Long-Term Settlement History and the Emergence of Towns in the Zuni Area

Abstract

From a regional perspective, the late thirteenth-century aggregation of village populations into large towns in the northern Southwest appears to be a brief and dramatic episode of social reorganization. That it is apparent across such a range of cultural and ecological circumstances suggests that a regional perspective will be needed to understand why it occurred. However, if we are to understand how it occurred—the social processes involved in the aggregation of populations into large towns—a high resolution, long-term view of the settlement history of particular localities provides a necessary complement to the regional view. We present a detailed examination of the development of one town in the American Southwest, the large, prehistoric Zuni town of Heshot uła. Without the long-term demographic reconstruction made possible by a fine-grained seriation and full-coverage survey, we would have seen this key transition as much more rapid and much less closely tied to the local situation than it now appears to be. Although this pueblo was built about A.D. 1275, we argue that its appearance was, at once, the culmination of demographic processes operating over at least 150 years, and the outcome of two more rapid, qualitative organizational transformations separated by a century.

Factors Controlling Pre-Columbian and Early Historic Maize Productivity in the American Southwest, Part 2: The Chaco Halo, Mesa Verde, Pajarito Plateau/Bandelier, and Zuni Archaeological Regions

“…In the early 1100s, some people from Chaco Canyon appear to have moved first to Salmon Pueblo (∼1100) and then to the Aztec Pueblo complex (∼1120) (Windes and Bacha 2008;Brown et al 2008). After the collapse of the Chacoan world at about 1130, people from the Chaco Halo may have migrated to Zuni (Kintigh et al 2004) and, during the late 1200s, Mesa Verdeans may have moved to sites in Northern Rio Grande, including the Pajarito Plateau (Ortman 2010;Lipe 2010).…”

Life among the tides : recent archaeology on the Georgia Bight : proceedings of the Sixth Caldwell Conference, St. Catherines Island, Georgia, May 20-22, 2011.

“…Tracking the shifting nature of archaeological material distribution through time and across space continues to be used by archaeologists to investigate a wide variety of past ideological, economic, and social phenomena including: relationships between people and natural resources (Daniel, 1996;Jones et al, 2003), logistical organization and residential strategies (Savelle, 2001), the creation and maintenance of social territories (Dortch, 2002;Kowalewski, 2003;Peterson and Drennan, 2005), changing power relations (Hally, 1996(Hally, , 1999(Hally, , 2006Williams and Shapiro, 1996), and demographic shifts (Feinman et al, 1985;Milner and Oliver, 1999;Scarre, 2001;Cobb and Butler, 2002;Kowalewski, 2003;Kintigh, Glowacki, and Huntley, 2004;Osborne, 2004).…”

“…Attempting to reconstruct past demographic trends is a perennial goal within archaeology (Hassan, 1978;Milner and Oliver, 1999;Cobb and Butler, 2002;Kowalewski, 2003;Bandy, 2004;Kintigh, Glowacki, and Huntley, 2004;Osborne, 2004). Quantity of temporally sensitive objects, such as ceramics, is a common approach, which is not without its dangers.…”

Who provided maize to Chaco Canyon after the mid-12th-century drought?

“…Judge (1989: 247) was the first to suggest that ''there was a shift in the administrative and ritual locus from Chaco to the San Juan area, perhaps to either Aztec or Salmon .circa A.D. 1090-1100''. Reed (2006) has argued that local San Juan residents were recruited by in-migrating Chacoans to be part of the original Salmon residential group and that the local indigenes remained in Salmon after A.D. 1125 (Reed, 2008 (Kintigh et al, 2004). While the rate of population increase in the Zuni region for the A.D. 1125-1225 period cannot be proven to have resulted from in-migration, megadrought characterized the southern Colorado Plateau between A.D. 1130 and 1177 ( Fig.…”

“…In the Totah area, both Salmon Ruin and Aztec West were established on or before A.D. 1100 and populations persisted in this area until about A.D 1300 (Brown et al, 2008;Reed, 2008). The Zuni region was populated well before A.D. 1100 and remained so until at least A.D. 1275 when Heshatauthla was built (Kintigh et al, 2004). Thus, we are left with three areas which could have supplied corn to Chaco Canyon in the A.D. 1180s -the Zuni region, the northeastern San Juan Basin (Mesa Verde-McElmo Dome), and the middle San Juan Basin (the Totah).…”