Collaborative Research: Analytic Approaches To Tracing Interaction Networks In The US Southwest

Washington State University, Pullman WA

Investigators

Abstract

This collaboration between Drs. Judith Habicht-Mauche at University of California, Santa Cruz and Andrew Duff at Washington State University examines ceramic technological practices and resources used to explore how emergent social networks enhanced the flow of information, material and people in the late precontact Southwest, transforming communities and identities in ways that continue to have relevance today. The Pueblo IV period (A.D. 1275-1400) was marked by a series of demographic upheavals that resulted in the formation of radically reconfigured social landscapes. The depopulation of long-occupied and densely settled regions instigated migrations that led to the displacement and reorganization of local communities and regional social networks. In areas that received a significant influx of new population, people from diverse ethnic, linguistic and cultural backgrounds came together to remake their social worlds. On the one hand, the Pueblo IV period appears to be a unique event in Pueblo history that led to many of the social formations and cultural identities that characterized the Southwest at European contact and that have largely endured to the present day. On the other hand, it is only one moment in a cycle of demographic reorganization and social negotiation that has characterized Pueblo societies from the beginnings of agricultural village life. The nature of Pueblo IV period reorganization,both what made it historically and structurally unique and what linked it to cycles of movement and culture change in the Southwest,remains a topic of central importance and anthropological inquiry. Archaeologists investigating this time period are interested in tracing migrant populations, in understanding how migrants merged with local groups to form multi-ethnic communities, in modeling how new social identities were negotiated and sustained, in documenting the emergence of novel social institutions and ritual practices and in understanding emergent systems of leadership and power. Data collected during this project will identify intra- and inter-regional trajectories of ceramic technological innovation and transfers of knowledge that illuminate subtle and complex interconnections among past and present populations. These connections trace both contact and movement of people, which have implications for contemporary Native American groups and public policy. Habicht-Mauche and Duff will mobilize a variety of analytical techniques to characterize local "recipes" and sources of raw materials used to prepare glaze paints on pottery manufactured at Pueblo IV period sites in east-central Arizona and west-central New Mexico. The project will chemically characterize glaze-paint composition using LA-ICP-MS and isotopically source lead in glaze paint using dissolution ICP-MS. These data will be integrated with other extant regional glaze-paint databases. Relationships among composition and source will be evaluated using Social Network Analysis. Thus, data from this project will contribute to emerging macroregional models of how late precontact social networks facilitated the exchange of technical information and materials, created and sustained migration corridors, and served as arenas of social reproduction that transformed Pueblo society. This project will enhance understanding of the cultural history of the Native peoples of the Southwest, while also making broader intellectual contributions to anthropological studies of migration and the anthropology of technology.