuses on the means by which indigenous and scientific communities conceptualize the idea of "cultural affiliation" research derived in large part from discussions with Dick Ford over the past twenty years.
My interest in archaeological approaches to cultural identity and affiliation owes at least part of its origin to a trip I made to Zuni twenty years ago. During a break from my dissertation research in the Mesa Verde region, I drove down to meet Dick Ford in Zuni where he was visiting friends and, as always, conducting his own research. After introducing me to Chu Chu's pizza, and some very hot green chile, Dick took me on my first tour of the pueblo. One memory is particularly clear. Dick explained to me the intricacies of the Shalako ceremony, describing how Shalako integrates the knowledge of various individuals and societies while simultaneously fragmenting the overall ritual practice. This holistic splintering of the ceremonial knowledge ensures that no one person or group controls all the performances and information on which the success of this world regeneration ritual rests. I remarked how interesting it would be from an anthropological perspective to know the entirety of the ritual. Of course, in return I received one of Dick Ford's famous smiling responses: "Well, that would certainly screw up Shalako for everyone else, now wouldn't it?" This is the balancing act inherent in Ford's ethnoscience: we seek to expand our understanding of the human past by studying the linkages between the archaeological record, ethnographic observations and traditional knowledge. However, we must not destroy, or even disturb, one realm of knowledge to provide understanding for another, potentially
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complementary, realm. Ford's ethnoscientific perspective has consistently balanced the "ethno" with the "science," not an easy task during those decades of the latter twentieth century when scientific investigation and explanation in archaeology often meant minimizing or ignoring the relevance of oral traditions and indigenous knowledge. Whether he was studying Pueblo agricultural knowledge, indigenous ceramic technology, or the timing and role of ritual in Pueblo societies, Ford ensured that both the ancestors and the descendants were given a voice. In that same spirit, this paper outlines how collaborative research that respects boundaries of knowledge and practice in both the ethno and the science is essential to a collective understanding of past and present cultural identities and affiliations in the Southwest. After reviewing various approaches to the concepts of ethnicity and cultural affiliation, I discuss affiliation and identity, emphasizing how these are applied as part of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Bearing in mind the opportunities (and pitfalls) legislated by NAGPRA, I then describe an ongoing collaborative research project involving Native American communities, ethnographers, archaeologists and historians, and designed to improve the theoretical and methodological applications of the concepts of ethnic identity and cultural affiliation.
Identity and Archaeology: Who Is the Past? The U.S. Southwest is a polycuJturallandscape of Native American, Hispanic, Anglo and other cultures, a home to human ancestries spanning tens of centuries. Here, contemporary Native American communities live with their ancestral landscapes of old village sites, sacred shrines, stone-lined agricultural fields and ancient foot trails. The sacred and historical landscapes of the Native American Southwest are spoken and sung in the traditional oral histories linking the living peoples to ancestral homes, migration routes, and places of origin. Here, the material and conceptual coexist, providing a pulse that continually forms, reforms and reproduces cultural identities at several levels, from the individual to the community to the tribal nation. At the same time, these cultural and conceptual landscapes serve as the archaeologist's primary means to investigate the well-preserved record of human cultural variability in this arid corner of the United States. Many interpretive paths converge and diverge in our collective attempts to understand the ancestral Southwest. Central to these understandings of the past is the concept of cultural affiliation, "the historically traceable shared identity between modern tribes and ancient peoples" (Ferguson 2002:8). In its most basic manifestation, cultural affiliation is a negotiated social understanding, created in the present, by people engaged in interpreting a range of information and understandings about past human identities. The relevance of information is often situational-neither agreed upon nor absolute-hence the negotiated nature of identity. With the recent federal enactment of NAGPRA and the ongoing concern with indigenous patrimony on the national and international levels, the number of stakeholders involved in the interpretation of the past continues to expand significantly. NAGPRA has pushed questions of cultural identity, ethnicity and cultural affiliation to the forefront of our disciplinary research agenda.
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Anthropologists, I long the arbitrageurs of the rich material and symbolic records of human variation, are increasingly faced with ethical, legal and professional obligations to share control of the links between past and present. In the U.S. Southwest, these realms of obligation include cultural resource management archaeology; court cases in which indigenous groups claim cultural affiliation with ancestral remains; and political contexts in which tribes assert rights to the disposition of natural resources, cultural patrimony, and intellectual property. As Ferguson (2002) recently observed, the concepts of ethnicity, identity and cultural affiliation are implicated in most anthropological research in the Southwest. Anthropologists are ethically, professionally, and morally responsible for helping enunciate the multiple ways in which ethnic group identity is understood, constituted and applied. Culture and Identity: The Past and Present of Cultural Affiliation A claim of cultural affiliation asserts a social identity that is shared over time between ancient groups and modern peoples. As such, cultural affiliation is both an ongoing social negotiation and a knowledge product, a complex of intertwining paths (interpretations) leading to a destination (ethnic group identity) that changes across both time and space. Individual and group identity is recursively created in the present day through the use of myriad historical precedents and cultural forms. Present day ethnic diversity commonly references various forms of evidence that tie present groups to earlier peoples long since past. Ethnicity and cultural affiliation exist in a conceptual landscape that is defined by its ambiguities, which is not surprising given the latitude inherent in terms such as identity, history, ancestry and evidence. Below I define the role each concept plays in anthropological research as well as some of the primary theoretical underpinnings that guide my investigations. Ethnicity and Identity Ethnicity has long been a debated concept in anthropology (e.g., Barth 1969; Banks 1996; Cohen 1978; Jenkins 1996; Jones 1997; Zenner 1988), but in this paper it refers to self-conscious group identity defined through contrasts with other groups. Ethnogenesis is the process through which ethnic group identity is created, reproduced, and sometimes muted through the use of contrast and similarity. As Zenner points out (1996:393), the term "ethnic group" was uncommon prior to the mid-1950s, appearing first as a replacement for terms such as "race" and "tribe" that had taken on negative associations with oppression and colonialism. The term embodies a longer tradition of anthropological observation documenting the lack of correspondence between biological variation, language, technologies, and identity (Boas 1940; Sapir 1921). Through the fluidity of these building blocks of culture, individuals and groups use contrasting constellations of these features to assert and alter ethnic group identity. Barth's (1969) influential study of ethnic group formation emphasized several important aspects of this process. His study of Pathan identity highlighted the importance of heterogeneous cultural contexts in the process of ethnogenesis. Rather than resulting from isolation and the absence of culture contact, ethnogenesis occurs within contexts of human diversity and interaction. From an archaeological perspective, we should
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expect that past human groups played on the presence and nature of cultural diversity to generate and reproduce ethnic differences. To what extent ethnic groups comprise identifiable, bounded social entities is an ongoing discussion in ethnicity research, and is the source of some critique of Barth's work. Barth's focus on the interactional nature of ethnic group definition assumed that ethnic groups were relatively bounded and identifiable, particularly when viewed synchronically in relation to other contemporaneous groups. Critics of this approach question the boundedness of these groups, preferring a perspective that deemphasizes ethnic groups as entities and emphasizes the situational nature of identity (Cohen 1978). In fact, Moerman's (1965) early work characterized an individual's ethnic identity as a nested set of potential identities, each of which could be asserted or sublimated depending on the situation. From this perspective, ethnic identity exists as a potential strategy that an individual or group might use, rather than as a bounded, exclusive identity that is expressed in all contexts at all times. Ethnicity derives not from set boundaries, but from individuals and groups defining levels of social inclusion and exclusion as part of their ongoing interactions with others. The archaeological record can yield evidence of inclusion and exclusion (Jones 1997), but we are still learning to understand the material implications of ethnogenesis and group identity dynamics. I disagree with those theorists who argue that ethnic group formation is a very recent phenomenon. Shennan (1989: 16-17), following Bentley (1987) and others (Smith 1986; Fried 1968), has argued that ethnic groups are largely an artifact of state-based domination. For Shennan, state-level organization rests on the manipulation of minority social groups, sublimating them to achieve a regionally homogeneous identity and to reduce lines of potential division within the polity. While I agree that state polities recognize and take advantage of ethnic identification to divide and ultimately assimilate those outside their political control, I follow Moerman (1965), Barth (1969) and others (e.g., Jones 1997) in arguing that ethnic group formation is not solely associated with complex societies. The problem is not in our understanding of ethnogenesis, but with our use of "ethnic" and "ethnicity" in today's society. "Ethnic group" has come to be that box you check on census forms or job applications, and the choices are few, keying on religious beliefs, primary language and origin nations. Ethnic group identity per se is no artifact of the state; rather, our present use of the terms, and the very terms themselves, are artifacts of the state. Ethnogenesis as a general process has a much deeper past, and has played a dynamic role in many non-state contexts. In particular, I would argue that ethnogenesis was an important aspect of ancestral Pueblo social interaction on local and regional levels, well before their sixteenth-century contact with Old World state-level societies. Ethnicity continues to be a salient force in today's indigenous communities, particularly when we appreciate the nested nature of ethnic identities in multiple contexts and with social groups of various sizes. The perspective employed here understands ethnic identity to be situation ally flexible, based on subjective individual and group identification of both daily human interaction as well as historical knowledge of individual and group relationships (Cohen 1978; McKay 1982; Vincent 1974). Of particular importance to my understanding of ethnic identity are recent approaches emphasizing the dialectic between recognized (but alterable) ethic identi-
10
Engaged Anthropology
ties and the strategies of individual human actors involved in everyday life (Eriksen 1991; Hegmon 1998:272-73; Dietler and Herbich 1998:244-48). These perspectives, infOlmed by concepts of human agency, circumvent the problems that arise when we depend too much on either the "instrumentalist" or "primordialist" theoretical perspectives. The primordialist perspective, often identified with Shils (1957) and Geertz (1963), situates ethnicity as an outgrowth of the basic conditions of kinship, language, religion and territory shared by local populations (Isaacs 1974). In essence, ethnic identity is the group manifestation of identity bonds that each individual internalizes as part of the socialization process. Critics of the primordialist approach (Jones 1997 :68-70; Stack 1986) point out that it essentializes ethnic identity as something determined and immutable, a condition into which one is born and raised. This overly psychological approach also fails to explain the fluid and dynamic nature of ethnic identity. The instrumentalist approach stresses the role of ethnicity in mediating and negotiating social relationships that affect access to economic resources, political power, social mobility, and so on. The instrumentalist approach has been criticized for reducing ethnic group identity to simple strategies of political and economic self-interest (Bentley 1987). Jones (1997:76-79) points out that the essential flexibility inherent in the instrumentalist perspective, one where individuals and groups can shed identities and don new ones as it benefits them, too often deemphasizes the historically contingent aspect of identity. Most studies of ethnic identity, while recognizing the role of origins and historical background in identity maintenance, have been synchronic studies with little actual analytical time depth. As Hegmon (1998:273) explains, a broader understanding of ethnicity should include an appreciation of how differences in language, appearance and other aspects of Bourdieu's (1977, 1990) habitus influence, often at a subconscious level, what people are (the primordialist view). At the same time, we must monitor as best we can the situational manipulation and reconstitution of identities on individual and group scales of interaction (the instrumentalist platform) in both short- and long-term frames of reference. For this reason, archaeology can and should play an increasingly important role in diachronic understandings of ethnogenesis, identity, and cultural affiliation.
The Role of the Past in Ethnic Identity Conceptualization of the past, through group history and origin traditions, is central to the construction and negotiation of ethnic identity. Sacred places, landscapes, and recounted occurrences comprise the necessary threads that tie an extant ethnic group's identity to its ancestral past. The historical ordering of events in the group's past also plays an important role, often reinforcing the relative statuses and identities of families and other constituencies within the ethnic group (Spicer 1980). As Zenner (1996:393) points out, the lack of a shared past of a first-generation religious group means that it is not an ethnic group. Over time, however, that same group's descendants may very well constitute an ethnic group as temporal continuity is conceptually and materially transformed into shared history, cultural landscapes, and understandings of origins. It is precisely the historical aspect of ethnic identity that necessitates an archaeological perspective on ethnogenesis. It is true that the flexibility and situational nature of ethnic
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identity make diachronic perspectives difficult to operationalize. Yet we must not lose sight of the fact that historical know ledge lies at the heart of the very enterprise of ethnogenesis. Historical ties can be symbolized in material forms and ideological concepts, all of which survive differentially across time and space. A major challenge for anthropology in general, and archaeology in particular, is to explain clearly the complex interactions among extant ethnic identities, cultural symbol systems, languages, and ideologies, in part through the materiality of the archaeological record. In the next section I discuss some of the important ways in which NAGPRA conditions the integration of modem ethnic identity, traditional Native American accounts of the past, archaeological cultures, and the evidentiary aspects of the archaeological record. Before I leap into that morass, however, I want to emphasize the largely beneficial role that NAGPRA's enactment has played in the United States. Most archaeologists now realize that NAGPRA did not spell the end of archaeological research, museum collections, or scientific understandings of the past. NAGPRA legislates processes for dialogue, negotiation, shared responsibility for assessing evidence of cultural affiliation, and a case-by-case decision on the repatriation of human remains, sacred items, and objects of cultural patrimony. As with all legal codes, statutes such as NAGPRA must necessarily simplify very complex issues in order to be interpreted and applied. In NAGPRA's case, the simplification of the central concepts of "identifiable past groups" and "cultural affiliation" is potentially problematic; further collaborative research and dialogue regarding these concepts is necessary to increase the benefits of NAGPRA for all interested parties. Cultural Affiliation, Past Identifiable Groups, and the Challenge of NAGPRA Recognizing a shared cultural and/or genetic heritage, operationalized as "cultural affiliation," is central to the process of affiliating present ethnic groups with ancestral populations in the U.S. Southwest. In fact, the legal definition of cultural affiliation within NAGPRA is the "relationship of shared group identity which can be reasonably traced historically or prehistorically between a present day Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization and an identifiable earlier group" (NAGPRA, Section 2). The statute allows a range of evidence to support a claim of cultural affiliation. These "NAGPRA nine" include geography, biology, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, folklore, oral tradition, and history, with a catchall line of evidence that includes "other relevant information or expert opinion." Establishing cultural affiliation must include the reasonable use of these evidentiary lines, and must show that a preponderance of the evidence supports the affiliation claim. We can spend months on these criteria, and as anthropologists we should, because these guidelines form the foundation for any working dialogue and collaboration between Native communities and the archaeological community. Multiple, cooperative perspectives on how identity is constituted will help avoid our beginning with an already limited frame of reference. This requires true collaboration between experts, including Native Americans, archaeologists, and historians. The final portion of this paper describes ongoing research that emphasizes collaboration among mUltiple research directions to investigate cultural affiliation links between past and present Pueblo peoples in the Southwest.
Engaged Anthropology
12
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Figure 2.1. Location of Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo, Bernalillo County, New Mexico.
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Ancestry and Identity at Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo This ongoing research conjoins archaeological, oral historical, and traditional knowledge to better understand the processes through which anthropologists and indigenous groups construct the concept of cultural affiliation and subsequently employ it in research, legal, and social contexts. The research collaboration focuses on a large ancestral Pueblo village, Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo (LA 578), located on a private ranch 36 km west of Albuquerque, New Mexico (Fig. 2.1). The settlement, occupied about A.D. 1250-1450, was home to 500-1,000 people at the height of its occupation in the late 1300s. The site was vacated by about A.D. 1450, and at least a portion of the site occupants likely migrated to other settlements in the region. It is significant that this privately owned archaeological site has not been part of any land, water, or aboriginal use area claim; it is basically a settlement without an established cultural affiliation identity. Because our research is not associated with any extant legal proceedings or repatriation claims, and because it is being conducted on private lands, there is no issue of who gets what at the end of the day.
Why Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo? Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo's location and occupation history make this site a very appropriate place to investigate concepts of cultural affiliation for several reasons. First, several contemporary Pueblos with potential ancestral ties to Chaves-Hummingbird are located in the region, including Acoma, Laguna, Zuni, Isleta, and Sandia Pueblo. Second, the site is on the boundary between two archaeological culture areas. To the west is the Acoma archaeological culture province, a regional constellation of archaeological settlements that Dittert (1959) and Ruppe (1990 [1953]) identified based on similarities in ceramic assemblages and settlement layout. To the east are the ancestral pueblo settlements of the Central Rio Grande archaeological culture area (Cordell 1979), a string of large villages located next to the floodplain of the Rio Grande. Finally, the main occupation of the site coincides with major regional abandonments and migrations documented in the archaeological record of the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. This was a time during which ancestral Nati ve American groups undertook "significant and far-reaching transformations in land and resource use" (Tainter and Tainter 1996:28). Large-scale changes in village size, layout, and the overall extent of ancestral Pueblo occupation of the Southwest target this period as a likely context for ethnogenesis and regional ethnic group differentiation (Duff 2002). Archaeological investigations over the past several years indicate extensive and deep archaeological deposits at the site, which allow for stratigraphically based interpretations of the site's occupation history. These deposits contain a wide range of artifact classes, including artifacts that are clearly from outside the locality, indicating interaction with non local groups. Finally, surface and subsurface remains of architecture show two distinct styles in different parts of the site, possibly due to the integration of non local groups into the settlement during the site's occupation. The main feature of the site is a rubble mound of fallen masonry architecture rising up to six meters (19.8 feet) above the surrounding landscape (Fig. 2.2). A single bulldozer
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Engaged Anthropology
Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo (LA 578) adobe surface room
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Figure 2.2. Aerial photo of Chave -Hummingbird Pueblo howing Main Mound and locations of the north and ea t roomblock .
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trench cuts through the rubble-covered mound, an unfortunate legacy of an early owner of the site. Test excavations in the bulldozer trench exposed cultural deposits as deep as eight meters in this part of the site. Archaeological Indications of Identity at Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo
Archaeological evidence suggests multiple ethnic groups may have coresided at ChavesHummingbird Pueblo. There are diverse contemporaneous architectural styles at the site. Surface clearance work in 1998 and 1999 uncovered and mapped the northern roomblock of approximately 70 surface rooms on the north side of the site, most a single story tall (Fig. 2.3). These structures define a large plaza area, with a probable opening on the northeast corner of the room complex. Floor area for rooms in the northern roomblock, as estimated by the tops of adobe walls mapped in 1999, range from 4.4 to 14.5 m 2 , averaging 6.9 m2 (S.D. = 1.68 m 2). Several rooms in this complex have been excavated (Adler 2002b). The surface clearance program recently expanded to encompass a new set of adobe rooms on the eastern side of Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo (Fig. 2.3). This complex, the eastern roomblock, shares some similarities to the northern roomblock, but is also distinctive in several ways. Like those in the northern roomblock, all of the original surface structure walls in the eastern complex are of coursed adobe construction. Unlike the northern roomblock which is two to three rooms wide, the eastern complex of rooms is nearly triple that in terms of the number of rooms that separate the plaza from the exterior of the roomblock. Both roomblocks surround a well-defined plaza, but the plaza of the northern roomblock covers roughly 1,500 m2 , while the eastern roomblock plaza covers only about 170 m2 , about 12% the size of the northern plaza. The sizes of rooms in the two complexes are also consistently different. Eastern roomblock structures average 15% less floor area per room than surface rooms in the northern roomblock. A total of 95 rooms in the eastern roomblock yielded sufficient wall exposure to allow an estimate of floor area. These eastern roomblock surface rooms ranged between 2.5-13.2 m2 , with an average floor area of 5.8 m2 (S.D. = 1.6 m2 ). These differences could be one result of population immigration that brought the builders - groups with historically different construction and architectural layout traditions - of the two complexes into co-residence. Architectural variations in construction fabrics, use of space, overall village layout and other differences in built space have been noted by southwestern archeologists for decades (Baldwin 1987; Cameron 1995, 1998; Gann 1996; Judd 1916; Kidder 1924). These differences have often been attributed to the movement of ancestral peoples and associated technological traditions. Cameron's (1998) review of the distribution of coursed adobe architecture, for example, led her to propose that this architectural fabric may have served as an emblemic style associated with the kachina religious belief system. Cameron (1998:205) readily admits to complications with this possible relationship, including timing differences in the spread to coursed adobe architecture and kachina iconography across the northern Southwest, as well as the lack of kachina imagery in the Hohokam region, one of the earliest regional manifestations of adobe architecture. Consistent with most archaeological studies of ethnic difference and possible material cor-
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Engaged Anthropology
n
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Figure 2.3. Architectural details of the adobe rooms in the north and east roomblocks.
Collaborative Knowledge-Adler
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relates, Cameron stresses the complicated interaction of material culture and group identity, cautioning against expectations for strong synchronic correlations between technological strategies, complex patterns of population integration and disintegration, and group identities across the ancestral landscapes of the southwest. Despite these challenges, we still must contemplate and test various explanations for patterned variations in technological choices at sites such as Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo. For example, the possibility that differences in construction and use of residential and plaza space relate to social group differences may also help explain variations in adobe composition uncovered at the site. Chemical analyses of adobe at Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo indicate that residential groups in the eastern roomblock used different "recipes" in the fabrication of adobe architecture at the site, due possibly to variations in building technology that the migrants brought to the settlement (Balsam, Adler and Deaton 2005). Three main adobe recipes were identified through diffuse reflectance spectrophotometry. Each correlates with bonding and abutting patterns evident in the exposed wall tops. Though we need additional samples (only 49% of the 95 rooms are analyzed), the data support the possibility that different construction episodes were undertaken using distinct mixes of adobe clay and organic materials. Further Evidence of Difference? Ceramic Wares at Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo
A significant number of local and nonlocal ceramic wares have been identified in the archaeological assemblage at Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo. Though we are still tabulating data from the 2003 and 2004 field seasons, initial patterns indicate that several of the nonlocal wares come primarily from the south and west with one such type, leddito Yellow ware, coming from the Hopi Mesas over 320 km to the west. As Duff (2002) notes in his recent consideration of ceramic evidence for social group differences in Western Pueblo region, we should not be misled into equating ceramic ware traditions with "ethnicity" or "cultural identity," given the transmission of ceramic technological knowledge within and between regional populations. At the same time, exchange of ceramic wares is a robust means of assessing the "connectivity" of various local and regional populations. If this settlement was home to one or more migrant groups, the newcomers may well have brought with them technologies and long-lasting ties to exchange partners in other areas beyond the Rio Puerco drainage. Bernardini has recently shown that similar dynamics influenced the spatial organization of ceramic exchange between ancestral Hopi communities in eastern Arizona, as well as the distribution of rock art motifs across the region of ancestral Hopi migrations (Bernardini 2005). Zedeno's (1994, 1998) analysis of ceramic technological traditions also highlights the explanatory value of comparing ancestral migration accounts and various material correlates of group mobility. In sum, archaeological evidence at Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo indicates that the site's occupation history did involve the integration of local and nonlocal ancestral Pueblo peoples, all of whom left the site some time before the end of the fifteenth century. But this is only half the story. The other half requires perspectives from contemporary Native American communities regarding the relevance of archaeological and ethnographic data to their own understanding of the past.
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Engaged Anthropology Collaborative Research at Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo
This site is an appropriate place to better understand cultural affiliation given its present affiliation "anonymity." Toward these ends, a group comprising archaeologists, ethnologists, historians and Native American cultural resource specialists2 has begun a multiyear collaboration to better understand where our respective concepts of cultural affiliation coincide, and where they differ. The guiding concept of this NSF-supported project is to use the settlement and its surrounding cultural landscape to start and sustain a long-term discussion of the intersection of ethnic identity, cultural affiliation and archaeology. During July and August 2004, individuals from Acoma, Laguna, Hopi and Zuni, chosen by their own communities for their traditional knowledge, joined us to investigate the various ways in which archaeology and traditional knowledge inform on past and present group identities. These four communities joined the collaborative effort not only because each has potential ties of affiliation within the region, but also because each has a strong cultural resource advisory program that was prepared to participate in the research. 3 All parties involved in this initial collaboration understand that other tribes and communities also may be affiliated with the site; our long-range plans will include other potentially affiliated communities. Each Pueblo cultural resource advisory team spent two days visiting the archaeological site and nearby shrines and rock art locations, and looking at artifacts from the site. Each team visit was conducted separately to discuss the criteria that were, and were not, pertinent in discerning evidence of cultural affiliation. We presented archaeological patterning and interpretation throughout the visit. It was made clear at the outset that the purpose of the collaboration was not to come to some sort of final agreement about who was affiliated and who was not. The research collaboration focused on the process of assessing affiliation claims, and determining what questions were useful, what evidence was irrelevant, and to what extent individuals and groups involved concurred on the utility of various lines of affiliation evidence. Our discussions were purposefully open-ended, spanning different social, temporal and spatial scales. At the local level we visited the site, discussed the motifs found in the rock art panels located near the site, and hiked to several possible shrine features surrounding the settlement. On the regional level we discussed migration histories and traditional oral historical accounts of relationships between the site and sacred locations in and around the Rio Puerco and Rio Grande drainages. Participating teams also spent a full day at the Maxwell Museum at the University of New Mexico, viewing and discussing archaeological materials recently excavated from Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo. At the end of each field and museum collaboration, each group of experts was asked whether there were cultural affiliation ties that linked their tribe to the ancestral occupants of Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo. If the answer was "yes," each was asked to identify the "past identifiable group" with which they were affiliated. A significant amount of time was spent discussing the various lines of evidence that each individual brought to bear on the question of identity and affiliation. Collaborators are currently synthesizing the discussions and findings, frequently communicating with the participants to check, refine and elaborate on potentially important findings and interpretations. Each Pueblo collaborative group and tribal advisors will be given a copy
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of the report detailing their affiliation research collaboration findings, with the understanding that individual participants can exclude information shared during the visit that should not be publicly divulged in the final published reports. During late 2005 the collaborators will convene for a three-day meeting at Southern Methodist University's research campus in Taos, New Mexico. This will allow the group as a whole to consider the overall findings of the research. We expect that discussions will require revisions of our cultural affiliation findings and recommendations for continued collaboration on the methods and concepts involved in affiliation research. Finally, we will collaborate on a book-length volume detailing each pueblo's perspectives on both specific and general aspects of cultural affiliation. A complete archive of research data will be provided for each participating pueblo community, including field notes, GIS data, photographs, report drafts, and summary statements relating to that community's involvement in the project.
Affiliation Findings: Shared Histories and Landscapes Because we are still compiling the specific data from each collaborative working session, only general observations are possible at this point. But even the general observations illustrate the complexities that surround collaborative research into cultural affiliation. Not surprisingly, each group did find support for cultural affiliation ties linking the occupants of Chaves-Hummingbird to their respective tribe. The criteria on which the affiliation ties rested varied in social scale and specificity of evidence. For example, Acoma representatives recognized a close affiliation between modern day Acoma and the site occupants, referring to the past group who occupied Chaves-Hummingbird as "grandfathers and grandmothers."4 According to the Acoma collaborators, the most conclusive evidence of ancestral Acoma use of the area resided in the form and location of the nearby shrines, traditional songs that described the site locale, traditional land-use practices, and rock art motifs. Certain artifacts from the site, including glaze-painted motifs on bowls from the site, also figured into individual and cultural resource team understandings of the links between the site and modern Acoma, although to a lesser extent. In the end, however, the Acoma collaborators put the issue very simply by emphasizing that they were aware of additional specific ties between their people and the Chaves-Hummingbird ancestors, but were not allowed to divulge more because of the sacred nature of the information. s Other groups were more specific about the linkages with past groups. For example, the consensus among the Zuni experts was that only a small ancestral component of the larger Zuni society appears to have been part of the occupation at Chaves-Hummingbird. This group is a named medicine society at Zuni today, and its presence was indicated in rock art motifs and shrine locations near Chaves-Hummingbird. 6 Oral traditions also identify this society as having migrated through the Rio Puerco drainage at some point in the past. Artifactual and architectural evidence from the site was of interest to the Zuni experts, but did not figure into their own identification of cultural affiliation linkages as heavily as shrines, oral history and rock art motifs. The ways "evidence" and "data" are used in these various arguments point to an important facet of cultural identity mentioned earlier. The Acoma team's response to our request
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Engaged Anthropology
for specific information was clear: in order for traditional knowledge to remain traditional and therefore effective, it could not be shared with non-Acoma individuals. Identification with ancestral places, peoples and events was and is essential to the internal integrity of the Acoma people. In that regard, their identity does not hinge on the agreement or disagreement of external groups on the matter; rather, it necessitates a degree of secrecy. As explained by team members from Acoma, the secrecy is not intended to convey a lack of respect for what other groups or individuals may think about Acoma identity and ancestry, but is intended to honor those people in Acoma, past and present, who serve as the stewards of this important legacy. This kind of stewardship of cultural resources differs from that espoused in the professional ethics of archaeology. The Society for American Archaeology code of ethics charges us with responsible stewardship of cultural resources, including full public disclosure of our research findings, interpretations and associated data. Our scientific inquiry requires that we share any and all pertinent information, not only so that others can assess the strength of our ideas but also because much of our support, funding, and archaeological resources derive from public (federal and state) contexts. This stewardship can and should coexist with the stewardship of traditional knowledge held by leaders and specialists within each tribal community. This research has also illuminated the shared nature of cultural identity and affiliation. None of the Native groups or individuals was bothered by fact that the other pueblos had also asserted affiliation ties to the site. In fact, each group fully expected that to be the case given the rich traditional history of migration, integration, and disintegration that exists at all four pueblos involved in this research. The interconnected histories of these and other pueblos is a reality of the southwestern cultural landscape.
Conclusions In the spirit of Richard Ford's ethnoscience, the research summarized here seeks multiple avenues of inquiry to better understand the linkages of past and present. In the contentious landscape of the Southwest, where resources such as productive lands and water are sometimes scarce, rules of precedence often determine who controls those resources. Thus, ties of cultural affiliation that link present to past groups playa large role in the granting and recognition of legal rights. Coming to a more nuanced understanding of how various stakeholders constitute their identity is essential; otherwise, dialogue simply turns into endemic misunderstanding. Our goal is to provide a diversity of voices in this debate, and at the same time, share in the negotiation of the strengths and weaknesses inherent in interpreting cultural affiliation. This research partnership is not unique. We are guided by recent innovative projects (Ferguson 200 I, 2002; Ferguson and Anyon 2001; Ferguson and Lomaomvaya 1999; Ferguson et al. 2004) that emphasize not only our need for a more informed conceptualization of cultural affiliation, but also the necessity to balance our theorizing with the views of descendant groups. As should be evident, our collaborative research at Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo will not result in a singular or unequivocal cultural affiliation between the site and one con-
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temporary tribal entity. The villagers that called Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo home were likely a multiethnic mix, a constellation of affiliations that, if investigated carefully and from multiple perspectives, will provide insights into how identity was asserted in the past. At the same time, the research pays particular attention to the lines of evidence that we, in the present, use to address historical links between modern Native American communities and the site.
Notes 1. I use the term "anthropologist" in those cases where both cultural anthropologists and archaeologists are involved. I try to reserve the more specific "archaeologist" label to those cases in which methods and concepts specific to the archaeology subfield are being utilized. 2. The primary research contacts for the research team include Michael Adler (SMU), James Brooks (SAR), Susan Bruning (SMU), Alfred (Ed) Dittert, Jr. (ASU emeritus), TJ. Ferguson (Anthropological Research, LLC), Peter Whiteley (American Museum of Natural History), and members of cultural resource advisory teams from Acoma, Hopi, Laguna, and Zuni Pueblos (names available on request). 3. Earlier affiliation research at Chaves-Hummingbird brought experts from Isleta Pueblo as well as the Navajo Nation to the site. These visits provided much of the impetus for this expanded, long-term research project. 4. "Papa" and "Nana" respectively. 5. Personal communication, Fidel Lorenzo, Acoma Cultural Resource Advisory Team, June 2005. 6. The specific identification of the group in print will have to await the permission of the Zuni Cultural Resource Advisory Team and related elders in 2006. .
References Cited Adler, Michael A. 1993 Why is a kiva? Recent research into pit structure use and function in the northern Rio Grande, New Mexico. Journal of Anthropological Research 49: 18-27. 2001 Report of Investigations at Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo. Report submitted to the Center for Field Research, Earthwatch Institute. Copy on file at SMU Department of Anthropology. 2002a Archaeological Research at Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo (LA 578), Bernalillo County, New Mexico, The 2002 Field Season. Report submitted to the State of New Mexico in accordance with Annual Excavation Permit. Copy in possession of the author. 2002b Architecture and Ancestral Pueblo Migrations: Recent Research at Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo (LA 578). Paper presented at the Pecos Archaeological Conference, August, 2002. Pecos, New Mexico. Adler, Michael A. (editor) 1996 The Prehistoric Pueblo World, AD. 1100-1300. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Anyon, Roger, T.J. Ferguson, Loretta Jackson, Lille Lane, and Philip Vicenti 1997 Native American oral tradition and archaeology, issues of structure, relevance, and respect. In Native Americans and Archaeologists, Stepping Stones to Common Ground, edited by Nina Swidler, Kurt Dongoske, Roger Anyon, and Alan Downer, pp. 77-87. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press.
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Baldwin, Stuart J. 1987 Roomsize patterns: a quantitative method for approaching ethnic identification in architecture. In Ethnicity and Culture, edited by R. Auger, M. Glass, S. MacEachern, and P.B. McCartney, pp. 163-74. Calgary: The University of Calgary Archaeological Association. Balsam, Bill, Michael Adler, and Robert Deaton 2005 Analysis of adobe wall composition at the Chaves-Hummingbird site, NM, by diffuse reflectance spectrophotometry. Manuscript. Bandelier, Adolph 1892 Final Report of Investigations among the Indians of the Southwestern United States, Carried Out Mainly in the Yearsjrom 1880 to 1885, Part II. Papers of the Archaeological Institute of America, American Series IV. Cambridge, MA: John Wilson and Son. Banks, Marcus 1996 Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions. London: Routledge. Barth, Frederik (editor) 1969 Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Bentley, G. Carter 1987 Ethnicity and practice. Comparative Studies in Society and History 29( 1):24-55. Bernardini, Wesley 2005 Reconsidering spatial and temporal aspects of prehistoric cultural identity: a case study from the American Southwest. American Antiquity 70( 1):31-54. Boas, Franz 1940 Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan. Bond, G.c., and A. Gilliam (editors) 1994 Social Construction of the Past: Representation as Power. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977 Outline of the Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1990 The Logic of Practice, translated by R. Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cameron, Catherine 1995 Migration and the movement of southwestern people. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 14: 104-24. 1998 Coursed adobe architecture, style, and social boundaries in the American Southwest. In The Archaeology of Social Boundaries, edited by Miriam Stark, pp. 183-207. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Cohen, Ronald 1978 Ethnicity: problem and focus in anthropology. In Annual Review of Anthropology 7, edited by Bernard Siegal, Alan Beals, and Stephen Tyler. Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews, Inc.
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Cushing, Frank H. 1896 Outlines of Zuni creation myths. In Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1891-92, by J.w. Powell, pp. 321447. Washington, DC.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Dittert, Alfred 1959 Culture Change in the Cebolleta Mesa Region, Central Western New Mexico. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson. Dongoske, Kurt E., Michael Yeatts, Roger Anyon, and T.1. Ferguson 1997 Archaeological cultures and cultural affiliation: Hopi and Zuni perspectives in the American Southwest. American Antiquity 62(4):600-608. Duff, Andrew 2002 Western Pueblo Identities: Regional Interaction, Migration, and Transformation. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Eckelt, Suzanne 2003 Migration and Population Dynamics in the Middle Rio Plierco. Dissertation, Arizona State University, Tempe. Eriksen, T. 1991 The cultural contexts of ethnic differences. Man 26: 127 -44. Ferguson, T.1. 200 I Ethnographic Study of Nine Tribes: Cultural Affiliation with the Uinta and Great Salt Lake Variants of Fremont. Prepared for Upper Colorado Regional Office, Bureau of Reclamation, Salt Lake City. 2002 Academic, Legal, and Political Contexts of Social Identity and Cultural Affiliation Research in the Southwest. Paper presented at the Southwest Symposium, Tucson, Arizona, January 11,2002. Ferguson, TJ., and Roger Anyon 200 I Hopi and Zuni cultural landscapes: implications of history and scale for cultural resources management. In Native Peoples of the Southwest: Negotiating Land, Water, and Ethnicities, edited by Laurie Weinstein, pp. 99-122. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Ferguson, TJ., C. Colwell-Chanthaphonh, and R. Anyon 2004 One valley, many histories: Tohono O'odham, Hopi, Zuni, and Western Apache history in the San Pedro Valley. Archaeology Southwest 18( 1). Center for Desert Archaeology, Tucson. Ferguson, T.J., and Micah Lomaomvaya 1999 Hoopoq'yaqam niqw WukosA:yavi (Those Who Went to the North and Tonto Basin), HopiSalado Cultural Affiliation Study. Kykotsmovi, Arizona: Hopi Cultural Preservation Office. Fewkes, Jesse W. 1900 Tusayan migration traditions. In Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1897-98, Part 2, by J.W. Powell, pp. 573-633. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
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Fried, Morton 1968 On the concepts of "tribe" and "tribal society." In Essays on the Problem of the Tribe, edited by June Helm, pp. 3-22. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Gann, Douglas 1996 The use of adobe architecture in the Homol'ovi region. In River of Change: Prehistory of the Middle Little Colorado River Valley, Arizona, edited by E. Charles Adams, pp. 93-106. Arizona State Museum Archaeological Series 185. Arizona State Museum, Tucson. Geertz, Clifford 1963 The integrative revolution: primordial sentiments and civil politics in the new states. In Old Societies and New States, edited by C. Geertz, pp. 105-57. New York: The Free Press. Goldberg, Carole 1999 Acknowledging the repatriation claims of unacknowledged California tribes. In Contemporary Native American Political Issues, edited by Troy R. Johnson, pp. 275-80. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. Isaacs, H. 1974 Basic group identity: idols of the tribe. Ethnicity I: 15-41. Jenkins, Richard 1996 Social Identity. London and New York: Routledge. Jones, Sian 1997 The Archaeology of Ethnicity, Constructing Identities in the Past and Present. London: Routledge. Judd, Neil M. 1916 The Use of Adobe in Prehistoric Dwellings of the Southwest. Holmes Anniversary Volume, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Kidder, Alfred V. 1924 An Introduction to the Study of Southwestern Archaeology with a Preliminary Account of the Excavations at Pecos. Published for the Department of Archaeology, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA. New Haven: Yale University Press. McKay, 1. 1982 An exploratory synthesis of primordial and mobilizationist approaches to ethnic phenomena. Ethnic and Racial Studies 5(4):395-420. Moerman, Michael 1965 Ethnic identification in a complex civilization: who are the Lue? American Anthropologist 67(5): 1215-30. NAGPRA 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Public Law 101-60 I (November 16,1990); 25 United States Code 3001 et seq.
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0lzak, Susan 1992 The Dynamics oj Ethnic Competition and Conflict. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Ruppe, Reynold 1990 The Acoma Culture Province: An Archaeological Concept. Reprint. New York: Garland Publishing. Originally presented as the author's Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1953. Sapir, Edward 1921 Language: An Introduction to the Study oj Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Shennan, Stephen (editor) 1989 Archaeological Approaches to Cultural Identity. London: Unwin Hyman. Shils, Edward A. 1957 Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology. Selected Papers oj Edward Shits, Vol. II, pp. 111-26. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Smith, Anthony D. 1986 The Ethnic Origins oj Nations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Spicer, Edward 1980 The Yaqui: A Cultural History. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Spier, Leslie 1917 An outline for a chronology of Zuni ruins. Anthropological Papers oj the American Museum oj Natural History 18(3):207-331. Stack,1.F. 1986 Ethnic mobilization in world politics: the primordial perspective. In The Primordial Challenge: Ethnicity in the Contemporary World, edited by J.F. Stack, pp. I-II. London: Greenwood Press. Tainter, Joseph A., and Bonnie Bagley Tainter 1996 Riveline settlement in the evolution of prehistoric Jand-use systems in the Middle Rio Grande Valley, New Mexico. In Desired Future Conditions jor Southwestern Riparian Ecosystems: Bringing Interests and Concerns Together. USDA Forest Service, General Technical Report RM-GTR-272. Vincent, 1. 1974 The structuring of ethnicity. Human Organization 33(4):375-79. Watkins, Joe 2000 Indigenous Archaeology, American Indian Values and Scientific Practice. Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press. Whiteley, Peter M. 1998 Rethinking Hopi Ethnography. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. 2002 Archaeology and oral tradition: the scientific importance of dialogue. American Antiquity 67(3):405-16.
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Zedeno, Maria Nieves 1994 Sourcing Prehistoric Ceramics at Chodistaas Pueblo, Arizona: The Circulation of People and Pots in the Grasshopper Region. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 1998 Defining material correlates for ceramic circulation in the prehistoric Puebloan Southwest. Journal of Anthropological Research 54(3):461-76. Zenner, Walter 1988 Common ethnicity/separate identities: interaction among Jewish immigrant groups. In Cross Cultural Adaptations, edited by Y.Y. Kim and W. Gudykunst. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publishing. 1996 Ethnicity. In Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 2, edited by D. Levinson and M. Ember. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
3
Our Father (Our Mother) Gender Ideology, Praxis, and Marginalization in Pueblo Religion Severin M Fowles Columbia University
Is Pueblo religion best characterized as egalitarian or hierarchical with respect to gender relations? In the following paper, I argue that any answer to this question must first distinguish between the ideology of gender and the praxis of gender. Among the Pueblos, for instance, the former typically asserts an ethic of equality or complementarity, while the latter often reveals marked inequalities in gendered access to religious power and leadership. Using the Northern Tiwa as my central example, I examine how these two seemingly contradictory patterns evolved, suggesting that the cooption of female symbolism and power by male ritualists during the Pueblo IV period was facilitated by progressive marginalization of actual women from the religious sphere.
Pueblo religion presents us with an intriguing contradiction. On one hand, native commentary on the nature of gender relations within the ritual realm is suffused with a profound ethic of gender complementarity, a conviction that both men's and women's participation in religion is crucial to the successful propitiation of the spirit world. Rarely is greater value placed on one gender or the other. When this does occur, however, emphasis is typically on the power of femininity, female symbolism, and women's reproductive capabilities (e.g., Schlegel 1990:31), and some scholars have used this observation to argue that Pueblo religion fosters true gender equality in social life (e.g., Jacobs 1995; Schlegel 1977, 1990; Young 1987). On the other hand, obvious gender inequalities simultaneously exist in access to priestly leadership, participation in group ritual, and religiopolitical decision-making. In all the historic Pueblos, for example, men not only held different religious roles than women; they held vastly more, and more culturally valued, roles (Bunzel 1992:542-44; Parsons 1996:40, passim). Indeed, those female leaders that did exist within the religious system typically served to support male ritual, carrying out directives made by men. True, women in all communities had their ways of "influencing" -as it is often put- the male priests, but the indirectness of this influence merely highlights a larger pattern of female religious marginalization.
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Engaged Anthropology
How are we to understand this contradiction? Is Pueblo religion best characterized as egalitarian or hierarchical with respect to gender relations? Of course, the latter question is far too simplistic as stated. The historic Pueblos were and are a congeries of diverse communities, some primarily matrilineal and others patrilineal, and one cannot expect that gender emerged similarly in the religious traditions of each. Furthermore, as an important recent survey (Crown 2000; see also Howell 1995) has demonstrated, there are strong indications that gender roles changed substantially throughout prehistory in the American Southwest. Any answer, therefore, must be qualified in time and space. There are deeper issues to confront as well. As Babcock (1988:375; see also Hays-Gilpin 2000a:91-92; Maltz and Archambault 1995:234) emphasizes, for instance, we must remain alert to the critical distinction between the ideology of gender (i.e., the cultural models of femaleness/maleness), and the praxis of gender (i.e, the actual actions or possibilities for action of gendered individuals). It may be that in the past, as in the present, female deities were venerated, that group rituals were centered on fertility following a female model, and that balance between male and female was a cosmological imperative; however, such tenets of Pueblo religious ideology do not speak directly to the situation of real women within particular fields of action. We know that among some village-level societies, cultural models (typically male, but in some cases shared by both genders) of the enormous power of female reproduction have been used to justify the exclusion of women from group decision-making and ritual praxis (e.g., Godelier 1986:144). Women may thus be both powerful and disempowered, embodied contradictions between ideology and praxis. The tendency to speak of a single ideology of gender within a given Pueblo community creates further complications. All societies have variously authored gender ideologies (Meigs 1990), some of which may be hegemonic within particular spheres (religiopolitics, the household, trade, warfare, etc.), others counterhegemonic, and still others exist simply as noncompeting alternatives (Ortner 1996:146). Students of Puebloan religion typically examine male-authored ideologies because men were the principal (often the only) informants employed by early ethnographers and because both genders historically have viewed religious knowledge as a male preoccupation. But this is not to say that female-authored ideologies do not also exist. Furthermore, it is likely that even male-authored ideologies of gender were internally diverse and lacked a unified model of maleness/femaleness. As multiple ideologies are constructed to suit varying social contexts, men may come to regard women and femininity as powerful and ineffectual, superior and inferior, pure and impure, and so on. (Needless to say, women may have equally complex views of men and masculinity.) From this perspective, the seemingly contradictory views of Pueblo religion-as fostering gender equality or inequality - become explicable: they inhere in the web of gender ideologies and actions within Pueblo communities themselves. In this essay I focus on one portion of this web and examine how gender inequalities in religious ideology and praxis were constructed by men over time among the Northern Tiwa Pueblos of north-central New Mexico. I argue that the progressive marginalization of female praxis from religiopolitics was a primary means by which men institutionalized and enhanced a male hierarchy through which they competed with other men-using, in part, appropriated female symbols. In other words, religiopolitical marginalization and the gender ideologies that buttressed it were probably not "about" the subjugation of Northern
Our Father (Our Mother)-Fowles
29
Tiwa women by men; I propose that they were instead about competition within an intragender field of male action that existed separately and alongside models of greater equality at a broader level. Following a review of certain salient gender patterns within historic Northern Tiwa religion, I tum to the archaeological record to explore how and why these patterns may have developed.
Gender and Religion among the Historic Northern Tiwa The little we currently know about gender patterns in historic Northern Tiwa religion is derived from twentieth-century ethnographic work at Taos Pueblo and to a lesser extent Picuris Pueblo, the two contemporary Northern Tiwa-speaking villages (e.g., Brandt 1980; Brown 1973, 1979, 1999; Parsons 1936, 1939; Smith 1967; Stevenson n.d.). From this work-which, while primarily undertaken by female anthropologists, was almost entirely based upon interviews with male informants-we have learned that the historic Northern Tiwa were like most other Pueblo groups in the sense that women were excluded from much ritual praxis and essentially all positions of religious authority. Importantly, the Northern Tiwa may have been somewhat extreme in their tendency toward female exclusion. Parsons (1936:80) concluded that "compared with the ceremonial organization of other pueblos women are notably omitted from the ceremonial organization of Taos." This is not to say that women did not take part in the ritual life of the community at all: girls were able, in fact, to join kivas (or, more accurately, they were able to be dedicated to kivas by their fathers), and for certain ceremonies the presence of women even appears to have been a ritual necessity (e.g., Stevenson n.d.: File 2.3). However, most female participation in kiva ritual was clearly limited to cleaning, food preparation, and dancing at the behest of male priests (Stevenson n.d.: File 2.32, passim). The only documented rituals performed autonomously by women- beyond individualistic acts such as private offerings-occurred following the birth of a child, at which time the mother and another supervisory woman worshiped the morning star on the newborn's behalf at the river's edge (Stevenson n.d.: File 3.11). This exception aside, it remains the case that no group rituals undertaken solely by women without male supervision and direction have been recorded at either of the two Northern Tiwa pueblos. Women, in other words, were marginalized with respect to most collective forms of ceremonialism. This pattern is particularly evident in the learning of archaic ceremonial languages, needed by both men and women to fulfill particular ritual functions. Stevenson (n.d.: File 2.5) learned that women were taught these languages in the home on an informal, need-to-know basis: "Even the girls who belong to the estufas are taught the language in their homes." Men, on the other hand, were taught ceremonial languages in highly formalized group contexts as part of their kiva initiation, which involved up to nineteen months of seclusion to receive religious training in isolation from women (Bodine 1979:262; Stevenson n.d.: File 3.14). (Women did not have any comparable kiva initiation.) Female ritual marginalization was further abetted by the fact that many sacred words were shrouded in gendered taboos - such words, Stevenson (n.d.: File 3.14) was told, were "too precious to be spoken by the lips of a woman." Parsons (1936:46) found this situation to apply more broadly. Women at Taos
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Pueblo "do not know the traditions" but were mere suppliers of cornmeal, or so she was told by her male informants. To what degree must we view this situation as one of inequality? Following a review of comparable patterns among the Western Pueblos, Young offers one possible answer: "It is a biased [i.e., androcentric] perspective," she argues, "that sees the role of women in religious practice as insignificant because they do not participate publicly" (1987:437). Young emphasizes that male ritual life at Hopi and Zuni is, in fact, centered on fertility following a/emale model (see also Babcock 1988:373-74; Haeberlin 1916), and she suggests that this represents men's effort to develop for themselves, through ritual, "the natural ability to be fecund that women are born with," an effort, in other words, to "repair male defects" (1987:440). Women, she concludes, do not take part in public ritual because they have no need. Thus, Young finds no evidence of significant female disempowerment or inequality within Western Pueblo religious systems. Young, no doubt, would have arrived at a similar conclusion had she been working among the historic Northern Tiwa pueblos. There too, male ritual drew heavily upon female reproductive symbolism. Like the Western Pueblos, the Northern Tiwa pantheon contained numerous important deities of both genders including female as well as male katsinas (t'Hichina or "rain-makers") and Black Eyes spirits (Stevenson n.d.: Files 2.18 and 3.1). The most important of the female deities, and the focus of much ritual energy, was the Earth Mother. As argued below, however, Young's larger conclusion regarding gender, religion, and power poorly explains the case at hand. Again, the key difference is between ideology and praxis, and with respect to the latter one must acknowledge that actual Northern Tiwa women-however much their counterparts in the supernatural realm were venerated-neither authored nor had any direct control over the shape of their community's ceremonial life. Perhaps most women really felt no need to enter into the priestly hierarchy or learn the community's core religious secrets, as Young suggests. The more important point is that women were granted no such option. If ritual praxis among the historic Northern Tiwa was marked by inequality, what of the hegemonic (i.e., male) gender ideology within the religious system? Most revealing is the fact that, at a general conceptual level, women were viewed solely as women whereas male priestly leaders were addressed as "our father our mother" (Parsons 1936:36), which is to say that "man," as a cultural category, subsumed "woman" without the reverse being true. A similar pattern has been recorded at many other pueblos in the Southwest (e.g., Babcock 1988:373; Lange 1979:381; Parsons 1996a: 159-60). Among the Tewa, close Tanoan relatives of the Northern Tiwa, for example, the spirits were asked at the time of a child's initiation to help "bring the girls to womanhood and the boys to manhood and womanhood" (Ortiz 1969:42, emphasis added). Interestingly, members of the "third gender" of the Pueblos, or "berdache," were necessarily also biological males who assumed a female way of life and were considered to embody the powers of both genders (Gutierrez 1991 :33-35,354, endnote 86). There was no comparable Pueblo tradition of a "fourth gender" in which a biological female assumed a male lifestyle (as was the case for the Athapaskan peoples ofthe Southwest and some other Native American groups), presumably because this would contradict the larger ideology of gender identity. Men could be women, but not women men.
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31
Gender inequality within the male-authored religious ideology also manifested itself at institutional levels. Consider the Ko'yukanna (or Kuyukana) society, a curing sodality at Taos Pueblo, whose membership symbolized the Com Mother. Despite being culturally coded as female, women were excluded from the society (Stevenson n.d.: File 3.1; Parsons 1936:76). The "Kiva of the Mother" - the seventh kiva at Taos in which resided the spirit of the Earth Mother herself and was thus regarded as a major community shrine (Stevenson n.d.: File 2.26; a.k.a. the "Disused Kiva" in Parsons 1936:96-97)- had similarly restricted access. "All the people are not privileged to enter the kiva of the 'Mother, ", reported Stevenson's informants, and from other mentions of the kiva's use it appears that the main class of individuals denied entry was women. A female space symbolically, but a male space in use: such an interpretation might also be made of all Northern Tiwa (and, indeed, all Pueblo) kivas, insofar as kivas were cognized as the sacred "wombs" of the community (see HaysGilpin and Hill 1999). Other examples of "the transcendental appropriation of the female principle" by men (Babcock 1988:373) have been explored in prehistoric Pueblo contexts elsewhere in the Southwest by Hays-Gilpin and her colleagues (Hays-Gilpin and Hill 1999; Robins and HaysGilpin 2000). For the time being, suffice it to say that the historic Northern Tiwa were part of this larger pattern and exhibited marked gender inequalities in the ritual sphere. Female symbolism was ideologically embraced and intricately woven into group ritual by men; female participation was not. In fact, there is some evidence that female power manifested in the actions of actual women -as opposed to female power that had been appropriated and "tamed" by men - was viewed as especially dangerous. During the treatment of injured males at Taos Pueblo, for example, bandages could never be made from articles of clothing worn by a woman; food consumed by injured males had to be prepared by a prepubescent virginal girl; and during the recovery period injured males were isolated from all females with the exception of a postmenopausal woman who would be permitted to bathe the victim and then quickly leave (Stevenson n.d.: File 4.9). All three of these prescriptions were presumably related to a fundamental belief that female reproductive power in the hands of women was dangerous and weakened men. Consider also Parsons' (1936:22) discussion of the obscene acts- genital exposure, urination, imitated copulation, and the like - women were expected to perform on or towards enemy scalps brought back to the community by male Taos warriors. "This was to take the power away [from the scalps] and make the enemies weak." Female sexuality wielded by women thus became an effective weapon of war, a danger that could be directed outward against the enemy, but that had to be carefully controlled and curtailed within the community. Cross-culturally, "danger," as Douglas (1966) emphasized, is also typically tied to notions of purity/impurity. Interesting, then, that Parsons (1936:40) was told at Taos: "Our parents say girls are the dittiest things." Let us keep in mind that these cultural patterns were primarily situated in the religious realm. At a broader social level the prevailing Northern Tiwa views of men and women tended to be much more egalitarian, particularly when the centrality of women to the household is considered. Of Taos, Bodine (1979:261) notes that "[o]lder males are accorded somewhat more respect than females; otherwise, the two sexes are generally equal, and inheritance of
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land, houses, and other property can occur from either," and at both Taos and Picuris the widespread Pueblo notion of gender complementarity and balance is commonly stressed in a general manner. Be that as it may, we still are left to contend with the undeniable patterns of gender inequality within Northern Tiwa religion. How and why did these patterns develop? This is an archaeological question, for as I argue below the critical gendering of Northern Tiwa religion-as it is known ethnographically, at least-largely occurred during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries A.D.
Prehistoric T I aitona Current archaeological evidence indicates that at the start of the thirteenth century A.D. the Taos District was occupied by a heterogeneous mix of long-term residents and recently arrived migrants who had entered the region as part ofthe dramatic settlement shifts following the dissolution of Chaco Canyon as a regional religiopolitical center (Fowles 2005). By the end of the thirteenth century, during what is locally referred to as the Talpa phase (A.D. 1260-1320), this core population had coalesced into three large and well-spaced villages: Cornfield Taos adjacent to modern Taos Pueblo, Picuris Pueblo in a more mountainous setting thirty kilometers to the south, and TaitCina (a.k.a. Pot Creek Pueblo) midway between the other two in the Rio Grande del Rancho Valley. Each probably housed three hundred or more people, and the spacing of the villages combined with the lack of evidence for occupation or use of the intervening landscape indicates that intersite relations were competitive and potentially violent (Fowles 2004b; Fowles et aI., in press). Of the three, serious research into the Talpa phase occupation has been conducted only at Taitona, which therefore serves as our sole window onto the early stage of Northern Tiwa development in the Taos District (Fig. 3.1). Taitona-or "People House" as the term is translated at Taos Pueblo-existed as an aggregated village for a mere three generations between A.D. 1260 and 1320 (Crown 1991), but during this brief period it was the nexus of numerous important economic and social developments including intensified agricultural practices, expanded household and suprahousehold (or residential block) units, and the adoption of a village-wide moiety system (Adler 2002; Arbolino 2001; Crown and Kohler 1994; Fowles 2004a, 2005). Gender relations within the social and economic spheres were undoubtedly also altered by these developments, but we currently have few means to investigate such changes directly. Somewhat more can be said regarding gender relations in the religious sphere. Community ceremonialism increased dramatically at TaitCina during the Talpa phase, as manifested in a suite of new architectural forms, ritual artifacts, shrines, and approaches to village planning (Fowles 2004a). Driven by models derived from historic gender relations, it is tempting to view these material changes as evidence of men's ascension to positions of ritual dominance. Beyond the potential interpretive pitfalls of so simplistic an imposition of the ethnographic present on the past, however, there are tangible reasons for concluding that ritual participation by women was, in fact, considerably greater during the Talpa phase than in historic times.
Our Father (Our Mother)-Fowles
(~
33
•
tl
•
GK
•
= Cupule boulder
• =Ground slick boulder D
=Large depression
K
....... N
K = Kiva GK = Great Kiva DK = D-shaped Kiva
• =Grinding room
o
10
20 meters
(koye)
Figure 3.1. Map ofTaitona (Pot Creek Pueblo) highlighting the rooms and surrounding features discussed in the text.
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Engaged Anthropology Gendered Shrines
The morphology and patterning of shrine features, for instance, are informative. A variety of rock shrines encircle T'aitona, ranging from simple elongated rocks set upright into the ground to large bermed rock circles. Viewed together, these features form a highly patterned shrine complex that was centered on the home village and, for this reason, are best interpreted as dating to the Talpa phase (see Fowles 2004a). Most rock shrines are currently impossible to associate with one or the other gender, in part because both men and women are ethnographically known to have used such shrines in the vicinity of Taos and Picuris pueblos. There are, however, two shrine types that permit us to explore the gendered nature of ritual during the Talpa phase more explicitly. One of these types consists of large boulders into which a series of cupules have been ground, each cupule being roughly five centimeters in diameter and one or two centimeters deep. Such cupule boulders are not known to have been part of historic ceremonialism at either Taos or Picuris (Ellis 1974; Donald Brown, pers. comm.), but they are a major element in the nearby shrine systems of the Tewa, the Northern Tiwa's close linguistic and cultural relati ves (e.g., Wendorf 1953:83). Of the significance of the Tewa's cupule boulders, Jeanc;on was told that, at certain times of the year, and during certain ceremonies, it was and still is the custom for women to go at daybreak and pound on the rocks to attract the attention of the "Sun god." The same rocks were always used, and that accounted for the holes. [Jean-~ ~
(NEW MEXICO)
~\
\
PLAINS \
CHIHUAHUA (
/'
(~__ IJ )
Figure 8.1. Location of Henderson Site and Bloom Mound in southeastern New Mexico.
During the Late Phase, which began in the early BOOs, several structures in the Main Bar were converted from domestic dwellings into storage facilities, and two large roomblocks, the East Bar and Center Bar, were added on, giving the village its final E-shaped layout. The community's orientation shifted from the north (and perhaps west) with a focus on the Great Depression, to the south (and perhaps east) with an earth oven complex in the East Plaza becoming the principal communal and ritual focus. The last portion of the village to be occupied appears to have been the East Bar, Henderson was finally abandoned sometime during the mid- to late fourteenth century, although sporadic visits to the hilltop location may have continued for some time thereafter. The villagers grew maize and other crops in fields along the floodplain of the Hondo, and collected a wide range of wild plants from the surrounding area as well as from the uplands to the west (Powell 2001). While maize was clearly an important crop, as burned cobs, cob fragments, and small numbers of kernels are nearly ubiquitous in the deposits of both phases (Dunavan 2004), its contribution to the villagers' diet was significantly less than at quasi-contemporary Puebloan communities like Pecos, Gran Quivira, and Hawikuh.
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Several lines of evidence point to this conclusion. First, Henderson's manos are crude, often massive, and utterly unstandardized, and most have only a single working surface. Second, the metates have very shallow, basin-shaped grinding surfaces, quite unlike the trough and slab forms so common elsewhere in the Southwest at the same time period (Hard et al. 1996; Speth et al. 2004). Third, carbon- and nitrogen-isotope signatures from Henderson's human skeletal remains (all dating to the Late Phase) indicate a modest dependence on C4 plants, maize very likely among them (Schoeninger 2004). Finally, Henderson's human dentitions display a low incidence of dental caries, more typical of hunter-gatherers than farmers (Rocek and Speth 1986). Henderson's heavy reliance on bison is one of the community's most striking features (Speth and Rautman 2004). Nearly one-quarter of all mammal remains found at the site are from this huge herbivore (ca. 4,100 bones). While the remains of medium ungulates, most of which are antelope, are slightly more numerous (4,700 bones), the fact that an adult pronghorn is less than 6% of the weight of a full-grown male bison indicates the tremendous contribution the latter made to Henderson's economy. While cottontails were numerically the most frequently hunted animals at Henderson (ca. 6,100 bones), it would take nearly 800 of these tiny animals to equal the weight of a single bison bull. It is sobering to note that the tremendous importance of bison would not have been evident had our excavations focused solely on Henderson's roomblocks. Bison remains in these parts of the site were quite scarce, particularly in the Late Phase. Only when we encountered the deposits in and around the earth oven complexes did the real importance of these animals become apparent. The bison bones that villagers transported back to the village were primarily of moderate to high utility (Speth 1983,2004), especially the upper hind limbs. The hunters apparently discarded most of the bones of the lower limbs and feet, many of the upper front-limb elements, and almost all of the skulls and pelves. This highly selective assemblage of body parts indicates that the hunters killed most of their bison quite far from the village, and focused their transport efforts on those parts of the carcasses, including marrow bones, that had high food value. Two-thirds of the bison brought back to the village were males, an indication that most if not all of the bison hunting was done in the spring (Speth 1983,2004). The scarcity or absence of fall and winter bison hunts strongly suggests that the herds had moved beyond the effective range of village hunters during these months of the year. Seasonality studies of other important animal taxa at Henderson, including antelope, cottontails, jackrabbits, prairie dogs, and catfish, suggest that most of these animals were procured during the spring, Summer, or early fall, raising the possibility that the village may have been abandoned after the harvest (Speth 2004). However, a number of the Early Phase dwellings in the Main Bar were converted into store rooms in the Late Phase. If the village had totally been abandoned for part of each year, these highly visible structures would have been easy targets for marauding strangers. Dried bison meat was extensively traded by the villagers. This is indicated by the fact that bison ribs and vertebrae, two elements frequently involved in the production of dried meat, were both sharply underrepresented at Henderson, much more so than their smaller and far more fragile counterparts in antelope and deer, ruling out a simple taphonomic explanation
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for their scarcity (Speth and Rautman 2004). Interestingly, bison bone assemblages from quasi-contemporary villages in the uplands west of the Pecos Valley are dominated by ribs and vertebrae, underscoring the probable importance of these anatomical units in regional and interregional exchange systems (Driver 1990; Spielmann, pers. comm.). One of the most fascinating discoveries at Henderson is the striking relationship between the body size of an animal resource and the abundance of its remains in domestic versus public contexts (Speth 2004). The larger the animal, the more likely it was processed, cooked, probably consumed, and then discarded in and around the massive earth oven complexes in the plazas. Moreover, significantly greater proportions of higher-utility limb elements of bison and jackrabbits, the only two animal resources that were communally hunted by the villagers, were processed and discarded in plaza areas. The concentration of larger animals, and of higher-utility body parts, in and around major earth oven complexes very likely reflects the fact that these areas of the village were the loci of repeated events of interhousehold, perhaps community-wide, meat sharing and feasting. Given the open and presumably very public nature of these cooking features, animals processed in them would have been highly visible to all members of the community and hence the ones most subject to the pressures and demands of sharing. Perhaps the most important discovery at Henderson, one that only became evident once we found that we could internally seriate the EI Paso Polychrome jar rims (Seaman and Mills 1988; Speth 2004), was the dramatic economic change that took place within the community during its comparatively brief existence. Bison hunting became far more important in the Late Phase, as evidenced by an increase in the overall density of both bison bones and projectile points in the younger deposits (Speth and Rautman 2004). At the same time, the average utility of body parts brought back to the village increased, very likely reflecting more selective culling of carcasses prior to transport. Such a shift in transport decisions is precisely what one would expect if the average number of animals taken per kill event, or the distance separating kill from village, had increased. Of course, these two possibilities need not be mutually exclusive. In either case, in the Late Phase we seem to be witnessing an increasing investment by village hunters in organized bison hunting that could target herds much farther from home. The communal importance of bison also increased dramatically within the village. During the Early Phase only about half of the bison were processed, cooked, and consumed in communal spaces, but during the Late Phase this figure skyrocketed to over 80%, with the highest-utility parts becoming concentrated in and around major public facilities. At the same time, the communal importance of antelope appears to have plummeted, as many fewer animals were brought to the village, more of the hunting was done by individual stalking close to home, and more of the meat was cooked by boiling in domestic contexts rather than by baking or roasting in the public earth oven complexes (Miracle 2004; Waskiewicz et al. 2004). Hand-in-hand with the increasing importance of bison as a communal resource, we see a dramatic jump in the intensity of regional and interregional exchange involving dried bison meat and probably other products of the hunt as well. This is strikingly shown by a precipitous decline in the proportional representation of bison ribs and vertebrae in the
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early BOOs (Speth and Rautman 2004). Henderson's ceramic assemblage underscores the sharply accelerating pace of westward-focused exchange in the Late Phase. Nearly 95% of the extraregional ceramics that have been found at the village come from Late Phase contexts (Wiseman 2004). The growing importance of interregional exchange can be seen in two other ways as well. One piece of evidence is provided by our recent work at Bloom Mound (LA-2528), a neighboring village that was occupied only a generation or two after Henderson (see below). This small site, located on the opposite bank of the Hondo and less than a mile downstream, is justly famous for its extraordinary assemblage of nonlocal ceramics, copper bells, obsidian flakes and points, marine shell ornaments, and other items imported from distant areas (Kelley 1984), a clear indication that the pace of exchange between villages in this stretch of the Pecos Valley and communities in the heartland ofthe Southwest continued to accelerate after Henderson had been abandoned. The second bit of evidence from Henderson is less clear-cut but nonetheless interesting. Most ornaments made of demonstrably nonlocal materials, such as turquoise beads and pendants, Olivella shell beads, and Glycymeris shell bracelets, were found in burials that date to the Late Phase (Rocek and Speth 1986). A similar number of burials was found in Early Phase contexts, but the vast majority of these burials were infants and children unaccompanied by grave goods. While this difference could reflect a much greater influx of nonlocal ornaments into the village during the Late Phase, it could equally well be the result of changing mortuary practices or sampling bias. The way around this impasse is to focus on ornaments and other unusual items that were found in nonburial contexts (I include here items such as fluorite and quartz crystals, twin-terminated quartz crystals known locally as "Pecos diamonds," obsidian flakes, and selenite plaques). Some of these items may have been lost or deliberately discarded in the trash, while others may have been inadvertently removed from burials by later construction activities or by the destructive proclivities of burrowing rodents. In either case, the abundance of such items found in fill from Early versus Late Phase contexts should provide at least a crude index of the total quantity that were brought into the community in each period. The results are as expected: in the Early Phase, 19.3% of the ornaments and other unusual items are of clearly nonlocal origin, whereas in the Late Phase the proportion jumps to 28.1 %, a difference that is statistically significant (ts = 1.93, p = 0.05; test of equality of two percentages based on arcsine transformation; Sokal and Rohlf 1969:607-10). Despite the many changes taking place at Henderson, particularly the growing importance of communal bison hunting and vastly intensified interregional exchange, there seems to be little detectable change in the agricultural component of the economy. Statistical analyses fail to reveal any major change over time in the density of small starchy seeds such as chenopods or amaranths, or in the density of maize cobs, cob fragments, or kernels (Powell 2001). Thus, Henderson's increasing emphasis on long-distance bison hunting does not appear to have been at the expense of maize cultivation. That said, there are several subtle hints that point to emerging or intensifying scheduling conflicts among key subsistence pursuits, almost certainly including agricultural activities. Perhaps the most obvious locus of conflict centered on bison itself. While we are unable to
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pinpoint the specific months when long-distance hunting forays were launched from Henderson, we do know that most of these activities took place during the spring, probably centered on the calving season (as evidenced by analyses of the nearby Garnsey bison kill [Speth 1983, 2004]). As a consequence, village bison hunting almost certainly came into direct conflict with critical farming activities such as field preparation, planting, and early weeding. Antelope hunting at Henderson very likely reflects another locus of increasing springseason scheduling conflict during the Late Phase, as evidenced by their decline in sheer quantity and in communal or public importance, as well as the fact that most Late Phase antelope hunts were conducted much closer to home than during the preceding period (Miracle 2004; Waskiewicz et al. 2004). An additional, though tentative, piece of evidence for increasing scheduling conflicts in Late Phase subsistence pursuits is the decline in the proportion of immature cottontails (Lee and Speth 2004). This decline could imply that Late Phase procurement of many of these animals took place somewhat earlier in the year than during the preceding phase, a shift that also may have been motivated by the competing time and labor demands of both bison hunting and farming. Henderson may also have undergone some fascinating but still very poorly understood changes in community organization (Speth 2004). The clearest hint of this is provided by the faunal remains themselves. As already noted, the quantity of an animal's bones that ended up in and around the public earth oven complexes is closely predicted by its body size-the larger the animal, the more likely it was processed, cooked, probably consumed, and then discarded in nonroom contexts. This pattern of discrimination on the basis of body size was already clearly evident in the Early Phase but was greatly accentuated in the Late Phase, most especially for bison, where the proportion of remains, particularly high-utility ones, jumped in public areas from roughly 50% to over 80%. If the Great Depression and East Plaza earth oven complexes were the loci of repeated events of interhousehold, perhaps community-wide, food sharing and feasting, it is clear that such activities became far more important after about A.D. 1300 (see Hayden 1995 and 1997 for interesting discussions of the role of communal feasting in egalitarian and emerging transegalitarian societies; see also Potter 1997a and 1997b for a faunal perspective on feasting in a Puebloan context). Bloom Mound As the work at Henderson progressed, and a picture of dramatic economic change began to take shape, I became increasingly curious about how Bloom Mound (LA-2528)-easily visible from Henderson and with a very similar ceramic assemblage-might fit into the picture. Unfortunately, there seemed to be nothing left of Bloom. Local amateurs had dug there for many years, beginning in the 1930s, and already by the mid-1950s archaeologists and amateurs alike agreed that no in situ deposits remained: What the amateurs had found, recorded in an on-again-off-again dig diary kept by members of the Roswell Archaeological Society, was a small village of only ten rooms: nine contiguous adobe surface structures and an adjacent semi-subterranean pitroom or "ceremonial chamber." The amateurs dug into all of them, emptying most, and crisscrossed the site with additional exploratory holes and trenches. They even stripped off part of the "mound" using a blade pulled by a pickUp
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truck. Yet, despite the site's small size, the amateurs unearthed a remarkable wealth of exotic ceramics, obsidian, marine shell ornaments, and perhaps as many as seven copper bells, leading Jane Holden Kelley (1984:455) to characterize Bloom as a "trading center of unusual affluence." According to the amateurs, the entire village may have been torched, perhaps violently destroyed in a single devastating raid, to judge by the many burned victims found helter-skelter in room fill and sprawled on house floors (see Kelley 1984; Wiseman 1997). The wealth of non local items, much more than we found at Henderson, suggested that Bloom might be somewhat later and might therefore tell us what happened to the local economy in the decades following Henderson's abandonment. Although occasionally new data from Bloom Mound would surface from an unexpected quarter, everyone, myself included, had understood that Bloom had been completely gutted, and most of the artifacts that had been recovered by amateurs had disappeared into private collections. Some, particularly those recovered by the Roswell Archaeological Society, had been stored, uncatalogued, in the basement of the Roswell Art Museum, but most of these were lost in a flood that swept through the museum in the 1950s, or subsequently discarded because they lacked provenience. As part of her dissertation research, Jane Kelley interviewed some of the most active amateurs about their finds, and inventoried the collections stashed in the museum basement shortly before their unfortunate demise. Also, at the invitation of the Roswell Archaeological Society, she excavated one of the original nine surface rooms and finished clearing the floor of the subterranean "ceremonial chamber." These materials, both artifacts and fauna, are now safely curated at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Kelley (1984) also mapped the site, something the amateurs had never done, even though they had gone through the motions of setting up an elaborate lOx 10 foot grid system demarcated by large, numbered nails. That seemed to be it. Bloom was gone and would remain an enigma forever. Though my better judgment told me there was nothing left, in 2000 I nonetheless began excavating at Bloom with the vague hope of being able to salvage some economic data from the pothunters' backdirt. I also hoped to get enough EI Paso Polychrome jar rims to be able to date Bloom's occupation relative to the two occupational phases at Henderson. To my amazement and delight, testing showed that parts of Bloom, particularly at the north end of the "mound," actually remained intact, and that the community was not only bigger than all of us had thought, but had quite a different layout as well. Instead of being a single linear roomblock with just 9 rooms and an adjacent pit structure, it was a partially, perhaps completely, enclosed rectangular structure surrounding the deep chamber with at least 20 to 25 rooms, if not more. In 2000, we relocated the original corners of the semi-subterranean structure, allowing us to connect Kelley's map to ours. And, as anticipated, seriation of the EI Paso Polychrome rims placed Bloom after Henderson, though perhaps by only a generation or so, indicating that Bloom's heavy involvement in long-distance exchange continued and amplified the process that had begun during Henderson's Late Phase. Like the amateurs, we too found a number of human skeletons whose remains give silent testimony to the violence that befell this small New Mexico community sometime during the mid- to late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. But what we found differed from the burned and clearly unburied skeletons encountered by the amateurs. Our human remains
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were all bona fide burials, all interred according to what seems to be the standard pattern for the area-bodies tightly flexed, probably wrapped in some sort of shroud, and placed beneath house floors, close to, and parallel to, the walls of the structures (see Rocek and Speth 1986). None were burned. None of the rooms we opened were burned either. Thus, the burials we encountered had been treated as kin, as people who belonged, not as enemies. To our surprise, however, all of these individuals had nonetheless met a violent end. Their faces were smashed in, and their skulls showed debilitating or lethal impacts from clubs and holes from arrows or spears. Two of the burials also had projectile points in their abdomens. The ages of the individuals are also revealing. Most were infants, juveniles, young adult women, and older males; none would have been prime-age warriors. Finally, the skeletons had been gnawed by dogs or coyotes. The damage was minor, not enough to destroy entire bones or even disarticulate the affected skeletal elements, but the damage is unmistakable nonetheless. The bodies clearly had been left exposed and unprotected, albeit briefly, before they were taken into the rooms and buried. The picture that is taking shape at Bloom dovetails quite well with our reconstructions at Henderson (Speth 2004). Like Henderson, Bloom was probably a semi-sedentary community, with many of the able-bodied adults away from the village each year in the autumn after the harvest was in, probably hunting bison, trading with the Pueblos, and perhaps raiding other communities (the absence of clandestine, below-ground storage pits positioned well away from the rooms argues against either community having been totally vacated for part of each year). However, unlike Henderson, where we found no obvious evidence of violence, Bloom was attacked, probably repeatedly, and probably precisely at those times of year when the community was undermanned. After the attack or attacks, survivors who somehow managed to escape returned to the village and buried their dead. The two arrow points found in the bodies of Bloom victims are particularly interesting. Both appear to be made on Edwards Plateau chert, and one of these is a Perdiz point, a distinctive and well-known type whose homeland lies hundreds of miles to the southeast in central Texas (Black 1989; Hester 1995; Johnson 1994; Rick1is 1992; Suhm and Jelks 1962). While Perdiz points are not abundant at Bloom (only 4 were found out of a total of 123 identifiable specimens), at Henderson this unmistakable form is absent altogether, even though we recovered more than 570 points complete enough to classify to type (Adler and Speth 2004). Moreover, while only a few of Henderson's hundreds of Washita and Fresno points were made of materials that fluoresce under ultraviolet light, a telltale sign of Edwards Plateau chert, a preliminary check of the B100m points indicates that at least 10% of these specimens clearly do, a strong indication that they too may derive from the Edwards Plateau area (Hofman et al. 1991). The Perdiz point is generally thought to appear by about A.D. 1300 and persist until A.D. 1600 or thereabouts. It is one of the hallmarks of the so-called "Toyah Phase," an archaeologically defined cultural entity found throughout central Texas (Black 1989; Hester 1995; Johnson 1994; J.e. Kelley 1986; Prewitt 1981, 1985). Perdiz points, however, are by no means restricted to the Toyah Phase or to central Texas; they are also found in other late prehistoric cultural entities, their distribution extending nearly across the width and breadth of Texas and into northern Mexico as well. A number of authors have attempted to link the classic Toyah Phase with the historically documented Jumanos (see discussions in
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Hickerson 1994; J.e. Kelley 1986; Wade 2003). While this attribution may be correct, or at least partly so, it seems very likely that many other ethnic groups in Texas and northern Mexico also made use of similar points. Thus, we may never know for sure which specific group or groups were fighting with the residents of Bloom. What we can say on the basis of the emerging evidence, however, is that by the mid- to late fourteenth century this small community, and perhaps others like it in the Roswell area, had become embroiled in violent, often lethal, conflict with groups coming into southeastern New Mexico from the southeast, probably from central Texas. We, of course, are seeing only the Roswell end of the system; the folks from Bloom may well have been making their own forays into central Texas, wreaking similar havoc on communities there. The million dollar question is why? Why would raiding parties travel hundreds of miles to "beat up" on an insignificant little mud-walled hamlet like Bloom on the margins of the Southwest? The evidence from Bloom and Henderson provides clues to the nature of the violence and what might have been motivating it. In a recent cross-cultural study of warfare in middle range societies, Julie Solometo (2004) found that deliberate killing of noncombatants occurred primarily among enemies that were socially distant, and often geographically distant as well. Wholesale destruction of structures was also more typical of warfare among socially distant enemies. The victims at Bloom-young adult women, infants, children, and older men-as well as the extensive burning of both victims and buildings documented by the amateurs, clearly point in this direction. Moreover, our excavations in 2000 exposed a segment of a thick, peculiarly curved wall at the north end of the site. An aerial photo of Bloom taken in the 1950s reveals a curious line that arcs around the north end of the site almost precisely where we found the wall, and may indicate that the site had been at least partially fortified (this suggestion is very tentative and needs to be examined more closely in future excavations). The nearly or completely enclosed layout of the original community likewise points to a concern for protection. Again in cross-cultural studies Solometo found that communities seldom fortify themsel ves unless actual conflict, not just the threat of conflict, occurs at a minimum on an annual basis. If she is right, Bloom must have been locked in a protracted and deadly struggle with other peoples on the margins of the Southwest. Though the nature of the conflict seems reasonably clear, its cause is less so. The answer, however, may be staring us in the face. Henderson's economy underwent a dramatic transformation in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. Bison hunting, much of it taking place far from the village, increasingly took center stage in Henderson's rapidly evolving economy, and trade with the Pueblos skyrocketed at the same time, a trend that becomes even more evident a generation or so later at Bloom. Particularly striking about the trade items coming into both villages-at least those items that have been preserved- is that almost all come from the Puebloan world to the west (i.e., ceramics, turquoise, marine shell, obsidian, copper bells, and a macaw found in the backdirt of another pothunted local village known as Rocky Arroyo; see Emslie et al. 1992). Aside from bison, the fluorescing points at Bloom, and a cache of mostly archaic dart points with a male burial at Henderson, we found almost nothing that we can confidently say came from the Plains. What we seem to be witnessing at Henderson and Bloom is the beginnings of intense interaction with the Pueblos, and bison clearly figured prominently in these relationships (Speth 1991, 2004). Dried meat, as a source of high-quality protein, may of course have become increasingly
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important to the eastern Pueblos as they aggregated into large, sometimes huge, sedentary communities heavily dependent on farming and as they depleted their locally available larger mammal resources (Speth 1991; Speth and Scott 1989; Speth and Spielmann 1983). Hides may also have become increasingly important, in part for robes, but also as raw material for shields, a need triggered by the destabilizing introduction of a new and far more lethal shock weapon, the backed or recurved "Turkish" bow that rendered traditional cane armor obsolete (see Le Blanc 1997, 1999). The socioeconomic changes we see in Roswell in the fourteenth century very likely were felt farther afield as well. One of the most striking features of the Toyah Phase is that many of these peoples also began to exploit bison intensively (e.g., Huebner 1991; Ricklis 1992). And, judging by the early Spanish chronicles that relate to central and south Texas, fights between groups over access to the herds, and perhaps to trading partners as well, both Caddoans to the east and Puebloans to the west, may have become commonplace (Wade 2003:21-22). Clearly, much remains to be learned about southeastern New Mexico's late prehistoric inhabitants. The work done thus far at Henderson and Bloom Mound has clarified many aspects of the lives and economy of these ancient New Mexicans, but it is also eminently clear that many new questions have surfaced, interesting and important ones that we are not yet able to address. Many of these can probably be answered by new or more detailed studies of existing collections. Others, however, can only be answered through renewed excavations at Henderson and elsewhere. Tragically, however, the archaeological record of southeastern New Mexico is disappearing before our eyes at an unbelievable rate, through urban expansion, mineral exploitation, widespread misuse and abuse of the landscape, and sheer vandalism. We can only hope that sites like Henderson, Garnsey, Bloom Mound, Rocky Arroyo, Fox Place, and a handful of others demonstrate just how valuable the area's archaeological record really is, and that Southwestern archaeologists will take full advantage of that potential before the record is irretrievably lost (Speth 1983,2004; Kelley 1984; Wiseman 2002). While there is much that remains to be learned about Plains-Pueblo exchange, and many intricate details and subtle complexities to be teased out of the data or acquired through additional modeling and theorizing, the fundamentally anthropological route that we must follow in order to reach these answers and understandings is already clearly laid out and marked, and has been for more than thirty years, ever since the appearance of Richard Ford's seminal look at "Barter, Gift, or Violence."
Acknowledgments I want to thank Dick Ford for his friendship, which goes back over forty years to a Florence Hawley Ellis dig at San Gabriel del Yungue near the banks of the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico. Since then he has helped me in so many ways that it would require another paper just to enumerate them all; a few of the most important must suffice. It was largely Dick who brought me to Michigan in 1965 as a graduate student; at the time I was headed for Tulane or perhaps Wisconsin. Dick, probably more than anyone else, brought
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me back to Michigan in 1976 to join the faculty as a North American archaeologist. He was Director of the Museum of Anthropology when I came up for tenure at Michigan, and I'm sure his hand was very much involved in the successful outcome of the process. It was Dick who nominated me for a Thurnau Professorship; and he was my staunchest supporter when I decided to launch a University of Michigan archaeology field school, the first from that institution since the 1950s. He faithfully visited me in the field in Roswell every summer I was there, braving my mania for heat even when it more than once pushed him to the limits. We share the same passion for undergraduate teaching and frequently jointly supervised the same students in lab projects, independent reading courses, museum techniques, and honors theses. The same has been true with graduate students: we have been on countless prelim and dissertation committees together, helped the same students find money for their fieldwork, and visited them in the field. Perhaps more than anything (aside from the fact that we both hail from New Jersey and our junior high schools competed in basketball!), we both share the same love for the Southwest, for its beauty, for its vastness, and for its archaeological and ethnographic diversity and richness. Thank you for so many things over all these many years, Dick. I would also like to acknowledge the help of the many other people who, over the years, have participated in one way or another in the excavations and myriad analyses of Garnsey, Henderson, and Bloom. Among these lowe a large debt of gratitude to Dave Snow and Dedie Thomas Snow, Regge Wiseman, and the late Robert H. (Bus) Leslie. I would also like to offer my sincerest thanks to the ranchers-Elmer (Skip) and Jane Garnsey, Matt and Karen Henderson, Calder and Candy Ezzell, and Jay and Carrie Hollifield-for the many kindnesses and warm hospitality they offered to the "foreigners from up north," and for their invaluable efforts in protecting and preserving these wonderful archaeological treasures. Finally, my thanks go to the Archaeological Conservancy, present owners of both Henderson and Bloom, for their important role in safeguarding southeastern New Mexico's rapidly vanishing archaeological heritage.
References Cited Adams, E.C., M.T. Stark, and D.S. Dosh 1993 Ceramic distribution and exchange: leddito yellow ware and implications for social complexity. Journal of Field Archaeology 20( 1):3-21. Adler, M.A., and J.D. Speth 2004 Projectile points from the Henderson Site (1980-1981). In Life on the Periphery: Economic Change in Late Prehistoric Southeastern New Mexico, edited by J.D. Speth, pp. 350-67. Memoirs, no. 37. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. Baugh, S.T. 1986 Late prehistoric bison distributions in Oklahoma. In Current Trends in Southern Plains Archaeology, edited by T.G. Baugh, pp. 83-96. Memoir 21. Lincoln, NE: Plains Anthropological Society.
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Baugh, T.G. 1986 Culture history and protohistoric societies in the Southern Plains. In Current Trends in Southern Plains Archaeology, edited by T.G. Baugh, pp. 167-87. Memoir 21. Lincoln, NE: Plains Anthropological Society. 1991 Ecology and exchange: the dynamics of Plains-Pueblo interaction. In Farmers, Hunters, and Colonists: Interaction Between the Southwest and the Southern Plains, edited by K.A. Spielmann, pp. 107-27. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Baugh, T.G., and F.w. Nelson, Jr. 1987 New Mexico obsidian sources and exchange on the Southern Plains. Journal of Field Archaeology 14(3):313-29. Black, S.L. 1989 Central Texas plateau prairie. In From the Gulf to the Rio Grande: Human Adaptation in Central, South, and Lower Pecos Texas, edited by T.R. Hester, S.L. Black, D.G. Steele, B.W. Olive, A.A. Fox, K.J. Reinhard, and L.e. Bement, pp. 17-38. Arkansas Archeological Survey Research Series 33. Fayetteville, AR: Arkansas Archeological Survey. Bozell, J.R. 1995 Culture, environment, and bison populations on the Late Prehistoric and Early Historic Central Plains. Plains Anthropologist 40(152): 145-63. Brosowske, S.D. 2004 Obsidian procurement and distribution during the Middle Ceramic Period of the Southern High Plains: evidence for the emergence of regional trade centers. Council of Texas Archeologists 28(2): 16-28. Collins, M.B. 1971 A review of Llano Estacado archaeology and ethnohistory. Plains Anthropologist 16:85-104. Cordell, L.S. 1997 Archaeology of the Southwest. 2nd ed. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. DeBoer, W.R. 1988 Subterranean storage and the organization of surplus: the view from eastern North America. Southeastern Archaeology 7(1): 1-20. Dillehay, T.D. 1974 Late quaternary bison population changes on the Southern Plains. Plains Anthropologist 19: 180-96. Doyel, D.E. 1991 Hohokarn exchange and interaction. In Chaco and Hohokam: Prehistoric Regional Systems in the American Southwest, edited by P.L. Crown and W.J. Judge, pp. 225-52. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Driver, J.e. 1990 Bison assemblages from the Sierra Blanca Region, southeastern New Mexico. Kiva 55(3):245-64.
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Dunavan, S.L. 2004 Archaeobotanical maize: the screened sample (1980-1981). In Life on the Periphery: Economic Change in Late Prehistoric Southeastern New Mexico, edited by J.D. Speth, pp. 394-406. Memoirs, no. 37. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. Emslie, S.D., J.D. Speth, and R.N. Wiseman 1992 Two prehistoric Pueblo an avifaunas from the Pecos Valley, southeastern New Mexico. Journal oj Ethnobiology 12(1 ):83-115. English, N.B., J.L. Betancourt, J.S. Dean, and J. Quade 200 I Strontium isotopes reveal distant sources of architectural timber in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Proceedings oj the National Academy oj Sciences 98(21): 11891-96. Ford, R.I. 1972 Barter, gift, or violence: an analysis of Tewa intertribal exchange. In Social Exchange and Interaction, edited by E.N. Wilmsen, pp. 21-45. Anthropological Papers, no. 46. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. Hammond, G.P', and A. Rey 1940 Narratives oJthe Coronado Expedition, 1540-1542. Coronado Historical Series 2. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. 1953 Don Juan de Onate: Colonizer oj New Mexico, 1595-1628. Coronado Cuarto Centennial Publications 5-6. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Hard, R.J., R.P. Mauldin, and G.R. Raymond 1996 Mano size, stable carbon isotope ratios, and macrobotanical remains as multiple lines of evidence of maize dependence in the American Southwest. Journal oj Archaeological Method and Theory 3(4):253-318. Hayden, B. 1995 Pathways to power: principles for creating socioeconomic inequalities. In Foundations oj Social Inequality, edited by T.D. Price and G.M. Feinman, pp. 15-86. New York, NY: Plenum Press. 1997 Observations on the prehistoric social and economic structure of the North American Plateau. World Archaeology 29(2):242-61. Hayes, A.C. (editor) 1981 Contributions to Gran Quivira Archaeology. Publications in Archaeology 17. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service. Hayes, A.c., IN. Young, and A.H. Warren 1981 Excavation oj Mound 7, Gran Quivira National Monument, New Mexico. Publications in Archaeology 16. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service. Hester, T.R. 1995 The prehistory of south Texas. Bulletin oJthe Texas Archeological Society 66:427-59. Hickerson, N.P. 1994 The Jumanos: Hunters and Traders oJthe South Plains. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
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Hofman, J.L., L.c. Todd, and M.B. Collins 1991 Identification of central Texas Edwards chert at the Folsom and Lindenmeier sites. Plains Anthropologist 36(137):297-308. Huebner, J.A. 1991 Late prehistoric bison populations in central and southern Texas. Plains Anthropologist 36( 137):343-58. Jelinek, A.1. 1966 Con'elation of archaeological and palynological data. Science 152: 1507-9. 1967 A Prehistoric Sequence in the Middle Pecos Valley, New Mexico. Anthropological Papers, no. 31. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. Johnson, L. 1994 The Life and Times of Toyah-Culture Folk as Seen from the Buckhollow Encampment, Site 41 KM16, of Kimble County, Texas. Report 38. Austin, TX: Texas Department of Transportation and Texas Historical Commission, Office of the State Archeologist. Kelley, lC. 1986 Jumano and Patarabueye: Relations at La Junta de los Rios. Anthropological Papers, no. 77. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. Kelley, J.H. 1984 The Archaeology of the Sierra Blanca Region of Southeastern New Mexico. Anthropological Papers, no. 74. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. Kidder, A.V. 1932 The Artifacts of Pecos. Robert S. Peabody Foundation, Papers of the Phillips Academy Southwestern Expedition 5. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Krieger, A.D. 1946 Culture Complexes and Chronology in Northern Texas with Extension of Puebloan Datings to the Mississippi Valley. Publication 4640. Austin, TX: University of Texas. LeBlanc, S.A. 1997 Modeling warfare in Southwestern prehistory. North American Archaeologist 18(3):235-76. 1999 Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press. Lee, Y.K., and J.D. Speth 2004 Rabbit hunting by farmers at the Henderson site, New Mexico. In Life on the Periphery: Economic Change in Late Prehistoric Southeastern New Mexico, edited by J.D. Speth, pp. 225-77. Memoirs, no. 37. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. Lynott, M.J. 1980 Prehistoric bison populations of northcentral Texas. Bulletin of the Texas Archaeological Society 50:89-101. Mills, B.1., and P.L. Crown (editors) 1995 Ceramic Production in the American Southwest. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.
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Minnis, P.E. 1989 The Casas Grandes polity in the international Four Corners. In The Sociopolitical Structure of Prehistoric Southwest Societies, edited by S. Upham, K.G. Lightfoot, and R.A. Jewett, pp. 269-305. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Minnis, P.E., M.E. Whalen, lH. Kelley, and J.D. Stewart 1993 Prehistoric macaw breeding in the North American Southwest. American Antiquity 58(2): 270-76. Miracle, P.T. 2004 Antelope procurement and hunting strategies at the Henderson site. In Life on the Periphery: Economic Change in Late Prehistoric Southeastern New Mexico, edited by J.D. Speth, pp. 148-214. Memoirs, no. 37. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. Neitzel, J.E. 1989 Regional exchange networks in the American Southwest: a comparative analysis of longdistance trade. In The Sociopolitical Structure of Prehistoric Southwestern Societies, edited by S. Upham, K.G. Lightfoot, and R.A. Jewett, pp. 149-95. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Patterson, J.T. 1936 The Corner-Tang Flint Artifacts of Texas. University of Texas Bulletin 3618:1-54, Bureau of Research in the Social Sciences Study 18, Anthropological Paper 1(4). Austin, TX: University of Texas. Plog, F.T. 1977 Modeling economic exchange. In Exchange Systems in Prehistory, edited by T.K. Earle and lE. Erikson, pp. 127-40. New York, NY: Academic Press. Potter, J.M. 1997a Communal Ritual Feasting, and Social Differentiation in Late Prehistoric Zuni Communities. PhD dissertation, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. 1997b Communal ritual and faunal remains: an example from the Dolores Anasazi. Journal of Field Archaeology 24(3):353-64. Powell, G.S. 2001 Hunting and Farming Between the Plains and the Southwest: Analysis of Archaeobotanical Remains from the Henderson Site, Roswell, New Mexico. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Washington University, St. Louis, MO. Prewitt, E.R. 1981 Cultural chronology in central Texas. Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society 52:65-89. 1985 From Circleville to Toyah: comments on central Texas chronology. Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society 54:201-38. Ricklis, R.A. 1992 The spread of a late prehistoric bison hunting complex: evidence from the south-central coastal prairie of Texas. Plains Anthropologist 37(140):261-73.
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Rocek, T.R., and J.D. Speth 1986 The Henderson Site Burials: Glimpses of a Late Prehistoric Population in the Pecos Valley. Technical Reports, no. 18. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. Schoeninger, MJ. 2004 The stable isotope results. In Life on the Periphery: Economic Change in Late Prehistoric Southeastern New Mexico, edited by J.D. Speth, pp. 416-19. Memoirs, no. 37. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. Seaman, TJ., and BJ. Mills 1988 What are we measuring? Rim thickness indices and their implications for changes in vessel use. In Fourth lornada Mogollon Conference (Oct. 1985): Collected Papers, edited by M.S. Duran and K.W. Laumbach, pp. 163-94. Tularosa, NM: Human Systems Research, Inc. Sokal, R.R., and FJ. Rohlf 1969 Biometry: The Principles and Practice of Statistics in Biological Research. San Francisco, CA: W.H. Freeman. Soli berger, lB. 1971 A technological study of beveled knives. Plains Anthropologist 16(53):209-18. Solometo, lP. 2004 The Conduct and Consequences of War: Dimensions of Conflict East-Central Arizona. PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. Speth, J.D. 1983 Bison Kills and Bone Counts: Decision Making by Ancient Hunters. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1991 Some unexplored aspects of mutualistic Plains-Pueblo food exchange. In Farmers, Hunters, and Colonists: Interaction Between the Southwest and the Southern Plains, edited by K.A. Spielmann, pp. 18-35. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Speth, J.D. (editor) 2004 Life 011 the Periphery: Economic Change in Late Prehistoric Southeastern New Mexico. Memoirs, no. 37. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. Speth, J.D., T.M. McKay, and K.K. Arntzen 2004 The groundstone evidence. In Life on the Periphery: Economic Change in Late Prehistoric Southeastern New Mexico, edited by J.D. Speth, pp. 384-91. Memoirs, no. 37. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. Speth, J.D., and A. Rautman 2004 Bison hunting at the Henderson site. In Life on the Periphery: Economic Change in Late Prehistoric Southeastern New Mexico, edited by J.D. Speth, pp. 98-147. Memoirs, no. 37. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. Speth, J.D., and S.L. Scott 1989 Horticulture and large-mammal hunting: the role of resource depletion and the constraints of time and labor. In Farmers as Hunters, edited by S. Kent, pp. 71-79. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
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Speth, J.D., and K.A. Spielmann 1983 Energy source, protein metabolism, and hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 2(1): 1-31. Spielmann, K.A. 1983 Late prehistoric exchange between the southwest and southern plains. Plains Anthropologist 28(102, Part 1):257-72. 1986 Interdependence among egalitarian societies. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 5(4):279-312. Spielmann, K.A. (editor) 1991 Farmers, Hunters, and Colonists: Interaction between the Southwest and the Southern Plains. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Suhm, D.A., and E.B. Jelks (editors) 1962 Handbook of Texas Archeology: Type Descriptions. Special Publication I. Austin, TX: Texas Archeological Society. Toll, H.w., T.C. Windes, and PJ. McKenna 1980 Late ceramic patterns in Chaco Canyon: the pragmatics of modeling ceramic exchange. In Models and Methods in Regional Exchange, edited by R.E. Fry, pp. 95-118. SAA Papers 1. Washington, DC: Society for American Archaeology. Vargas, Victoria D. 1995 Copper Bell Trade Patterns in the Prehispanic U.S. Southwest and Northwest Mexico. Archaeological Series 187. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona, Arizona State Museum. Wade, M. de F. 2003 The Native Americans of the Texas Edwards Plateau, 1582-1799. Texas Archaeology and Ethnohistory Series. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Waskiewicz, c., J.J. Noone, and J.D. Speth 2004 Scheduling conflicts at the Henderson site: evidence for a decline in medium ungulate procurement and use. In Life on the Periphery: Economic Change in Late Prehistoric Southeastern New Mexico, edited by J.D. Speth, pp. 215-20. Memoirs, no. 37. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. Wiseman, R.N. 1997 A preliminary look at evidence for late prehistoric conflict in southeastern New Mexico. In Layers of Time: Essays in Honor of Robert H. Weber, edited by M.S. Duran and D.T. Kirkpatrick, pp. 135-46. Archaeological Society of New Mexico 23. Albuquerque, NM: Archaeological Society of New Mexico. 2002 The Fox Place: A Late Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Pithouse Village Near Roswell, New Mexico. Archaeology Notes 234. Santa Fe, NM: Museum of New Mexico, Office of Archaeological Studies. 2004 The pottery of the Henderson site (LA-1549): the 1980-1981 seasons. In Life on the Periphery: Economic Change in Late Prehistoric Southeastern New Mexico, edited by J.D. Speth, pp. 67-95. Memoirs, no. 37. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor.
9
Protohistoric Western Pueblo Exchange Barter, Gift and Violence Revisited Stephen Plog Commonwealth Professor of Anthropology, University of Virginia
Although many studies over the last few decades have demonstrated that the movement of various products among pueblos was commonplace in the proto historic Western Pueblo world, our current understanding of that interaction often fails to acknowledge the complex social, political, and ritual relations that underlie exchange relations. Using Ford's classic description of barter, gift, and violence in protohistoric Eastern Pueblo societies, the author reexamines our current understanding of protohistoric Western Pueblo exchange.
During the careers of most scholars, there often are a few individuals, a few key publications that affect their approach to research. For me, Dick Ford has been one of those crucial individuals. From the time I applied to Michigan and arrived as a bewildered undergraduate, Dick has been there to offer guidance whenever issues arose. I have always relied upon Dick for advice and insight, whether it was where to do fieldwork during my undergraduate summers, my dissertation topic, or what particular paths I should take during my career. I have spoken with him at every key juncture in my career. As probably happens with many graduate students, there were certainly times when I could not grasp why he was so interested in particular issues. Color symbolism (Ford 1980)? The Tewa conception of their cosmos (Ford 1972a)? Jemez Cave (Ford 1968)? How were these issues going to help me understand the particular archaeological problems that I was addressing? Now, more than thirty years after I first entered the Michigan graduate program, I have, of course, found myself asking questions about color symbolism in Pueblo ceramics (Plog 2003), and about the way that deposits in Chacoan rooms parallel their perception of their cosmos (Heitman and Plog 2005). I find myself returning to many of Ford's publications, often articles published decades earlier in the 1970s and 1980s and remembering conversations in Dick's comer office in the Ethnobotany lab in the Museum of Anthropology at Michigan.
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One point that I did comprehend early in my studies with Ford is the importance of trade and exchange among social groups. Along with Kent Flannery, Jeff Parsons, Ray Kelly, and Henry Wright, Dick helped me see the fallacy of the "autonomous village" concept so prevalent then in the American Southwest (Plog 1980) and provided an understanding of some of the key social relationships that link people and communities. In his 1972 article, "Barter, Gift, and Violence: An Analysis of Tewa Intertribal Exchange," Ford called attention to the need to better understand exchange networks in the American Southwest through more systematic discussions of the movement of materials, goods and services (1972b:21). He further emphasized that "For an area where long distance trade is rooted in antiquity, an in-depth analysis of exchange processes is long overdue" (Ford 1972b:21). He explained the importance of exchange that develops for reasons other than the differential distribution of raw materials and the necessity of understanding the social and ritual networks through which trade goods might flow (1972b:22-23). In his own study of historic Tewa exchange, Ford (1972b:25) emphasized that the ritual system may help "regulate many of the ecological variables of each Tewa ecosystem," such that "trade becomes a necessary safety valve for pueblo survival." In 1972, systematic studies of prehistoric and protohistoric Pueblo exchange were rare, and mainstream research too often ignored demonstrations of the prevalence and magnitude of exchange during the prehispanic era. The important earlier studies of such scholars as Harold Colton (1941) and, in particular, Anna Shepard (e.g., 1939, 1942) unfortunately continued to be regarded as anomalous, even though they supported some of the key points that Ford and others had emphasized regarding historic Pueblo exchange. Most archaeologists still regarded examples such as the thousands of vessels that Shepard (1939) had demonstrated were moved from the Chuskas to Chaco Canyon to be more extraordinary than expected because of the common assumption of village autonomy, the common assumption that differential raw material distribution was the primary cause of exchange. After all, clay was available throughout the northern Southwest. Why would people trade finished vessels when they could make their own? Much has changed in the ensuing decades, and examinations of trade relations fortunately have become a frequent component of archaeological research. Our understanding of local and regional social networks consequently is much richer as archaeologists increasingly recognize the crucial sociopolitical dimensions of material transactions. Early exchange studies such as Shepard's and Colton's now seem incredibly shrewd and prescient. I suggest, however, that a key aspect of Ford's 1972 paper "Barter, Gift, and Violence" remains too often unexplored: the importance of ritual in stimulating and regulating exchange. Much of what I and others have addressed over the last few decades are the spatial patterns and magnitude of ceramic exchange, an emphasis that reflects both the abundance of such materials on archaeological sites and the availability of techniques to discover where pottery was produced. The exchange of ceramics also undoubtedly had its ritual dimensions, however, as shown by key recent studies such as Crown's (1994) examination of the Salado Wares. But more significantly, we fail to acknowledge that many of the materials important in historic rituals are rare in archaeological assemblages. A review of the Hopi notes of Alexander Stephen (1936), for example, shows the ubiquity of painted wood, feathers, pigments, and shell, materials that are infrequent or absent on most archaeological sites. It is
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not difficult at all to cite other ethnographic documentation of the same phenomenon (e.g., Bunzel 1932a, 1932b; Parsons 1939). It is thus critical that we begin to take better advantage of the exceptions to the archaeological pattern and examine the locations and contexts where, because of either protection or providence, we find deposits with fragile or simply unusual material that may provide key insights. Let me be clear that I am not suggesting that we should seek and excavate new ritual deposits. I am, however, suggesting that we explore the rich information occasionally available from unusual contexts-the assemblages of painted wood from Chetro Ketl in Chaco Canyon discovered by Gwinn and Gordon Vivian (Vivian et al. 1978), for example-and that we examine the significance of such materials in intergroup relations. And, perhaps more importantly, we must take advantage of information that may not only be readily available, but may be found in contexts that few would label as "sacred." Put simply, if we accept the interrelationship of the social, political, and ritual aspects of Pueblo life, as I believe we must, then we need not look in kivas and shrines for insights regarding ritual. A recent discovery that underlines this point is the unearthing of large quantities of cotton seeds in flotation samples from Homol'ovi I, II and III, a group of major protohistoric settlements near Winslow, south of the Hopi Mesas. In his most recent monograph on the history of the settlement group, Chuck Adams (2002: 162) observed that "cotton production increased substantially in the middle to late 1300s, rising to a ubiquity frequency [in flotation samples] of25 percent at Homol'ovi III, 28 percent at Homol'ovi I, and 57 percent at Homol'ovi II." In the northern Pueblo region, where corn, beans, squash and a variety of wild plant foods characterize most flotation samples, the abundance of cotton seeds at the Homol'ovi settlements is certainly unexpected, if not startling. Early archaeological studies of fabrics, the presence of loom holes in many kiva floors, and the occurrence of other materials such as spindle whorls showed long ago that prehispanic and historic Pueblo groups cultivated cotton. In 1983, Kate Peck Kent (1983:24) argued that "by A.D. 1100, at the latest, cotton was virtually the only material used in loom weaving." However, while indications of weaving and cotton textiles are not unusual, evidence of cotton cultivation has never been quite so apparent and remarkable as it is at the Homol'ovis. Clearly the leagues of cotton fields that Antonio de Espejo's group rode through during his exploration of the Hopi region in 1582, and the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cotton mantas offered to him at the time by the Hopi people (Bolton 1963: 186; Hammond and Rey 1966: 192) had prehispanic antecedents that perhaps too often we do not recognize. As many have discussed, cotton clearly had a significant economic role during the protohistoric and historic periods and was exchanged for a variety of other commodities ranging from meat to buffalo hides to turquoise (Parsons 1939:33; Riley 1987; Sayers 1989:76). Adams (2002:202) proposes a perhaps more significant role for cotton in the protohistoric Western Pueblo world, concluding that "the economic engine that ran the entire regional exchange system was the cotton that was produced in abundance at Homol'ovi and exported to Hopi, where it was traded to its neighbors, an exchange network that continued to operate into historic times." But in some ways the portrayal of cotton as an economic commodity may have been the least important aspect of cotton and cotton fabrics. Jerrold Levy (1992:46) has suggested,
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for example, that prior to the impact of the introduction of sheep on cotton cultivation, "the high-ranking [Hopi] clans probably benefited the most from [cotton] trade" as they often held most of the high-quality fields that were most suitable for cotton cultivation. Cotton thus had not only an important economic role, but a very significant social dimension as well. But why was this the case? What was significant about the control of cotton production? Does recognizing the economic and social dimensions of cotton exchange provide us with the complete picture and adequately explain the importance of cotton in the regional exchange system? I argue that ethnographic evidence across the Pueblo region suggests otherwise. Adams (2002:220) recognizes that the "increased demand for cotton, macaw feathers, shell, and copper bells could also be tied to the intensification of ritual associated with the spread of katsina religion." However, as Kate Peck Kent noted in the quote cited earlier, weaving and cotton production was ubiquitous in the Pueblo region after A.D. 1100, if not before. Moreover, ethnographic studies suggest that the sacred dimension of cotton was significant long before katsina ritual and the rise of cotton production at the Homol'ovis, and that cotton was impOitant, if not necessary, for numerous components of ceremonies. Sayers (1989:77, 78), for example, suggests that at Hopi the use of textiles is associated with ritual activity and "the very activity of weaving in the context of the kiva, as suggested by Cushing, can be considered a vehicle for the sharing and transmittal of important cultural information." He further adds that "Hopi weaving ... penetrates to the heart of Hopi culture, gaining meaning through its association with various ceremonies and rites of passage" (Sayers 1989:74). Kelley Hays-Gilpin (2000: 107) emphasizes a similar point when she notes that "spinning was part of the larger process of transforming cotton into cloth, symbolically analogous to the transformation of clouds into rain." Elsie Clews Parsons (1939: 18; but see Lange 1959:95) observed that historically cotton fields are confined to Jemez, Santa Ana, Isleta, and possibly Moenkopi, and generally to ritual use. But even where cultivation does not occur, use is common, particularly in ritual contexts. At Zuni, for example, Parsons (1939:70) notes that cotton is placed over the face of deceased members of the Zuni war society because cotton represents clouds and departed war chiefs turn into storm-cloud beings. Bunzel (1932:482) notes that males buried at Zuni wear "white cotton shirts and trousers." One key aspect of both cotton and feathers is that they render the breath-body of individuals and other materials light for travel (Parsons 1939:70, 92). It undoubtedly was for this reason that ethnographic documentation from Cochiti in the east to Zuni to Hopi in the west shows that most if not all prayer sticks include feathers tied to the stick with string- and a number of accounts specify that the string must be made of cotton (e.g., Bunzel 1932a:499, 500; 1932b:710; Lange 1959:95; Stephen 1936: 164). Cotton is also placed over the face of the dead at Hopi, and four feathers are tied to the head with cotton string to make the body light so that it can go to the clouds (Parsons 1939:70, 92). Ritual bundles of various sorts also are wrapped in cotton string (Stephen 1936:311). Data from prehispanic settlements in Chaco Canyon and a variety of other regions with well-preserved contexts show a similarly common pattern of string, often cotton but sometimes of yucca, used to attach feathers to ceremonial staffs and prayer sticks (e.g., Pepper 1920: 145, 146, 157). The sacred dimension of cotton thus may have deep roots into the Pueblo past.
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We are thus reminded of statements that Dick Ford made thirty-three years ago in "Barter, Gift, and Violence": While adaptation detennined the nature of exchange and social relations structured it, ritual required it. Parrot and macaw feathers, bison hair, turquoise, and red paint, derived from foreign exchange, were continuously expended in ceremonies. Only trade could replenish the exhausted supplies. [1972b:44] By ignoring demography, social structure, ritual, and the social milieus, the [archaeologist] cannot possibly understand trade or, worse yet, advance beyond the meager discussions now available. [1972b:45] Cotton may have been one of the key materials in protohistoric exchange spheres, but the catalyst for that system was the cosmological and ritual emphasis on those particular materials. Morever, that exchange was possible only because of the social matrix through which materials flowed, a matrix that was critical to many aspects of Pueblo life, not just to economy, and that functioned through barter, gift, and violence. Dick used the phrase "barter, gift, and violence" in the title of his paper as a tribute to Bandelier who had coined that phrase at the turn of the century. I have repeated that title as a tribute to Dick, to the insights he has contributed toward our understanding of human behavior generally and the Pueblo more specifically, and to all that lowe him after many years as a friend and mentor.
References Cited Adams, E. Charles 2002 Homol'ovi: An Ancient Hopi Settlement Cluster. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Bolton, Herbert E. (editor) 1963 Spanish Exploration of the Southwest, 1542-1706. New York: Barnes & Noble. Colton, Harold S. 1941 Prehistoric trade in the Southwest. Scientific Monthly 52:308-19. Crown, Patrica L. 1994 Ceramics & Ideology: Salado Polychrome Pottery. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Ford, Richard 1. 1968 Jemez Cave and Its Place in an Early Horticultural Settlement Pattern. Paper presented at the 33rd Annual Meetings of the Society for American Archaeology. Santa Fe, NM. 1972a An ecological perspective on the eastern Pueblos. In New Perspectives on the Pueblos, edited by A. Ortiz, pp. 1-17. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 1972b Barter, gift, or violence: an analysis of Tewa inter1ribal exchange. In Social Exchange and Interaction, edited by E.N. Wilmsen, pp. 21-45. Anthropological Papers, no. 46. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor.
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1980 The color of survival. Discovery, pp. 17-29. Santa Fe: School of American Research. Hammond, George P., and Agapito Rey (editors) 1966 The Rediscovery of New Mexico, 1580-1594. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Hays-Gilpin, Kelley 2000 Gender ideology and ritual activities. In Women & Men in the Prehispanic Southwest, edited by P.L. Crown, pp. 91-135. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Heitman, Carolyn, and Stephen Plog 2005 Kinship and the dynamics of the house: rediscovering dualism in the Pueblo past. In A Catalyst for Ideas: Anthropological Archaeology and the Legacy of Douglas W. Schwartz, edited by Vernon Scarborough, pp. 107-60. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Kent, Kate P. 1983 Prehistoric Textiles of the Southwest. Santa Fe: School of American Research. Lange, Charles H. 1959 Cochiti: A New Mexico Pueblo, Past and Present. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Levy, Jerrold E. 1992 Orayvi Revisited: Social Stratification in an "Egalitarian" Society. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Parsons, Elsie C. 1939 Pueblo Indian Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pepper, George H. 1920 Pueblo Bonito. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 27. New York. Plog, Stephen 1980 Village autonomy in the American Southwest: an evaluation of the evidence. In Models and Methods in Regional Exchange, edited by Robert E. Fry, pp. 135-46. SAA Papers No. l. Washington, DC: Society for American Archaeology. 2003 Exploring the ubiquitous through the unusual: color symbolism in Pueblo black-on-white pottery. American Antiquity 68(4):665-95. Riley, c.L. 1987 The Frontier People: The Greater Southwest in the Protohistoric Period. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Sayers, Robert 1989 Hopi weaving: context and continuity. In Seasons of the Kachina, edited by L.J. Bean, pp. 73-83. Hayward, CA: BaHena Press.
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Shepard, Anna O. 1939 Technology of La Plata pottery. In Archaeological Studies in the La Plata District, by E.H. Morris, pp. 249-87. Publication no. 519. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute of Washington. 1942 Rio Grande Glaze Paint Ware. Contributions to American Anthropology and History, vol. 7, no. 39. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute of Washington. Stephen, Alexander M. 1936 Hopi Journal of Alexander M. Stephen. New York: Columbia University Press. Vivian, R. Gwinn, Dulce N. Dodgen, and Gayle H. Hartmann 1978 Wooden Ritual Artifacts from Chaco Canyon New Mexico: The Chetro Ketl Collection. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
10
Ritual, Politics, and the "Exotic" in North American Prehistory Katherine A. Spielmann Arizona State University Patrick Livingood University oj Michigan
Dick Ford has made the case that individual Pueblo needs jor paraphernalia used in ritual peljormance drove intertribal exchange in the U.S. Southwest. In three case studies involving Pueblo, Hopewell, and Mississippian peoples, the authors take this argumentfurther and explore the relationship between political structure and the acquisition oj exotics necessary jor ritual participation. Although there were diverse means ojacquiring ritual exotics in each case, variability in procurement patterns across these cases appears closely related to variability in strategies jor political prominence and influence.
In his seminal paper "Barter, Gift, or Violence" Dick Ford (1972a) demonstrated that ritual and economics were intimately linked among the Rio Grande Pueblos. Using ethnographic and historic data on the Tewa, he made the case that individual Pueblo needs for paraphernalia used in ritual performance drove intertribal exchange across the U.S. Southwest, onto the Plains, and south into Mexico. Through his emphasis on the supply of ritual items provided to the Tewa by non-Pueblo peoples (Comanche, Ute, and Apache), Ford also documented that in fact "many of the items deemed proper ritual apparel ... come from outside the Tewa area" (Ford 1972a:42). These items included raw materials such as ochre, parrot and macaw feathers, and bison hair, and finished goods such as shell ornaments and kilts. Ford emphasized the sociality of particular mechanisms of exchange that brought these goods into Tewa villages. In this chapter we elaborate upon this link between distance and ritual efficacy by analyzing three archaeological case studies involving Pueblo, Ohio Hopewell, and Mississippian societies. Our concern in this comparative analysis is not with mechanisms of interaction, but instead: (l) the importance oflocal versus distant materials in ritual paraphernalia, and 155
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Figure 10.1 . Map of uhural area and ire di eu ed in the t xl.
(2) the empha i on di tant phy icalloci and di tant cultural tradition a ource of powerful ritual material. We u e data from thi tudy to argue that political tructure i intimately tied to the relation hip between crafting and ritual. A ro the e case, variability in the ource of raw material and fini hed product for ritual performance appear clo ely related to variability in pathways to political prominence and influence. Through the e ca e tudie we acknowledge Dick ' many contribution to orth American archaeology both ea ' tern and we tern and one of the theme woven through hi publication : the link betw en ritual and other facet of life in mall- cale societie (e.g. Ford 1972a, 1972b J 992). In our ca e tudie the ource of extralocal material for ritual parti ipation and performance differ dramatically. Pueblo communitie focu ed primarily on locally available raw material , but al 0 exchanged for occa ional raw material and fini hed products from communitie outside the Pueblo world. In contra. t, among Ohio Hopewell communitie · exotic raw material , uch a copper, mica and ob idian, were the ba i for the local creation of most ritual object , and reference to other cultural tradition through th importation of fini hed good are largely ab ent. The third ca , southea tern Mi i ippian ocietie, highlight the critical importance of a particular cultural tradition, that of Cahokia, as a ource of both fini hed object and concept that underwrote ub equent Mi i ippi an ritual practice . The degree of acce to ritual object al 0 reveal intere ting parallel and difference among our ca es. Pueblo and Mi i ippian data ugge t marked differenti al acce to ritual paraphernalia, while among the Ohio Hopewell acc to ritual power may have been more op n.
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Our analysis corroborates the recognition that in non-state societies ritual, resource acquisition, and politics are inescapably intertwined. As Ford and others (e.g., Dietler and Hayden 2001) have demonstrated, ritual often provides both the motivation and the context for acquiring exotic resources. Furthermore, such acquisition has an explicitly political dimension whether one takes the view that acquisition aims to cement alliances to ensure against resource uncertainty (Braun and Plog 1982; Ford 1979; Price and Brown 1985) or the view that people acquire exotic resources when attempting to build influence and renown (Brumfiel 1994; Clark and Parry 1990; Earle 1990; Helms 1988; Welch 1991).
Crafting for Ritual Communal and personal rituals often require certain kinds of clothing and material goods in order to be both appropriate and effective in ceremony. The efficacy of a ceremonial act derives in part from the nature of the material objects used. A fundamental assumption underlying our discussion, then, is that material objects have power (Appaduri 1986; Helms 1988, 1993:3; Bradley 2000; Hamann 2002). Numerous social anthropologists have developed the argument that in many world views the capacity for action exists in all beings and crosscuts the Western distinction between animate and inanimate things (e.g., Ingold 2000; Swentzell 1993; Young 1988). Material objects may thus be alive and have the power to act in the world. Taking a related point of view, Elsie Clews Parsons (1939: x) notes that Pueblo ritual is a form of instrumentalism. Through actions involving material objects such as masks, figures, paint, and textiles, she writes, Pueblos supplicate and ultimately come to control spirit beings. The power of material things derives from multiple attributes. Those attributes that appear to have cross-cultural relevance include: the source of the raw materials from which the object is made, the skill with which the object is crafted, and certain qualities of the finished object, such as its shininess or luster, color, and size (Helms 1992; Spielmann 2002). In this analysis we are particularly concerned with the sources for the objects that Pueblo, Ohio Hopewell, and Mississippian peoples used in communal ritual, and whether they are local or nonlocal, and if non local, whether they are raw materials or finished products. Anthropologist Margaret Rodman's (1992:63) observation that "Places produce meaning and meaning can be grounded in place," lies at the core of this analysis of the sources of ritual paraphernalia. The materials that archaeologists recover from locations of ritual production and performance can tell us a great deal about where power was situated geographically because the material objects themselves embody the power of the places from which they come (Bradley 2000; Helms 1988, 1993 :3). British archaeologist Richard Bradley (2000:81-84) has coined the term "pieces of place" to encapsulate this concept that material acquired from sacred places, whether it is rock, plant or water, is powerful because it was a physical part of those places. The "pieces of place" concept can be extended beyond sacred places to include raw materials representative of, and finished items crafted by, non local cultural traditions (Spielmann 2002), as goods from distant places are "imbued with the extraordinary or cosmological powers of the ... peoples whence they are deri ved" (Helms 1992: 188). We might thus refer
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to these items as "pieces of tradition" (Michelle Hegmon, pers. comm.). Ford demonstrated the importance of certain nonlocal items for historic Pueblo ceremonies. Ritual items crafted in Cahokia appear to have been both imported and copied by people in several southeastern Mississippian polities. Powerful places may be local or geographically distant. Mary Helms (1988, 1993:3), in particular, argued that distance can be an important dimension of power. Interestingly, although she has noted that geographic distance is not universally valued as an attribute of power, she has not grappled with why there is variation in the degree to which geographic distance confers symbolic value. The Pueblo-Hopewell-Mississippian comparison highlights the importance of understanding both sides of the distance coin. Both the distance to and the types of meaningful places varied for pre-contact Pueblo, Ohio Hopewell, and Mississippian societies. This variability likely reflects differences in the pathways to social power that were possible in these societies. Pueblos tend to emphasize power associated with the local landscape, a scale that generally encompasses their immediate, visible geographic surroundings and neighbors. They do however import a few critical items from communities outside the Pueblo world. People participating in Ohio Hopewell ritual activities, in contrast, sought special power through journeys to geographically distant sacred places. They crafted most of their durable ritual paraphernalia using raw materials obtained from these places, and rarely imported finished material goods. Southeastern Mississippian societies also associated power with the extralocal, but in this case several polities drew upon ritual practices and paraphernalia developed in the Cahokian chiefdom.
The Geography of Power in the Pueblo World Anthropologist Keith Basso's book Wisdom Sits in Places (Basso 1996; Feld and Basso 1996) captures much of the Southwestern perception of the sacred landscape (Ortiz 1969; Parsons 1939:307). Pueblo ethnography, such as that by Alfonso Ortiz (1969) and Richard Ford (1992), supports the importance of local place in Pueblo cosmology. The centrality of local sacred places derives in part from the importance of regular travel or pilgrimage to these places to partake of the wisdom that they contain. Although Basso writes in reference to the Western Apache, he notes that sense of place imparts to both individuals and entire communities a sense of connectedness and belonging in the community. These places also exert a powerful religious force. For Pueblo peoples, sacred places on the landscape are visible from their villages (Ortiz 1969) and are marked with shrines, at which offerings are left or religious paraphernalia cached. Shrines may be dangerous places, to be visited only by ceremonial practitioners (Parsons 1939:341; Helms 1988:168), although any place that a person uses regularly for prayer can be considered a shrine. On occasion, pieces of particular sacred places form important components of Pueblo ritual paraphernalia or performance, as in the case of water from sacred springs and pigments from sacred mountains (Parsons 1939:275). With Pueblo ritual craft production, however, it appears more often that the type of material (for example, different species of wood for
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different kinds of prayer sticks), rather than its specific source, is emphasized in the creation of powerful objects. Most raw materials used in Pueblo communal ritual come from within the Pueblo world, not beyond it. So in a certain way all that is local has a sacred quality to it. The sacredness of the locale is intimately bound with the view that the Pueblo village is the center of that population's universe (Swentzell 1993; Young 1988). In the case of the Hopi and Zuni, these spiritual centers were the destination of years of migration in the remote past (Bernardini 2002; Young 1988; Dongoske et al. 1997). An important exception to the use of local raw materials involves the importation of macaws, and macaw and parrot feathers, from Mesoamerica. This importation has both "pieces of tradition" and "pieces of place" components. On the one hand, Pueblo concepts of the homed/plumed serpent are derived from Mesoamerica (Schaafsma 1992:64,124-25), where parrot feathers are associated with the cult of Quetzalcoatl (Crown 1994: 166; Young 1989). On the other hand, macaw feathers are associated with the south, the direction from which rain comes to the Southwest. These icons ofthe south are thus important in ceremonies focused on bringing rain (Crown 1994:167; Roediger 1941:71). Pueblos also draw to some extent on the cultural tradition of neighbors, as Ford (1972a) discusses with regard to relationships between Rio Grande pueblos and Plains populations. Bison heads and hair were used in a few specific ceremonies. The pre-contact Pueblo archaeological record reflects this same emphasis on the immediate Pueblo world for sacred raw materials. Pigments come from mountains surrounding individual pueblos, obsidian from the Jemez Mountains that dominate the skyline west of the Rio Grande, and feathers from local hawks, falcons, and eagles (e.g., Graves 2002). Macaws, shells from the Gulf of California, and bison skulls are the primary exceptions to this emphasis on the locally sacred, but these are exceedingly rare in the Pueblo archaeological record. As Dick Ford's research documented, certain manufactured items also appear to have particular power or significance in Pueblo ritual. As with raw materials, they tend to come from within rather than outside the Pueblo world. Whether these imports are driven by connections to particularly powerful traditions in the crafting pueblos or by economic specialization or both is a matter of debate. Ethnographically, Hopi kilts and sashes are required in many Pueblo ceremonies across the Southwest (Roediger 1941: 116, 135; Ford 1972a). Pueblos can import plain cloth, however, and then embroider it with their own designs (Roediger 1941 :60, 116). In the pre-contact period, ceramics made at particular pueblos were sometimes important for ceremonial feasting. For example, glaze-decorated serving bowls were exported in large numbers from the Galisteo Basin, even when importing populations made their own glaze-decorated bowls. The Galisteo Basin vessels were distinctive in the yellow slips that covered them and introduced bird iconography to the Rio Grande glazeware tradition (Mobley-Tanaka 1998). It appears that owning vessels from this area (pieces of this tradition) was important because people living in this cluster of villages were responsible for developing a new, Rio Grande-specific ideology. Thus, the symbolic importance of vessels from these villages led to specialized production and large-scale export of these serving bowls (Mobley-Tanaka 1998; Spielmann 1998).
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The Geography of Power in the Ohio Hopewell World Raw material acquisition for Ohio Hopewell is markedly different from that among the Pueblos. It is commonly known that the raw materials, such as copper, mica, marine shell, obsidian, silver, grizzly bear canines, sharks' teeth, and exotic flints, from which Ohio Hopewell ritual paraphernalia were produced come from a diversity of very distant places. This distance becomes particularly interesting when compared with the Pueblo world. While the raw materials for most Pueblo sacred items come from no more than 100 km or so from any particular village, the most abundant durable materials represented in Ohio Hopewell ritual precincts- mica and copper- derive from hundreds of kilometers away, and the sources of obsidian (northwest Wyoming and southern Idaho) from over 2,000 km distant. In the Ohio Hopewell case, in contrast with the Pueblo one, there do not appear to be local communities that provided particular manufactured goods for use in Hopewell ritual across southern Ohio. Instead, participants at each earthwork, or perhaps concentration of earthworks, appear to have crafted largely for their own use. For example, Ruhl and Seeman (1998) have documented different technological styles in ears pool construction at different earthwork sites. Seeman and Heinlen (2002) noted unique patterns in grizzly bear canine modification across earthwork sites; Carr and Mazlowsi's (1995) research on textiles indicates that visible stylistic differences distinguish different valleys or portions of valleys. Participants in the Ohio Hopewell ritual system not only procured their raw materials from geographically distant locations, but as in the case of obsidian from the West and copper from Isle Royale in Lake Superior, these places were difficult to access due to the vagaries of weather, and in the case of obsidian, presented the challenges of crossing a very different, possibly hostile cultural landscape. In this regard, we note that people in middle range societies worldwide often deliberately procure ritually important raw materials from places that are difficult to access, even when similar materials are more readily available. Richard Bradley and British colleagues, for example, have demonstrated that raw materials for European stone axes were obtained from quarries that were often in unusual or remote locations. Comparatively accessible, high quality raw material appears to have been passed over in favor of outcrops that were difficult and dangerous to reach (Bradley and Edmonds 1993; Watson 1995). Mary Helms' discussion of "distance as an obstacle" (1988:58-59) is apt in these cases. She notes that the conquest of distance, to make a trip beyond the known world and return successfully, is a testament to the exceptional qualities the traveler possesses (Helms 1992). Successful voyaging can be used to enhance one's political prestige, the pieces of place providing evidence that the journey actually occurred. In the case of Yellowstone obsidian, the primary motivation for the journey was likely the destination: a powerful landscape filled with geysers and boiling mud, and inhabited by grizzly bears; this unique material proved that one had entirely left the world of the Eastern Woodlands. Helms refers to this form of journeying as power questing: the search for power from outside one's known universe. Seeman (1995) has argued specifically that aspiring Ohio Hopewell leaders engaged in power-questing activities to procure exotic goods and esoteric knowledge. He suggests that the shared ideology that Hopewell writ large represented in the Eastern Woodlands
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provided some degree of safe passage around that landscape. The voyages west, however, would have taken people out of this ideological realm. Seeman's power-questing model fits well with the possibility raised by James Griffin (1965,1979) that many of the most exotic goods in the Hopewell world could have been procured with a small number of trips. For example, Griffin (1965) argued that obsidian recovered from Ohio Hopewell sites that had been procured from the Rocky Mountains could have been collected in a single canoe trip. Debate continues concerning the frequency of Hopewell visits to the far west. Stevenson and colleagues (2004; see also Hatch et al. 1990) use obsidian hydration data from the large cache of obsidian debitage under Mound 11 at Hopewell to argue that the cache grew accretionally over several centuries. They conclude that several episodes of obsidian collection were necessary to create the curated cache of debitage. In contrast, DeBoer (2004) has argued that the decrease in obsidian biface size in Ohio Hopewell contexts suggests that a single hoard of obsidian may have been depleted over time. There is less debate regarding how these materials arrived in southern Ohio. The vast majority ofthe raw materials were procured by long-distance journeys; very few exhibit the down-the-line falloff pattern typical of exchange in small-scale societies (Knife River flint being im exception; Clark 1984). Moreover, DeBoer (2004) draws attention to a bighorn effigy pipe and ceramic effigy hom recovered from Mound City as likely evidence that Ohio Hopewell individuals made the journey to the Rocky Mountains and returned to describe the fauna of that strange land. The Geography of Power among Southeastern Mississippian Societies By necessity, the following discussion on Mississippians will be based entirely on data from the largest Mississippian chiefdoms. These sites have the most evidence of ritual objects and activity and have been the focus of the most scholarship. Many recent studies (e.g., Blitz and Livingood 2004; King and Meyers 2002; Lorenz 1996; Livingood and Blitz 2004), however, have demonstrated that there are significant social differences between the largest and smallest Mississippian communities, and thus the largest sites are not representative of the Mississippian as a whole. Unlike the previous two examples, where status was mostly achieved, Mississippian polities tended to be hereditary chiefdoms. Early in the history of many of the large Mississippian polities, aspiring chiefs impOlted new belief systems and practices, and appear to have used these exotic cosmologies to legitimize their access to power. This practice suggests that Mississippians believed that the sacred can be found in the distant and the exotic. The earliest and largest Mississippian chiefdom was Cahokia. Tim Pauketat and Thomas Emerson (Pauketat 1997, 2004; Pauketat and Emerson 1997, 1999) have argued that at Cahokia elites appropriated traditional local notions about fertility and put them under control of specialized practitioners to create a center-dominated ritual and political landscape. They melded these modified indigenous notions about fertility with iconography borrowed from the Upper Mississippi and Plains (Brown 2004; Diaz-Granados 2004), and with beliefs about mound building from the Central and Lower Mississippi Valley, to create an entirely new belief system.
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Cahokians valued exotic goods that were demonstrably "foreign." They gathered valuable raw materials such as galena, hematite, and Missouri fireclay from sources less than 150 km away, and marine shell, copper, mica, and exotic flints from much greater distances (Pauketat and Emerson 1997). There is an active and lively debate over the complexity of exchange and procurement required for Cahokia to obtain the raw materials it needed (compare Brown et al. 1990; Cobb 2000; Muller 1997; Pauketat 2004), but it seems likely that for some materials, such as marine shell, some Cahokia residents must have gone out of their way to engage in long-distance procurement or develop long-distance trade relationships that bypassed simple down-the-line exchange practices (Griffin 1991; Pauketat 2004: 121). During its zenith, Cahokia was unrivaled in size and complexity, but as it began to decline around A.D. 1200, other major centers in the Southeast began to flourish. A subset of the iconography and beliefs developed at Cahokia began to find broader regional acceptance (Anderson 1997; Brown 2004). This iconography had significant regional variations, but at its core it seems to reference a set of beliefs about the otherworld and a set of stories, heroes, spirit-beings, and events related to this mythic reality (Knight et al. 2001). The objects, such as shell cups and gorgets, engraved pottery, and copper ornaments and tablets, that bear the iconography associated with these otherworldy accounts form the bulk of the ritual items known from the Mississippian world. Interestingly, most Mississippian polities did not borrow the fertility iconography and accompanying beliefs that were widespread at Cahokia (Knight et al. 2001; Pauketat 2004), suggesting that these ideas did not translate to other Southeastern cultures or that these new Mississippian communities, and specifically their elites, were picking and choosing among cosmologies. While most major Middle Mississippian centers adopted new and foreign cosmologies in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the extent to which this exchange of ideas can be linked directly to Cahokia varies. Spiro was ideologically very close to Cahokia, imported a large number of Cahokia artifacts beginning in the twelfth century and developed an iconographic style based directly on the Classic Braden style of Cahokia (Brown 1996,2004). Moundville, in contrast, did not become a prominent chiefdom until the thirteenth century and imp0l1ed very few Cahokia-made artifacts. There is only a distant relationship between Moundville's Hemphill style of iconography and Cahokia's Braden style (Brown 2004), but there is a strong similarity in the otherworldly subject matter. This suggests that although Moundville adopted a belief system with an ultimate origin at Cahokia, it may not have done so directly or it may have tried to differentiate and localize the subject matter. Like Moundville, Etowah did not become a prominent Mississippian center until after Cahokia was in decline (King 2004), but unlike Moundville, the elites were interred with a significant number of copper plates and shell gorgets that were manufactured at Cahokia. These objects appear to have been used as a part of a ritual regalia for powerful chiefs, possibly to demonstrate that these chiefs were avatars of mythic heroes or gods. By the time these artifacts were interred they were antiques, and Adam King suggests that Cahokia may have become a mythical place to thirteenth- and fourteenth-century residents of Etowah. distant in both time and space (King 2004: 163). Therefore, the Etowah elites were using an explicitly foreign symbolic set and artifacts that were "pieces of place" of a distant and ancient polity to justify their place in the social order.
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Like the Hopewell example, Mississippians were open to the notion that ritual power can be derived from distant sources. Mississippians demonstrated this belief by according special respect to cosmologies from distant locales that were themselves primarily concerned with otherworldly and extralocal beings and heroes. They contrast with the Hopewell in drawing on extant cultural traditions rather than sacred "natural" places on the landscape. In contrast to both the Puebloan and Ohio Hopewell cases, Mississippians valued ritual objects of both local and exotic manufacture, made with both locally available and exotic raw materials, although these preferences vary between polities and over time.
Ritual and Politics Our case studies illustrate marked variation in the importance of local and distant raw material and crafted item in ritual paraphernalia. Pueblo practitioners drew (and continue to draw) strongly on the local, on the sacred center, for much ritual crafting, but incorporated important raw materials from neighboring (bison hair) and distant (macaw feathers) cultural traditions and finished items from Pueblo (Hopi) cultural traditions. Ohio Hopewell, in contrast, privileged the journey to distant places, returning with raw materials that bore witness to that journey and provided powerful materials for ritual crafting. Southeastern Mississippian societies drew on at least some of the newly fashioned ritual liturgy of Cahokia and its accompanying paraphernalia, either through direct importation or emulation. Pieces of tradition rather than pieces of place characterize ritual paraphernalia there. To understand this diversity, we consider the ways in which the goals of ritual and political activities meshed with communal ritual performances in each case. The spiritual goals or intents of ritual performance in each society govern the nature, intensity, and elaborateness of preparation for those rituals. Among Pueblo peoples, the spirits as deities are the "sources of all man's needs," especially rain (Ortiz 1969:25), and most Pueblo ritual is dedicated to propitiating the spirits to bring rain. Rain is a localized phenomenon, forming over localized mountains and mesas, and needed for localized fields. Distant places may be of no help in bringing rain. In contrast, whatever Hopewellian peoples prayed for, distant power had the capacity to provide some of those things. Middle Mississippian societies drew on the demonstrable power of the largest pre-contact polity in North America, Cahokia, in their own religious practices. A more straightforward explanation for the marked variation in the geographic and cultural sources of powerful materials and objects, however, lies in the different ways in which social power may have been constructed among Pueblo, Ohio Hopewell, and southeastern Mississippian societies. Helms (1988:263) argues that it is "politico-religious specialists" Who are likely to engage in power questing. Yet in the Pueblo case, historically this kind of person specifically avoids leaving the known world (Ford 1972a), and archaeologically, we find that local materials are privileged in ritual production. The external is threatening, not powelful in a way that can be captured in a positive manner. If it is aspiring politico-religious leaders among the Ohio Hopewell who are voyaging, then the dimensions along which an individual could establish influence appear to have been quite different in these two areas.
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Among the Pueblos, ethnography and pre-contact archaeology indicate relative equality in access to materials necessary for everyday life. There are few lifestyle differences evident in the archaeological record, and burial practices are modest. Individuals and groups are rarely singled out either qualitatively or quantitatively for different treatment at death (Hegmon 2005). What does differ, at the inter-site level however, is the hosting of ritual events (Graves 2002). In the Salinas Pueblo area of central New Mexico where Spielmann works, one site, Gran Quivira, stands out for its density of ritual architecture (kivas), and ritual fauna (primarily raptorial birds). Pueblo ethnography (Brandt 1977; Ortiz 1969) documents that ritual knowledge is the currency of hierarchy in Pueblo society. Ritual personnel possess a great deal of knowledge necessary to perform the calendrical cycle of ritual that maintains the world. They act on that knowledge in the context of ceremonial groups, such as curing societies, moieties, or clans, rather than as dominant individuals. It is these ritual leaders who comprise the governing council for each pueblo village, and thus decide on land allocation, labor requirements, and communal food distributions. Ritual knowledge is power in Pueblo society, and secrecy (the limited distribution of that knowledge) is the foundation upon which hierarchy is built (Brandt 1977, 1994). We suggest that if ritual knowledge is so central to the construction of power in Pueblo society, then regular access to sacred places on the landscape is a significant aspect of legitimizing that power. Among middle range societies in general, esoteric ritual knowledge is a source of power. Thus, Ohio Hopewell ritual specialists in some respects will not have differed from their Pueblo counterparts in controlling that knowledge. But within Ohio Hopewell society a primary source of ritual knowledge appears to have been external, acquired through power questing. Of all the eastern woodland populations, the Ohio Hopewell seem to have elaborated most upon the notion of power questing. Power questing is related to the beliefs shared (though diverse) among Native American societies (Benedict 1964; Dugan 1985) across much of North America concerning the importance of individuals establishing their own relationships with nonhuman beings (Ingold 2000) who share the world with them. Among Algonquian populations of the Midwest and subarctic, this relationship was established through the vision quest, which involved fasting in isolation at the time of puberty, both for girls and for boys (Callender 1978; Callender et a1. 1978; Rogers and Taylor 1981; Ridington 1981; Skinner 1913; Trowbridge 1939; Ingold 2000). During the fasting period, the being that was the person's guardian spirit visited the individual in a dream. Through offerings to this spirit, the individual was then able to negotiate the vagaries of life assisted by the power of the guardian spirit. Among Plains populations, adults undertook the vision quest at times when they needed the spiritual powers of nonhuman beings to cope with some future event (Benedict 1964; Dugan 1985: 138). Rugged, isolated areas were sought out, as these brought one closer to the spirits one was seeking to address (Steinbring 1981; Dugan 1985:143). In neither the Plains nor the Woodlands, however, was a great journey undertaken to achieve the visions, although it was possible among the Menominee on occasion for the dream to involve a journey. Such a dream then gave the individual the rights to create a more powerful sacred bundle (Skinner 1913:46).
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In both areas, personal access to spiritual power beyond what an individual possessed gave him or her the power to live life well. Visions among Algonquian populations were accompanied by instructions on assembling a bundle of objects that were powerful for that individual due to his or her relationship with the guardian spirit. Based on these understandings of the vision quest, it is possible that for the Ohio Hopewell, (1) journeying, like vision questing, was open to a diversity of individuals, (2) journeying to distant and very remote sacred places brought one even closer to powerful spirits than the more remote areas of one's home, and (3) that the journey itself associated the individual with creative powers far beyond those available at home. Individual vision quests do not result in the creation of the large ritual precincts that are a critical component of Ohio Hopewell ritual practice. In some ethnographic cases, however, there is a corporate aspect to the vision quest experience. Among the Menominee, eastern Sioux, Iroquois, and Pottawatomie, for example, individuals who had experienced similar dreams associated together in a loose sodality that had its own ceremonies and paraphernalia (Benedict 1964:54; Skinner 1913). Perhaps Ohio Hopewell individuals who made journeys to the same distant places were similarly allied at home, and were responsible for organizing at least some components of the ritual system. The ubiquity of copper and mica in Hopewell sites suggests that over time a fair number of people may have made journeys to Lake Superior and the Appalachian Mountains, places that lie within the Eastern Woodlands, the area of shared iconography that Seeman (1995) discusses. In the case of copper, they traveled to places that had been visited off and on for millennia. The large quantities of obsidian at the Hopewell site, however, indicate a journey that "upped the ante," so to speak: a journey for which prestige must have been immense, when at least some of the people who attempted that journey returned. It is thus not surprising that obsidian is found almost exclusively and only in large quantities at the preeminent Ohio Hopewell site, Hopewell itself. Among Mississippian peoples, elites were motivated to find ways to legitimize their station. One way to accomplish this was to identify themselves with temporally, spatially, and spiritually distant forces that carried the imprimatur of being powerful, morally proper, and part of the god-given nature of things (Helms 1992: 186). When this was accomplished, their status and their decisions became unassailable because they were associated with entities that could not be directly scrutinized and challenged. Therefore Mississippian elites repeatedly placed themselves in position to mediate between local populations and distant powers. It is no surprise that some Mississippian elites found Cahokia to be a powerful referent and a useful entity to be associated with, even after Cahokia had faded from the political landscape. These strategies typically resulted in the adoption of new cosmological beliefs and the creation of multiple tiers of exclusivity in Mississippian religious access and iconography. Some forms of ritual performance and ritual knowledge were open to non-elite residents and may have been performed at the household or community level. Even in communities with strong social ranking, elites may have had little control, influence, or participation in rituals involving veneration of important ancestors, celebration of kinship bonds, feasting (Maxham 2000), and other assorted "public" rituals. Additionally, elites did not control ac-
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cess to raw materials, and non-elite residents had access to exotics such as copper, shell, and greenstone (Cobb 2000; Gall and Steponaitis 200 I; Welch 1991; Wilson 2001). Moreover, several classes of high quality objects that contain iconographic depictions exhibit broad social distribution. For example, Hemphill-style pottery is finely decorated with significant mythical motifs and has been recovered from elite and non-elite burials from Moundville and surrounding sites. Hemphill ceramics often show extensive signs of wear, and it is suspected that they were used commonly in elite and non-elite rituals. What distinguished elite ritual is possession of a handful of badges, symbols, and iconography that reference restricted ritual knowledge that were monopolized by elites or exclusive cults. The best evidence for these claims comes from Moundville. At Moundville the most exclusively elite objects are copper-bladed axes that are associated only with seven very high-status males buried in the most privileged precinct at Moundville (Peebles and Kus 1977). Other objects at Moundville with strong elite associations include marine shell beads, copper gorgets, copper pendants, stone gorgets, painted pottery, stone bowls, copper ear spools, mineral pigments, and galena (Peebles and Kus 1977; Steponaitis and Knight 2004). Steponaitis and Knight (2004: 179) found that the iconography on these objects, especially on the pendants and gorgets, shows a remarkable homogeneity in style and may have been used as emblems of a particular social status or sodality. These tiers of exclusivity have strong parallels in Pueblo ethnography (Ortiz 1969; Brandt 1994; Hegmon 2005; Parsons 1939), which documents the degree to which ritual knowledge and the creation of ritual objects are controlled within Pueblo societies. These exclusive rituals work to emphasize the status difference between those who are capable of performing such ritual and those who are not, and to reinforce social differences in both Pueblo villages and Mississippian chiefdoms. Unfortunately, investigating the differential distribution of ritual objects in the pre-contact Puebloan period is hampered by the fact that many ritually sacred items such as prayer sticks, altars, masks, and garments have not survived in the open-air pueblo sites of that period. Durable material goods, such as the glaze-decorated bowls discussed above, appear unrestricted in their distributions, as does the small amount of shell and turquoise recovered from the large pre-contact Pueblo sites of the Rio Grande. In the Hopewell case, the degree of exclusivity and control is less clear. Archaeologically visible Hopewell ritual tended to consist of events for public participation. It recognized the power of exotic goods, such that individuals who literally and physically bridged the distance between the local and the distant were accorded respect and social status. If power questing, like vision questing, was open to anyone with the need or desire for the power that distant journeys bring to an individual, there may have been greater opportunity for wider participation in the ritual process. Conclusion We have developed two dimensions of contrast to better appreciate the relationship between political structure and the acquisition of exotics necessary for ritual participation. First, there is a strong contrast between Puebloan peoples who obtained most of their ritual
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material from localities within the Puebloan world and Hopewell and Mississippian peoples who imported raw materials and ritual paraphernalia from distant locales. We have connected these practices to differing beliefs regarding sources of ritual power. Second, there is a contrast in the potential degree of control of ritual objects and ritual knowledge. In both the Puebloan and Mississippian cases, some ritual knowledge was tightly controlled, and the practitioners derived social and political status from the possession of restricted knowledge. It is likely that there were similar efforts to restrict access among the Hopewell, but the practice of power questing may have created a situation in which valuable knowledge could be obtained by those who could successfully complete such journeys. This meant that a larger number of Hopewell people might have been able to achieve status by obtaining new ritual knowledge than in cases where existing practitioners more tightly regulate the transmission of such knowledge. Together, these contrasts document that there is a complex relationship between ritual, geography, and political structure. Beliefs about the locus of ritual power shape behavior and affect how a community organizes itself and interacts with its neighbors. Likewise, beliefs about how ritual practitioners can engage with the ritual elements across the landscape can structure access to esoteric knowledge, and through that, affect opportunities to gain social status.
Acknowledgments We would like to thank Dick Ford for his mentorship and collegiality, and David Anderson, Chris Glew, Sunday Eiselt, and Michelle Hegmon for their comments on this paper.
References Anderson, David G. 1997 The role of Cahokia in the evolution of southeastern Mississippian society. In Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World, edited by T.R. Pauketat and T.E. Emerson, pp. 248-68. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Appadurai, Arjun 1986 Introduction: commodities and the politics of value. In The Social Life of Things, edited by A. Appadurai, pp. 3-63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Basso, Keith H. 1996 Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Benedict, Ruth 1964 The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America. Kraus Reprint. Millwood, New York. Bernardini, Wesley 2002 The Gathering of the Clans: Understanding Ancestral Hopi Migration and Identity, A.D. 1275-1400. Ph.D. dissertation, Arizona State University, Tempe.
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Blitz, John H., and Patrick C. Livingood 2004 Sociopolitical implications of Mississippian mound volume. American Antiquity 69(2):291301. Bradley, Richard 2000 An Archaeology of Natural Places. New York: Routledge. Bradley, Richard, and Mark Edmonds 1993 Interpreting the Axe Trade: Production and Exchange in Neolithic Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brandt, Elizabeth A. 1977 The role of secrecy in a Pueblo society. In Flowers of the Wind: Papers on Ritual, Myth, and Symbolism in California and the Southwest, edited by T.e. Blackburn, pp. 11-28. Socorro, New Mexico: Ballena Press. 1994 Egalitarianism, hierarchy, and centralization in the Pueblos. In The Ancient Southwestern Community: Models and Methods for the Study of Prehistoric Social Organization, edited by W.H. Wills and R.D. Leonard, pp. 9-23. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Braun, David P., and Stephen Plog 1982 The evolution of "tribal" social networks: theory and prehistoric North American evidence. American Antiquity 47(3):504-25. Brown, James A. 1996 The Spiro Ceremonial Center: The Archaeology of Arkansas Valley Caddoan Culture in Eastern Oklahoma. Memoirs, no. 29. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. 2004 The Cahokian expression: creating court and cult. In Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South, edited by R.F. Townsend, pp. 105-24. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago. Brown, James A., Richard A. Kerber, and Howard D. Winters 1990 Trade and the evolution of exchange relations at the beginning of the Mississippian period. In The Mississippian Emergence, edited by B.D. Smith, pp. 251-80. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Brumfiel, Elizabeth M. 1994 Factional competition and political development in the New World: an introduction. In Factional Competition and Political Development in the New World, edited by E.M. Brumfiel and J.W. Fox, pp. 3-13. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Callender, Charles 1978a Great Lakes-Riverine sociopolitical organization. In Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 15, Northeast, edited by B.G. Trigger, pp. 610-21. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1978b Fox. In Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 15, Northeast, edited by B.G. Trigger, pp. 636-47. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1978c Miami. In Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 15, Northeast, edited by B.G. Trigger, pp. 681-89. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
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Callender, Charles, Richard K. Pope, and Susan M. Pope 1978 Kickapoo. In Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 15, Northeast, edited by B.G. Trigger, pp. 656-67. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Carr, Christopher, and R.F. Maslowski 1995 Cordage and fabrics: relating form, technology, and social processes. In Style, Society, and Person: Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives, edited by C. Carr and J. Neitzel, pp. 297-343. New York: Plenum Press. Clark, Frances 1984 Knife River flint and interregional exchange. Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 9: 17398. Clark, John E., and William J. Perry 1990 Craft specialization and cultural complexity. Research in Economic Anthropology 12:289346. Cobb, Charles R. 2000 From Quarry to Cornfield: The Political Economy of Mississippian Hoe Production. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Crown, Patricia L. 1994 Ceramics and Ideology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. DeBoer, Warren R. 2004 Little Bighorn on the Scioto: the Rocky Mountain connection to Ohio Hopewell. American Antiquity 69(1 ):85-107. Diaz-Granados, Carol 2004 Marking stone, land, body, and spirit: rock art and Mississippian iconography. In Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South, edited by R.F. Townsend, pp. 139-50. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago. Dietler, Michael, and Brian Hayden 2001 Digging the feasts: good to eat, good to drink, good to think. In Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power, edited by M. Dietler and B. Hayden, pp. 1-20. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Dongoske, Kurt, Michael Yeats, Roger Anyon, and TJ. Ferguson 1997 Archaeological cultures and archaeological affiliation: Hopi and Zuni perspectives in the American Southwest. American Antiquity 62:600-628. Dugan, Margaret 1985 The Vision Quest of the Plains Indians: Its Spiritual Significance. Lewiston, NY: E. Mellon Press. Earle, Timothy K. 1990 Style and iconography as legitimation in complex chiefdoms. In The Use of Style in Archaeology, edited by M. Conkey and C. Hasdorf, pp. 73-81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Feld, Steven, and Keith H. Basso (editors) 1996 Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Ford, Richard I. 1972a Barter, gift, or violence: an analysis of Tewa intertribal exchange. In Social Exchange and Interaction, edited by E.N. Wilmsen, pp. 21-45. Anthropological Papers, no. 46. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. 1972b An ecological perspective on the eastern Pueblos. In New Perspectives on the Pueblos, edited by A. Ortiz, pp. 1-17. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 1979 Gathering and gardening: trends and consequences of Hopewell subsistence strategies. In Hopewell Archaeology: The Chillicothe Conference, edited by D.S. Brose and N. Greber, pp. 234-38. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. 1992 An Ecological Analysis Involving the Population of San Juan Pueblo, New Mexico, with new introduction. The Evolution of North American Indians. New York: Garland Press. Gall, Daniel G., and Vincas P. Steponaitis 2001 Composition and provenance of greenstone artifacts from Moundville. Southeastern Archaeology 20(2):99-117. Graves, William M. 2002 Power, Autonomy, and Inequality in Rio Grande Puebloan Society, A.D. 1300-1672. Ph.D. dissertation, Arizona State University, Tempe. Griffin, James B. 1965 Hopewell and the dark black glass. Michigan Archaeologist II: 115-55. 1979 An overview of the Chillicothe conference. In Hopewell Archaeology: The Chillicothe Conference, edited by D.S. Brose and N. Greber, pp. 266-80. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. 1991 Cahokia as seen from the peripheries. In New Perspectives on Cahokia: Views from the Periphery, edited by J.B. Stoltman, pp. 349-53. Monographis in World Archaeology, no. 2. Madison, Wisconsin: Prehistory Press. Hamann, Byron 2002 The social life of pre-sunrise things. Current Anthropology 43(3):351-82. Hatch, James W., Joseph W. Michels, Christopher M. Stevenson, Barry E. Scheetz, and Richard A. Geidel 1990 Hopewell obsidian studies: behavioral implications of recent sourcing and dating research. American Antiquity 55:461-79. Hegmon, Michelle 2005 Beyond the mold: questions of inequality in southwest villages. In North American Archaeology, edited by T.R. Pauketat and D.D. Loren, pp. 212-34. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Helms, Mary W. 1988 Ulysses' Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographical Distance. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1992 Political lords and political ideology in southeastern chiefdoms: comments and observations. In Lords of the Southeast: Social Inequality and the Native Elites of Southeastern North America, edited by A.W. Barker and T.R. Pauketat, pp. 185-94. Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 3.
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1993 Craft and the Kingly Ideal: Art, Trade, and Power. Austin: University of Texas. Ingold, Tim 2000 A circumpolar night's dream. In The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill, by T. Ingold, Chapter 6, pp. 89-110. London: Routledge. King, Adam 2003 Etowah: The Political History of a Chiefdom Capital. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 2004 Power and the sacred: mound C and the Etowah chiefdom. In Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South, edited by R.F. Townsend, pp. 15166. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago. King, Adam, and Maureen S. Meyers 2002 Exploring the edges of the Mississippian world. Southeastern Archaeology 21 (2): 113-16. Knight, Vernon James, James A. Brown, and George P. Lankford 2001 On the subject matter of southeastern ceremonial complex art. Southeastern Archaeology 20:129-53. Lankford, George P. 2004 World on a string: some cosmological components of the southeastern ceremonial complex. In Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South, edited by R.F. Townsend, pp. 207-18. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago. Livingood, Patrick c., and John H. Blitz 2004 Timing Is Everything: The Periodicity of Mississippian Mound Construction. Paper presented at the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, St. Louis. Lorenz, Karl G. 1996 Small-scale Mississippian community organization in the Big Black River valley of Mississippi. Southeastern Archaeology 15(2): 119-31. Maxham, Mintcy D. 2000 Rural communities in the Black Warrior Valley, Alabama: the role of commoners in the creation of the Moundville I landscape. American Antiquity 62(2). Mobley-Tanaka, Jeanette 1998 An Analysis of Design on Glaze Ware Sherdsfrom the Salinas Area, New Mexico. Ms. on file, Department of Anthropology, Arizona State University, Tempe. Muller, Jon 1997 Mississippian Political Economy. New York: Plenum Press. Ortiz, Alfonso 1969 The Tewa World; Space, Time, Being, and Becoming in a Pueblo Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Parsons, Elsie Clews 1939 Pueblo Indian Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Pauketat, Timothy R. 1997 Specialization, political symbols, and the crafty elite of Cahokia. Southeastern Archaeology 16(1):1-15. 2004 Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pauketat, Timothy R., and Thomas E. Emerson 1997 Introduction: domination and ideology in the Mississippian world. In Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World, edited by T.R. Pauketat and T.E. Emerson, pp. 3051. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1999 The representation of hegemony as community at Cahokia. In Material Symbols: Culture and Economy in Prehistory, edited by J. Robb, pp. 302-17. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University. Peebles, Chris S., and Susan M. Kus 1977 Some archaeological correlates of ranked societies. American Antiquity 42:471-48. Price, T. Douglas, and James A. Brown 1985 Aspects of hunter-gatherer complexity. In Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers: The Emergence of Cultural Complexity, edited by T.D. Price and lA. Brown. New York: Academic Press. Ridington, Robin 1981 Beaver. In Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 6, Subarctic, edited by J. Helm, pp. 350-60. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Rodman,M. 1992 Empowering place: multilocality and multivocality. American Anthropologist 94:640-56. Rogers, Edward S., and J. Garth Taylor 1981 Northern Ojibwa. In Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 6, Subarctic, edited by 1. Helm, pp. 231-43. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Roediger, Virginia More 1941 Ceremonial Costumes of the Pueblo Indians. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ruhl, Katharine c., and Mark E Seeman 1998 The temporal and social implications of Ohio Hopewell copper ear spool design. American Antiquity 63:651-62. Seeman, Mark E 1995 When words are not enough: Hopewell interregionalism and the use of material symbols at the GE mound. In Native American Interactions: Multiscalar Analyses and Interpretations in the Eastern Woodlands, edited by M.S. Nassaney and K. Sassaman, pp. 122-46. Knoxville: University of Tennessee. 2004 Hopewell art in Hopewell places. In Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South, edited by R.E Townsend, pp. 57-72. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago. Seeman, Mark E, and Benjamin W. Heinlen 2002 Grizzly Bear Canines and Ohio Hopewell Interaction: A Little Problem with Big Teeth. Paper presented at the 48th Annual Midwest Archaeological Conference, October 3-6. Columbus, Ohio.
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Skinner, Alanson B. 1913 Social Life and Ceremonial Bundles of the Menomini Indians. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 13( I). New York. Spielmann, Katherine A. 1998 Ritual influences on the development of Rio Grande glaze A ceramics. In Migration and Reorganization: The Pueblo IV Period in the American Southwest, edited by K.A. Spielmann, pp. 253-62. Anthropological Research Paper no. 51. Tempe: Arizona State University. 2002 Feasting, craft specialization, and the ritual mode of production in small-scale societies. American Anthropologist 104(1): 195-207. Steinbring, Jack H. 1981 Salteaux of Lake Winnipeg. In Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 6, Subarctic, edited by J. Helm, pp. 244-55. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Swentzell, Rina 1993 Mountain form, village form: unity in the Pueblo world. In Ancient Land, Ancestral Places: Paul Logsdon in the Pueblo Southwest, by Stephen Lekson and Rina Swentzell. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press. Steponaitis, Vincas P, and Vernon James Knight 2004 Moundville art in historical and social context. In Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South, edited by R.F. Townsend, pp. 167-82. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago. Stevenson, Christopher M., Ihab Abdelrehim, and Steven W. Novak 2004 High precision measurement of obsidian hydration layers on artifacts from the Hopewell site using secondary ion mass spectrometry. American Antiquity 69:555-67. TroWbridge, Charles C. 1939 Meearmeer Traditions, edited by V. Kinietz,. Occasional Contributions, no. 7. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. Watson, Aaron 1995 Investigating the distribution of group VI debitage in the Central Lake district. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 61:461-62. Welch, Paul D. 1991 Moundville's Economy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama. Wilson, Gregory D. 2001 Crafting control and the control of crafts: rethinking the Moundville greenstone industry. Southeastern Archaeology 20(2): 118-28. Young, M. Jane 1988 Directionality as a conceptual model for Zuni expressive behavior. In New Directions in American Archaeoastronomy, edited by A.F. Aveni, pp. 171-82. BAR International Series 454. Oxford. 1989 The southwest connection: similarities between western Puebloan and Mesoamerican cosmology. In World Archaeoastronomy, edited by A. Aveni, pp. 167-79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
11
"Darkening the Sun in Their Flight" A Zooarchaeological Accounting of Passenger Pigeons in the Prehistoric Southeast H. Edwin Jackson University of Southern Mississippi
The now extinct passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) has been of interest to zooarchaeologisls because of the disparity between historic accounts of its abundance and its uneven distribution in the archaeological record. The research has thus far focused on the northeastern U.S., where rookeries concentrated the birds during the nesting season. This paper examines the Southeast where they were seasonal migrants, using the zooarchaeological record to assess their importance as afood resource, and to discern possible cultural rules that affected their distribution.
Then it came to pass that a pestilence fell on the city, Presaged by wondrous signs, and mostly by flocks of wild pigeons, Darkening the sun in their flight, with naught in their craws but an acorn. Longfellow's lines from "Evangeline" describe Philadelphia in 1763 just preceding an outbreak of yellow fever, which the superstitious believed was foretold by the large flocks of pigeons that overflew the city for several days. The last of the passenger pigeons died in captivity in 1914 (Schorger 1955). The last well-documented sightings in the wild were more than a decade prior to that. But a century earlier, vast flocks of these birds had darkened the skies of the eastern United States as they moved between nesting areas and on their annual migration. So plentiful were these birds that they offered a seemingly endless supply of meat, fat and feathers to European colonists and their descendants as late as the mid-nineteenth century. Historic accounts document that Native American groups also utilized the passenger pigeon and had well-developed capture techniques and a variety of ways to cook the birds. Estimates of the number of passenger pigeons varied but at their peak the pigeons numbered in the billions (Schorger 1955:204). A.W. Schorger, a noted ornithologist who
174
"Darkening the Sun in their Flight" -Jackson
175
wrote the definitive study about passenger pigeons, suggested that this single species may have represented between twenty-five and forty percent of the total North American bird population (Schorger 1955 :205). How well historic records represent the prehistoric abundance of passenger pigeons is of interest to archaeologists because if accurate, passenger pigeons would have represented an enormous resource to human populations within their range. In fact, this has been a matter of some debate, a debate that has centered geographically on the northeastern U.S., which was the pigeons' principal nesting area in historic times. Since the southeastern U.S. served as important wintering grounds for historic flocks, the archaeological record from that region may provide some additional insights into the prehistoric potential of this species. Fortunately, with the increasing tempo of zooarchaeological studies in the Southeast, a preliminary database is now available with which to document both geographic and chronological variation that may exist in the prehistoric exploitation of passengers by Southeastern Native Americans. That greater insight into the long-term population dynamics of an animal species might be gleaned by better understanding the timing and changing importance of that species in human subsistence is clearly stated in Richard Ford's model of the changing role of human populations in the evolution of ecosystems in North America, best expressed in his classic paper "Evolutionary Ecology and the Evolution of Human Ecosystems: A Case Study from the Midwestern U.S.A." (1977). Ecosystems evolve complex networks of trophic relationships among the species that comprise their communities. As Ford argues (p. 165), "human populations also participate in ecosystems and are involved in their evolution." Adaptation by human populations includes not only utilization of requisite resources, but also the regulation of other populations to the advantage of the ecosystem. However, given the complex food web represented in mature ecosystems, changes in resource use by human populations can both positively and negatively affect other species of the system. In the present case we are not only interested in the relationship between humans and passenger pigeons in the food web, but how possible changes in human food use may have indirectly affected the trophic relationships of the passenger pigeon.
Historic Abundance To appreciate the enormous subsistence potential that is suggested by historic accounts of passenger pigeons, a few examples are in order. Major W. Ross King observed his first flock of pigeons in Ontario: Early in the morning I was apprised by my servant that an extraordinary flock of birds was passing over, such as he had never seen before. Hurrying out and ascending the grassy ramparts, I was perfectly amazed to behold the air filled and the sun obscured by millions of pigeons, not hovering about, but darting onwards in a straight line with arrowy flight, in a vast mass a mile or more in breadth, and stretching before and behind as far as the eye could reach. [King 1866 in Schorger 1955:201]
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Antoine Le Page du Pratz observed pigeons in southwest Mississippi in the early 1700s: The wood pigeons are seen in such prodigious numbers, that I do not fear to exaggerate when I affirm that they sometimes cloud the sun. One day on the banks of the Mississippi I met with a flock of them which was so large, that before they all passed I had leisure to fire with the same piece four times at them. But the rapidity of their flight was so great that though I do not fire ill, with my four shots I brought down but two. [Le Page du Pratz 1972:266-67]
Observing their roosting habits Le Page du Pratz noted: But how great my surprise when I approached the place from whence the noise came and observed it to proceed from a thick short pillar on the bank of the river. When I drew still nearer to it, I perceived that it was formed by a legion of wood-pigeons, who kept continually flying up and down successively among the branches of an ever-green oak, in order to beat down the acorns with their wings. Every now and then some alighted to eat the acorns which they themselves or others had beat down; for they all acted in common, and eat in common; no avarice nor private interest appearing among them, but each labouring as much as for the rest as for himself. [1972:267-68]
By the mid-nineteenth century a vigorous trade in pigeons had developed. In 1876, netters in Shelby, Michigan, shipped an estimated 25,000 pigeons a day (dead in barrels and live for use in trapshooting by enthusiasts) for the four weeks of the nesting season in Shelby (Schorger 1955:151). By 1882, the numbers being captured were beginning to decline and by the end of the decade, the passenger pigeon's fate was sealed.
Prehistoric Importance of Passenger Pigeons Despite their ubiquity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and accounts of their use by Native Americans, the prehistoric importance of passenger pigeons is a matter of some controversy. Thomas Neumann (1986) questioned the value of Schorger's historic reconstruction of abundance for understanding prehistoric subsistence patterns. Noting that while there are archaeological sites in the northeastern United States with significant numbers of pigeon elements, there are many others that lack them. Moreover, beyond the principal nesting area of the Northeast, passenger pigeon bones are rare. Neumann suggested that prehistoric native hunting systems targeted those species, namely deer, turkey, squirrels and raccoon, that competed with humans for nut masts. Were pigeons significant competitors, they too would have figured more significantly in the hunting mix. Neumann goes on to argue that there was a precipitous growth in the passenger pigeon population engendered by the impact of the early stages of European contact. In particular, the significant demographic decline of Native Americans due to introduced European diseases reduced an important predator and competitor that had under prehistoric conditions kept the pigeon population in check. In addition to removing competition from Native American populations, European farming increased grains as an alternative food resource, and European hunting practices that included the eradication of "vermin" such as cougar, wolf and fox would have relaxed predation on the pigeon. Finally, increased hunting of deer by Native Americans due to new demands of
"Darkening the Sun in their Flight" -Jackson
177
the hide trade would have further reduced competition for mast. The net result, according to Neumann, is that in the early eighteenth century the pigeon population skyrocketed. Cregg Madrigal (1998), in his doctoral research on Late Archaic subsistence strategies in New York, found that passenger pigeon remains did in fact occur in significant frequencies at some sites. He argued that they represented a seasonal and geographically unpredictable resource. Moreover, their appearance in the spring would have created opportunities for multigroup aggregations at roosting sites, and encouraged intersocietal cooperation. Since roosting sites varied from year to year depending on where heavy mast had been produced the prior fall, groups were not likely to defend particular roosting areas, and because the abundance of squabs exceeded the need of any single group, sharing roost location information with other groups made sense, particularly since that knowledge would be reciprocated in following years. Most of the discussion has focused on the principal nesting area of the pigeon, which was in the northeastern United States. Neumann included a few southeastern sites in his sample, but was not concerned with the wintering habits of pigeons. A broader view of possible trends might be discernible if we examine the southern portion of the passenger pigeon's annual migratory round.
Passenger Pigeons in the Southeast Historic records from southern states document wintering flocks from the Carolinas across the south westward to east Texas. As early as the mid-sixteenth century, the French explorer Rene Laudoniere mentions the passenger pigeon in the St. John's region of northeast Florida (Schorger 1955: 10). In the early eighteenth century, another French colonist, Le Page du Pratz, described the passenger pigeon as darkening the sky in the area of Natchez, Mississippi. While Schorger indicates that breeding occurred generally north of Tennessee, there are isolated records from the nineteenth century of nesting areas in northeastern Mississippi and possibly on St. Simon's Island in Georgia (Schorger 1955:264). Turning to ethnohistoric information regarding the use of passenger pigeons by Southeastern Native American groups, Swanton (1946:295, 298) suggests that the passenger pigeon was second only to turkey as a subsistence bird and indicates that both Creeks and Chickasaws exploited them. Indirect evidence for their significance is found in the distribution of place names that reference the species. However, it is interesting to note that there is little specific information regarding the role of pigeons in Southeastern Indian diets, at least south of the Carolinas.
Archaeological Distribution of Passenger Pigeons in the Southeast The archaeological record of the Southeast offers a means to assess the prehistoric distribution of pigeons in the region, and how it might have changed over time. Two caveats must precede the discussion. First, the archaeological record is obviously one of use and not necessarily one of regional presence. However, if we are to accept the assumption that
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pigeon population size and habits were that of the historic era, such a bountiful resource is unlikely to have been ignored. Alternatively, changes in the frequency or abundance in the archaeological record, assumed to be a reflection of rational decision-making among subsistence options, may be an indirect measure of changes in range or demography of this potential resource. A second issue is the archaeological record itself. Faunal preservation is highly variable at archaeological sites. Bird bones are generally delicate and may not withstand many taphonomic processes as well as other more robust skeletons. The possibility that an assemblage lacks passenger pigeon bones because they were not utilized rather than simply because they are not preserved can be controlled somewhat by noting the contributions made by other taxa of medium and small birds. Finally, the possibility shouldn't be ignored that passenger pigeons may be under-identified simply because they are not represented in many comparative collections used to analyze archaeological faunal remains. Offsetting this is the fact that they are sufficiently unlike other taxa to at least raise a red flag for the analyst, whom we must hope will seek further input. The data used for the following analysis are derived from published and unpublished faunal reports, many being found in the growing gray literature. It is impossible to cover this literature in a systematic fashion, given the number of universities and private firms producing it. Therefore, participants of the SAAArch-biology list-serve maintained by the Illinois State Museum were asked to help identify relevant references. In this manner, a number of additional assemblages including passenger pigeon were identified, although doubtless there are others that I've missed. Table 11.1 is the compilation of known sites with passenger pigeon. I have included southern Illinois and Missouri in the "southeast." These states are outside the historic breeding range, and may help to document changes in geographic distribution. There is also a great deal of faunal research from the area. Assignment to time period is sometimes a best judgment on my part. Identified bone sample size (NISP) is included, although it is reported in different ways by different analysts and not always tallied. Bird NISP and the number oftaxa identified allow a means to gauge preservation and sampling issues. Finally, along with pigeon NISP, I have included NISP for turkey, to provide a comparison with the undeniably more important bird species for prehistoric Native Americans. Table 1l.2 is a list of major faunal assemblages in the Southeast that lacked pigeon. It does not include every small or poorly preserved faunal sample that was examined for the study. There are several late Pleistocene and early Holocene occurrences of passenger pigeons beyond the nesting range, including three cave paleontological faunas analyzed by Paul Parmalee: one in northwest Alabama, one in middle Tennessee, and one in southern Illinois (Fig. I l.1). Late Pleistocene examples of passenger pigeon are also recorded in Florida (Hulbert 2001: 164). The earliest archaeological examples are from Dust Cave in northwest Alabama (Walker 2000) in the Late Paleoindian zone (NISP = 8). Archaic occurrences of passenger pigeon are found associated with three rockshelter or cave sites, Modoc Rock Shelter, Dust Cave, and Russell Cave (Fig. 11.1). Passenger pigeons occur mainly in the Middle Archaic deposits, but also in Late Archaic contexts at Modoc (Parlamee 1959; Thorson and Styles 1992). At Dust Cave, they are found in Early and
AL
AR
AR
MO
AL
Stanfield Worley (41)
Toltec Md D (42)
Toltec Md S (43)
Upper Bridgeton (44)
ITU66 (45)
5
AR
AR
Paw Paw (35)
MS
TN
Oliver (32)
Priestly (37)
LA
Lake Providence (31)
Rock Levee (39)
5
IL
Fish Lake (26)
5
6
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
IL
4
4
MO
IL
Bridgeton (24)
TN
Rhoton Cave (17)
Scoville (18)
2
2
2
2
2
I
Time Code
Black Earth (23)
IL
AL
Russell Cave (10)
Dust Cave (8)
Modoc (9)
AL
AL
Dust Cave (7)
IL
AL
TN
Cheek Bend Cave (2)
Meyer Cave (3)
AL
Bell Cave (I)
Dust Cave (6)
State
Site Name
2053
Early Archaic
Mississippian
Late Woodland 4460
1168
446
3843 16523
Late Woodland
Woodland
Late Woodland
661
210
1342
951
109
0
91
129
1120 39000
L Woodland (EM)
L Middle Wood?
I3
I3
8
11
8
10
8
II
6
0
0
2
56
954 403 29
7 7
746
~
15
2
56
93
10
2
40
6
45
259
283
44
7
126
37
Jackson 2003
Kelly, unpublished data
Kelly and Rolingson 2003
Hoffman 1982
Parmalee 1962
Scott 1995
Kelly 1990
Kelley 1992
Breitburg and Mainfort 1994
~
1181
::cl
.......
~
~
'""
I ~
00·
:::J 44
Scott, unpublished data
::;. ""
S· ..... ;:Kelly 1984
14
Breitburg 1981 0
~
"";:::
VJ
7
Munson et al. 1971
~
en:,
S·
*""
is \:l
Kelly 1998
Faulkner and McCollough 1974
0
Weigel, Holman, & Paloumpis 1974
Parrnalee 1969
Walker 2000
Walker 2000
Walker 2000
Parmalee 1967
Parmalee and Klippel 1982
Parmalee 1992
Reference
49
352
67
II
6
I
3
13
Turkey NISP
37
28
46
3
5
3 8
II
414
1041
present
50
Pigeon NISP
32
40
333 343
Bird Taxa
Bird Sam Size
925
1642
2817
L Wood (EM)*
Late Woodland
12484
3033
0
Late Woodland
Late Woodland
Late Woodland
Woodland
Middle Woodland
84
2890
Middle Woodland
9218
Archaic
E, M, L Archaic
1582
1516
Middle Archaic
106000
Pleistocene
2700
Sample NISP
Late Paleo
Pleistocene
Pleistocene
Time Period
Table 11.1. Southeastern sites with passenger pigeon identified in faunal assemblages.
TX
George C. Davis (63)
6
6
AL
MO
IL
OK
GA
AR
Moundville (77)
Owls Bend (78)
Petitt (80)
Roden (83)
Ruckers Bottom (84)
Shallow Lake (85)
6
6
6
6
6
6
AL
TX
Mitchell (75)
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
Lubbub Creek (74)
AR
MO
Knappenberger (7 I)
Lilbourn (73)
TX
TN
French Lick (62)
Hatchell (67)
GA
Etowah (61)
IL
GA
Etowah (60)
Halliday (66)
6
MO
Cronso (57)
AL
AR
MO
GA
Beaver Dam (51)
Crenshaw (56)
Gilliam (64)
AR
Bangs Slough (49)
Gooseneck (65)
6
AR
Armorel (48)
6
AR
Alexander (47)
Time Code
State
Site Name
(cont.)
Mississippian
5780
13015
33436
Mississippian
Mississippian
5217
Mississippian
Mississippian
Mississippian 12747
33000
Mississippian
Mississippian
21826
2 6
125
10
17
13
0
33
8
3
5
3
8
4
19
15
3
7
8
3
Bird Taxa
834
334
655
2148
0
2187
69
43
1116
129
444
420
79
150
667
1149
5798
6907
1061
7039
737 625
7573
98
46
Bird Sam Size
21000
3613
6953
Sample NISP
Mississippian
Mississippian
Mississippian
Mississippian
Mississippian
Mississippian
Mississippian
Mississippian**
Mississippian
Mississippian
Mississippian
Mississi ppian
Mississippian
Mississippian
Mississippian
Mississippian
Time Period
2
14
82
6
13
present
3
2
I
7
14
I
300
I
48
87
75
3
present
39
Pigeon NISP
10
12
66
3
21
307
190
21
32
Rolingson and Schambach 1981
Scott 1985
Parmalee and Bogan 198 I
B reitburg 1999
Lynott 1988
Jackson and Scott 2002
Lord and Thurmond 1979
Scott 1983
Smith 1975
Bogan 1974a
Lord and Thurmond 1979
Kelly, unpublished data
Smith 1975
Jackson 2003
Lord and Thurmond 1979
Breitburg 2000
34 III
Roe 1990
van der Schalie and Parmalee 1959
Neumann 1985
Scott and Jackson 1998
Reitz, Marrinan, and Scott 1987
Colburn and Styles 1990
Bogan 1974b
Styles, Purdue, and Colburn 1985a
Reference
95
587
101
157
37
14
3
Turkey NISP
Cl ~
\:)
~
CS
;:;,t.
;:J:. ;:s
>:l..
~
OQ
\:)
OQ
@l
a
"00
IL
SC
KY
Black Earth (105)
Broom Hall (106)
Cut-off Caves (108)
8
8
7
7
7
7
6
6
6
6
6
unknown
EJlmAmerjcan
Hist.
Ellm8.meric8n
Historic Cherokee Historic 18th Indian Hist.
Protohistoric
Historic Indian
Historic Sauk-Fox
Proto historic
Protohistoric
Mississippian
Mississippian
Mississippian
Mississippian
Mississippian
Mississippian
Time Period
Ridgehouse (109) AR unknown Sliding Slab Shelter unknown AR (11 0) Numbers in first column refer to sites indicated in figures. *EM = Emergent Mississippian. **Possibly mixed with historic material.
IL
IL
Waterman (104)
NC
TN
AR
Ables Creek (95)
Toqua (102)
AR
Zebree (94)
AR
AL
Yarborough (93)
Hardman (101)
7
TN
Widows Creek (92)
MS
7
KY
Wickliffe (91)
Fatherland (99)
7
NC
Town Creek (88)
6
TN
Toqua(87)
Time Code
State
Site Name
(cont.)
5051
0
3593
46017
4521
5680
8728
514
0
28
2222
103
172
148
1035
1819
25812 6082
116
3033
560
4965
Bird Sam Size
2335
7033
75887
Sample NISP
5
0
7
27
30
27
11
29
10
0
5
22
Bird Taxa
present
3
9
3
51
8
3
10
85
108
10
3
67
65
99
Pigeon NISP
22
0
0
97
7
13
129
0
12
73
101
478
353
376
Turkey NISP
Marrinan, pers. comm.
J ames and Neal 1986
Watson, pers. comm.
Hogue, Wilson, and Jacobson 1995
Breitburg 1981
Parma lee and Bogan, 1980b
Bogan 1980
Rolingson, pers. comm.
Cleland 1965; Penman 1983
Parmalee 1964
Van der Warker and Detwiler 2000
Jackson 1992
Guilday and Parma lee 1975
Scott 1982
Morey 1996
Wesler 2001
Wilson and Hogue 1995
Bogan 1980
Reference
t3
.......
CQ
.......
;:,:
~ 0
"
~
OQ' ;:,:-.. I" ~
~.
~
~
S·
:;;: ;:,:
V:J
~
~
OQ
S·
;:,:
~
....?;-
\:)
2
4
4
LA
LA
LA
SC
LA
GA
TN
SC
IL
LA
Conly (4)
Copes (5)
Watson Brake (II)
38JA61 (12)
Fredericks Site (13)
Hartford (14)
Higgs (15)
Lewis (16)
Smiling Dan (19)
Tchefuncte (20)
MS
IL
AR
LA
AR
AR
Noble Weiting (34)
Powell Canal (36)
Pump Canal (38)
Alexander (46)
Banks Village (50)
IL
Julien (29)
McNight (33)
AR
M.()
5
MS
French (27)
Ink Bayou (28)
Kimberlin (30)
5
AR
Faulkner Lake (25)
5
6
6
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
IL
AR
Apple Creek Site (21)
Bangs Slough (22)
4
4
4
4
4
2
2
Time code
Site Name
State
127
Late Woodland
4898
Mississippian
Mississippian 4874
3790
50804
Late Woodland
Late Woodland
920
99
137
17
200
394
8122
Late Woodland
Late Wood-E Miss
5
II
19
166
119
19
976
257
661
Late Woodland 2444
2343
13397
Late Woodland
Late Woodland
3662
969
Late Woodland
24758
M, L Woodland
4557
Early Woodland
Late Woodland
7745
Middle Wood
27
2
6
4
18
8
4
6
2
0
33
0
17
0
0
0
0
0
0
Pigeon NISP
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
63
4
4
8
28
3
Bird Taxa
0 7169
807
47
21
854
852
124
Bird Sam Size
Middle Wood
24143
4530
17031
9224
24909
3794
Sample NISP
EWoodland
Middle Wood
Middle Wood
EWoodland
Middle Archaic
Late Archaic
Middle Archaic
Time Period
Table 11.2. Southeastern sites examined that lacked passenger pigeon.
138
17
0
2
38
8
3
0
4
3
7
13
167
Parmalee 1966
Styles, Purdue, and Colburn 1985a
Misner 1991
Carr 1982
Parmalee and Bogan 1980a
Breitburg 1998
Neumann 1985
Cross 1984
Colburn 1987
Wilson 1987
Scott 19%
Colburn and Styles 1990
Parma1ee, Paloumpis & WilsOR 1972
Lewis 1997
Styles et al. 1985b
IS 5
Reitz, Marrinan, and Scott 1987
Neumann 1985
Carder et al. 1996
Shafer 2000
Reitz, Marrinan, and Scott 1987
Jackson and Scott 200 I
Jackson 1989
Jackson and Scott 200 I
Reference
17
0
217
0
0
31
13
2
Turkey NISP
~
~
C)
0
'"15
CS
~
....
>:>... ;l:. ;:s
~
CiQ
>:>
CiQ
N
00
.......
6
1785 1913
Mississippian
Mississippian
Historic 18th Euro
8
7
Protohistoric Early 19th c Indian 1300
3975
2036
6098
Mississippian
Historic Indian
795
7310
3136
1897
Mississippian
Mississippian
Mississippian
Mississippian
1127
Mississippian
92
1225
31
47
75
104
39
159
133
69
178
104
7281
Mississippian
7
6
6
6
6
6
6
755
6300
259
170
864
23
Bird Sam Size
Mississippian
Numbers in first column refer to sites indicated in figures.
IL
MS
Welcome Center (90)
Waterman (107)
MO
Snodgrass (86)
Turner (89)
GA
MO
Powers Fort (81)
Victory Drive (103)
7
MO
Parkin (79)
AR
AR
Moon Site (76)
AR
AR
Lawhorn (72)
Cedar Grove (96)
AR
Kingston Lake (70)
Goldsmith Oliver (100)
6
IL
Kellogg (69)
6
IL
MS
Julien (68)
16884 34419
Mississippian
6
Mississippian
6
Mississippian
16353
Sample NISP
6
Mississippian
Mississippian
Time Period
TN
TN
6
AR
TN
6
Time code
MO
State
Chucalissa (55) East Nashville Mound (58) EOFF 1 (59)
Callahan-Thompson (53) Cedar Grove (54)
Site Name
(conI.)
5
3
2
6
4
4
8
8
7
35
8
3
9
16
7
Bird Taxa
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
Pigeon NISP
0
100
4
0
10
24
11
41
14
17
9
0
19
152
478
28
6
Turkey NISP
Parmalee and Bogan 1980b
Ledbetter 1997
Scott and Jackson 1990
Styles and Purdue 1984
Mooney et al. 2003
Smith 1975
Neumann 1985
Neumann 1985
Keck 1997
Kelly 1992
Parmalee 1962b
Parmalee 1962a
Atkinson, Phillips, and Walling 1980
Cross 1984
Faulkner and McCollough 1975
Breitburg 2000
Smith 1975
Sty les and Purdue 1984
Neumann 1985
Reference
ti
u.,
"00
;::J
Cl
~
is'