Matching Items (4)
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- All Subjects: Pueblo Indians
- Creators: Kintigh, Keith W.
Description
Understanding agricultural land use requires the integration of natural factors, such as climate and nutrients, as well as human factors, such as agricultural intensification. Employing an agroecological framework, I use the Perry Mesa landscape, located in central Arizona, as a case study to explore the intersection of these factors to investigate prehistoric agriculture from A.D. 1275-1450. Ancient Perry Mesa farmers used a runoff agricultural strategy and constructed extensive alignments, or terraces, on gentle hillslopes to slow and capture nutrient rich surface runoff generated from intense rainfall. I investigate how the construction of agricultural terraces altered key parameters (water and nutrients) necessary for successful agriculture in this arid region. Building upon past work focused on agricultural terraces in general, I gathered empirical data pertaining to nutrient renewal and water retention from one ancient runoff field. I developed a long-term model of maize growth and soil nutrient dynamics parameterized using nutrient analyses of runoff collected from the sample prehistoric field. This model resulted in an estimate of ideal field use and fallow periods for maintaining long-term soil fertility under different climatic regimes. The results of the model were integrated with estimates of prehistoric population distribution and geographical characterizations of the arable lands to evaluate the places and periods when sufficient arable land was available for the type of cropping and fallowing systems suggested by the model (given the known climatic trends and land use requirements). Results indicate that not only do dry climatic periods put stress on crops due to reduced precipitation but that a reduction in expected runoff events results in a reduction in the amount of nutrient renewal due to fewer runoff events. This reduction lengthens estimated fallow cycles, and probably would have increased the amount of land necessary to maintain sustainable agricultural production. While the overall Perry Mesa area was not limited in terms of arable land, this analysis demonstrates the likely presence of arable land pressures in the immediate vicinity of some communities. Anthropological understandings of agricultural land use combined with ecological tools for investigating nutrient dynamics provides a comprehensive understanding of ancient land use in arid regions.
ContributorsKruse-Peeples, Melissa R (Author) / Spielmann, Katherine A. (Thesis advisor) / Abbott, David R. (Committee member) / Hall, Sharon J. (Committee member) / Kintigh, Keith W. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This research explores how people's relationships with the spirits of the dead are embedded in political histories. It addresses the ways in which certain spirits were integral "inhabitants" of two social environments with disparate political traditions. Using the prehistoric mortuary record, I investigate the spirits and their involvement in socio-political affairs in the Prehispanic American Southeast and Southwest. Foremost, I construct a framework to characterize particular social identities for the spirits. Ancestors are select, potent beings who are capable of wielding considerable agency. Ancestral spirits are generic beings who are infrequently active among the living and who can exercise agency only in specific contexts. Anonymous groups of spirits are collectives who exercise little to no agency. I then examine the performance of mortuary ritual to recognize these social identities in the archaeological record. Multivariate analyses evaluate how particular ritual actions memorialized the dead. They concentrate on treatment of the body, construction of burial features, inclusion of material accompaniments, and the spaces of ritual action. Each analysis characterizes the social memories that ritual acts shaped for the spirits. When possible, I supplement analysis of archaeological data with ethnohistoric and ethnographic information. Finally, I compile the memories to describe the social identities for the spirits of the dead. In this study, I examine the identities surrounding the spirits in both a Mississippian period settlement on the Georgia coast and in several Protohistoric era Zuni towns in the northern Southwest. Results indicate that ancestors were powerful members of political factions in coastal Mississippian communities. In contrast, ancestral spirits and collectives of long-dead were custodians of group histories in Zuni communities. I contend that these different spirits were rooted in political traditions of competition. Mississippian ancestors were influential agents on cultural landscapes filled with contestation over social power. Puebloan ancestral spirits were keepers of histories on landscapes where power relations were masked, and where new kinds of communities were coalescing. This study demonstrates that the spirits of the dead are important to anthropological understandings of socio-political trajectories. The spirits are at the heart of the ways in which history influences and determines politics.
ContributorsThompson, M. Scott (Author) / Buikstra, Jane E. (Thesis advisor) / Kintigh, Keith W. (Committee member) / Abbott, David R. (Committee member) / Goldstein, Lynne G (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This dissertation explores the interrelationships between periods of rapid social change and regional-scale social identities. Using archaeological data from the Cibola region of the U.S. Southwest, I examine changes in the nature and scale of social identification across a period of demographic and social upheaval (A.D. 1150-1325) marked by a shift from dispersed hamlets, to clustered villages, and eventually, to a small number of large nucleated towns. This transformation in settlement organization entailed a fundamental reconfiguration of the relationships among households and communities across an area of over 45,000 km2. This study draws on contemporary social theory focused on political mobilization and social movements to investigate how changes in the process of social identification can influence the potential for such widespread and rapid transformations. This framework suggests that social identification can be divided into two primary modes; relational identification based on networks of interaction among individuals, and categorical identification based on active expressions of affiliation with social roles or groups to which one can belong. Importantly, trajectories of social transformations are closely tied to the interrelationships between these two modes of identification. This study has three components: Social transformation, indicated by rapid demographic and settlement transitions, is documented through settlement studies drawing on a massive, regional database including over 1,500 sites. Relational identities, indicated by networks of interaction, are documented through ceramic compositional analyses of over 2,100 potsherds, technological characterizations of over 2,000 utilitarian ceramic vessels, and the distributions of different types of domestic architectural features across the region. Categorical identities are documented through stylistic comparisons of a large sample of polychrome ceramic vessels and characterizations of public architectural spaces. Contrary to assumptions underlying traditional approaches to social identity in archaeology, this study demonstrates that relational and categorical identities are not necessarily coterminous. Importantly, however, the strongest patterns of relational connections prior to the period of social transformation in the Cibola region largely predict the scale and structure of changes associated with that transformation. This suggests that the social transformation in the Cibola region, despite occurring in a non-state setting, was governed by similar dynamics to well-documented contemporary examples.
ContributorsPeeples, Matthew A. (Author) / Kintigh, Keith W. (Thesis advisor) / Hegmon, Michelle (Thesis advisor) / Spielmann, Katherine A. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Environmental change has often been cited as affecting choices made whether to pursue cooperative or competitive strategies. The Flagstaff region provides a unique opportunity to address how environmental changes may affect choices made between competition and cooperation. Part of the region was a prehistoric frontier zone between three archaeological cultures and these groups had to contend with a marginal and highly variable climate for agriculture. These regional patterns of climatic variation are well documented and further the eruption of Sunset Crater Volcano in the midst of this frontier zone devastated local environments and reshaped the landscape. As groups re-colonized the frontier zone, they actively sought to negotiate new boundaries using both competitive and cooperative strategies that can be discerned archaeologically, including intergroup violence and the construction and use of communal ritual architecture. Dendroclimatological data is used to identify periods of environmental change and expectations for cooperative and competitive responses to these changes are developed based on anthropological theory and ethnographic case studies. These expectations are then tested against the archaeological record. Three lines of evidence are used to assess changes in levels of competition: (1) use of defensive sites, (2) presence of skeletal trauma, and (3) emergence of specialized social roles and weapons technologies. Two lines of evidence are used to assess changes in levels of cooperation (1) use of communal ritual architecture and (2) patterns of exchange. In some cases the expected relationships between favorable conditions and evidence of increased cooperation and between unfavorable conditions and evidence of increased competition are found. However, in other cases the expectations are not supported, with local historical and cultural contingencies appearing to override environmental influences. Contrasts between patterns of cooperation and competition found in the culturally diverse frontier zone versus the patterns found in the more culturally homogenous heartland are identified that suggest greater likelihood of the emergence of conflict in settings with pre-existing contexts of social differences.
ContributorsO'Hara, Frederick Michael (Author) / Hegmon, Michelle (Thesis advisor) / Kintigh, Keith W. (Committee member) / Abbott, David R. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015