Dissertation Research: Lithic Raw Material Procurement Patterns and the Social Landscape in the Central Mesa Verde Region, A.D. 600-1300

Washington State University, Pullman WA

Investigators

Abstract

Under the supervision of Dr. Timothy Kohler (also the PI of the NSF-sponsored "Village Ecodynamic Project"), Fumiyasu Arakawa will investigate toolstone procurement patterns from A.D. 600 to 1300 in the central Mesa Verde region, a region that includes the Dolores Valley, Ute Mountain, and McElmo/Yellowjacket areas of southwestern Colorado. Toolstone procurement patterns reflect important aspects of territoriality and land-tenure systems by suggesting how far and how often people traveled to obtain raw materials. To understand toolstone procurement patterns, this research concentrates on studying debitage (manufacturing by-products) of various raw material types and the distance from their source areas to archaeological sites. Activities--hunting, gathering, and domestic purposes--related to additional lithic source identification, and additional debitage analysis, will be implemented, building on already strong r egional datasets in the study area. The database assembled will be organized in a geographic information system by six periods, making it easy to visualize differences between periods. The spatial distribution of stone raw materials is greatly understudied in this region, despite the fact that pilot studies indicate that these distributions inform on land use, community territoriality, and community interactions at increasing scales of analysis-from the residential site to the community, locality, and region. The perspectives gained on the social dynamics of the region with this database will be greatly enhanced by what is already known about this region and what else is being learned, and will contribute to ongoing and future studies in this region. Furthermore, this research is conducted by an international (Japanese) student, furthering the training of foreign researchers in American archaeological method and theory. Competing hypotheses for the major, still-unresolved questions concerning this area's prehistory (the causes for aggregation; the nature of the local Chacoan greathouses; the possibility of multiple ethnicities in this region; and the causes of the post-Pueblo I and post-Pueblo III depopulations) often depend on differing views of the social and spatial scales of conflict and cooperation. This research will assist in narrowing the range of possible models for these problem domains in the research area, and thereby help us understand similar processes in societies of similar scale elsewhere around the world.