The Long History of field research at Grasshopper, a massive, 500-room pueblo in an isolated mountain meadow in east-central Arizona, has produced a wealth of architectural information. Drawing on this extensive research, Charles Riggs reconstructs the pueblo and provides a glimpse into the everyday life of the community at a critical time in Southwest prehistory. Between AD 1300 and 1330 a group consisting mainly of newcomers to the area established and then enlarged Grasshopper. From the architectural remnants excavated by the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School it is possible to determine that the earliest arrivals settled Grasshopper relatively quickly and that subsequent groups from the region and the Colorado Plateau built their houses next to kinsmen. The houses of locals and immigrants remained separate in discrete room blocks despite their occupants' participation in communal groups. Ultimately short-lived, by AD 1330 the influx of immigrants tapered off and the architecture came to reflect a more seasonal, less intensive use of the area. Eventually the community was abandoned and the walls were left to crumble. In The Architecture of Grasshopper Pueblo, Riggs gives us a new view of community life at this ancient Puebloan site.
Located in the mountains of east-central Arizona, Grasshopper Pueblo is a prehistoric ruin that has been excavated and interpreted more thoroughly than most sites in the Southwest: more than 100 rooms have been unearthed here, and artifacts of remarkable quantity and quality have been discovered. Thanks to these findings, we know more about ancient life at Grasshopper than at most other pueblos. Now two archaeologists who have devoted more than two decades to investigations at Grasshopper reconstruct the life and times of this fourteenth-century Mogollon community. Written for general readers—and for the White Mountain Apache, on whose land Grasshopper Pueblo is located and who have participated in the excavations there—the book conveys the simple joys and typical problems of an ancient way of life as inferred from its material remains. Reid and Whittlesey's account reveals much about the human capacity for living under what must strike modern readers as adverse conditions. They describe the environment with which the people had to cope; hunting, gathering, and farming methods; uses of tools, pottery, baskets, and textiles; types of rooms and households; and the functioning of social groups. They also reconstruct the sacred world of Grasshopper as interpreted through mortuary ritual and sacred objects and discuss the relationship of Grasshopper residents with neighbors and with those who preceded and followed them. Grasshopper Pueblo not only thoroughly reconstructs this past life at a mountain village, it also offers readers an appreciation of life at the field school and an understanding of how excavations have proceeded there through the years. For anyone enchanted by mysteries of the past, it reveals significant features of human culture and spirit and the ultimate value of archaeology to contemporary society.
Identifying distinct social groups of the past has always challenged archaeologists because understanding how people perceived their identity is critical to the reconstruction of social organization. Material culture has been the standard measure of distinction between groups, and the distribution of ceramics and other artifacts has often been used to define group boundaries. Western Pueblo Identities argues that such an approach is not always appropriate: demographic and historical factors may affect the extent to which material evidence can define such boundaries. Andrew Duff now examines a number of other factors—relationships among settlement size, regional population densities, the homogeneity of material culture, and local and long-distance exchange—in order to trace the history of interaction and the formation of group identity in east-central Arizona and west-central New Mexico from A.D. 1275 to 1400. Using comparative data from the Upper Little Colorado and Zuni regions, Duff demonstrates differences in patterns of interaction within and between regions with different population densities. He then links these differences to such factors as occupational history, immigrant populations, the negotiation of social identities, and the emergence of new ritual systems. Following abandonments in the Four Corners area in the late 1200s, immigrants with different historical backgrounds occupied many Western Pueblo regions—in contrast to the Hopi and Zuni regions, which had more stable populations and deeper historical roots. Duff uses chemical analyses of ceramics to document exchange among several communities within these regions, showing that people in less densely settled regions were actively recruited by residents of the Hopi and Zuni regions to join their settlements. By the time of the arrival of the Spaniards, two distinct social and territorial groups—the Hopi and Zuni peoples—had emerged from this scattering of communities. Duff's new interpretations, along with new data on ceramic exchange patterns, suggest that interaction is a better way to measure identity than more commonly used criteria. His work offers new perspectives on the role of ritual in social organization and on identity formation in Pueblo IV society and is rich in implications for the study of other sedentary, middle-range societies.
From 1971 to 1974, the School of American Research conducted a major multidisciplinary program of excavation and research at Arroyo Hondo Pueblo, one of the largest fourteenth-century Rio Grande sites. At its peak, Arroyo Hondo contained about one thousand rooms. This seventh volume in the series is focused on the walls, roomblocks, and architecture of public spaces at the site.
During more than a thousand years before Europeans arrived in 1540, the native peoples of what is now the southwestern United States and northern Mexico developed an architecture of rich diversity and beauty. Vestiges of thousands of these dwellings and villages still remain, in locations ranging from Colorado in the north to Chihuahua in the south and from Nevada in the west to eastern New Mexico—a geographical area of some 300,000 square miles. This study presents a comprehensive architectural survey of the region. Professionally rendered drawings comparatively analyze 132 sites by means of standardized 100-foot grids with uniform orientations. Reconstructed plans with shadows representing vertical heights suggest the original appearances of many structures that are now in ruins or no longer exist, while concise texts place them in context. Organized in five chronological sections that include 132 professionally rendered site drawings, the book examines architectural evolution from humble pit houses to sophisticated, multistory pueblos. The sections explore concurrent Mogollon, Hohokam, and Anasazi developments, as well as those in the Salado, Sinagua, Virgin River, Kayenta, and other areas, and compare their architecture to contemporary developments in parts of eastern North America and Mesoamerica. The book concludes with a discussion of changes in Native American architecture in response to European influences. Written for a general audience, the book holds appeal for all students of native Southwestern cultures, as well as for everyone interested in origins in architecture. In particular, it should encourage younger Native American architects to value their rich cultural heritage and to respond as creatively to the challenges of the future as their ancestors did to those of the past.
A fresh volume on the ancient structures of Chaco Canyon, built by native peoples between AD 850 and 1130, that unifies older information on the area with new advanced research techniques focusing on studies of technology and building types, analyses of architectural change, and readings of the built environment, aided by over 150 maps, floor plans, elevations and photos.
From the mid-twelfth to the mid-fourteenth century, the world of the ancestral Pueblo people (Anasazi) was in transition, undergoing changes in settlement patterns and community organization that resulted in what scholars now call the Pueblo III period. This book synthesizes the archaeology of the ancestral Pueblo world during the Pueblo III period, examining twelve regions that embrace nearly the entire range of major topographic features, ecological zones, and prehistoric Puebloan settlement patterns found in the northern Southwest. Drawn from the 1990 Crow Canyon Archaeological Center conference "Pueblo Cultures in Transition," the book serves as both a data resource and a summary of ideas about prehistoric changes in Puebloan settlement and in regional interaction across nearly 150,000 square miles of the Southwest. The volume provides a compilation of settlement data for over 800 large sites occupied between A.D. 1100-1400 in the Southwest. These data provide new perspectives on the geographic scale of culture change in the Southwest during this period. Twelve chapters analyze the archaeological record for specific districts and provide a detailed picture of settlement size and distribution, community architecture, and population trends during the period. Additional chapters cover warfare and carrying capacity and provide overviews of change in the region. Throughout the chapters, the contributors address the unifying issues of the role of large sites in relation to smaller ones, changes in settlement patterns from the Pueblo II to Pueblo III periods, changes in community organization, and population dynamics. Although other books have considered various regions or the entireprehistoric area, this is the first to provide such a wealth of information on the Pueblo III period and such detailed district-by-district syntheses. By dealing with issues of population aggregation and the archaeology of large settlements, it offers readers a much-needed synthesis of one of the most crucial periods of culture change in the Southwest. Contents 1. "The Great Period": The Pueblo World During the Pueblo III Period, A.D. 1150 to 1350, Michael A. Adler 2. Pueblo II-Pueblo III Change in Southwestern Utah, the Arizona Strip, and Southern Nevada, Margaret M. Lyneis 3. Kayenta Anasazi Settlement Transformations in Northeastern Arizona: A.D. 1150 to 1350, Jeffrey S. Dean 4. The Pueblo III-Pueblo IV Transition in the Hopi Area, Arizona, E. Charles Adams 5. The Pueblo III Period along the Mogollon Rim: The Honanki, Elden, and Turkey Hill Phases of the Sinagua, Peter J. Pilles, Jr. 6. A Demographic Overview of the Late Pueblo III Period in the Mountains of East-central Arizona, J. Jefferson Reid, John R. Welch, Barbara K. Montgomery, and MarA-a Nieves ZedeAo 7. Southwestern Colorado and Southeastern Utah Settlement Patterns: A.D. 1100 to 1300, Mark D. Varien, William D. Lipe, Michael A. Adler, Ian M. Thompson, and Bruce A. Bradley 8. Looking beyond Chaco: The San Juan Basin and Its Peripheries, John R. Stein and Andrew P. Fowler 9. The Cibola Region in the Post-Chacoan Era, Keith W. Kintigh 10. The Pueblo III Period in the Eastern San Juan Basin and Acoma-Laguna Areas, John R. Roney 11. Southwestern New Mexico and Southeastern Arizona, A.D. 900 to 1300, Stephen H. Lekson 12. Impressions of Pueblo III Settlement Trends among the Rio Abajo andEastern Border Pueblos, Katherine A. Spielman 13. Pueblo Cultures in Transition: The Northern Rio Grande, Patricia L. Crown, Janet D. Orcutt, and Timothy A. Kohler 14. The Role of Warfare in the Pueblo III Period, Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer 15. Agricultural Potential and Carrying Capacity in Southwestern Colorado, A.D. 901 to 1300, Carla R. Van West 16. Big Sites, Big Questions: Pueblos in Transition, Linda S. Cordell 17. Pueblo III People and Polity in Relational Context, David R. Wilcox Appendix: Mapping the Puebloan Southwest, Michael Adler and Amber Johnson
For thirty years, the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School at Grasshopper—a 500-room Mogollon pueblo located on what is today the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona—probed the past, taught scholars of international repute, and generated controversy. This book offers an extraordinary window into a changing American archaeology and three different research programs as they confronted the same pueblo ruin. Like the enigmatic Mogollon culture it sought to explore and earlier University of Arizona field schools in the Forestdale Valley and at Point of Pines, Grasshopper research engendered decades of controversy that still lingers in the pages of professional journals. Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittlesey, players in the controversy who are intimately familiar with the field school that ended in 1992, offer a historical account of this major archaeological project and the intellectual debates it fostered. Thirty Years Into Yesterday charts the development of the Grasshopper program under three directors and through three periods dominated by distinct archaeological paradigms: culture history, processual archaeology, and behavioral archaeology. It examines the contributions made each season, the concepts and methods each paradigm used, and the successes and failures of each. The book transcends interests of southwestern archaeologists in demonstrating how the three archaeological paradigms reinterpreted Grasshopper, illustrating larger shifts in American archaeology as a whole. Such an opportunity will not come again, as funding constraints, ethical concerns, and other issues no doubt will preclude repeating the Grasshopper experience in our lifetimes. Ultimately, Thirty Years Into Yesterday continues the telling of the Grasshopper story that was begun in the authors’ previous books. In telling the story of the archaeologists who recovered the material residue of past Mogollon lives and the place of the Western Apache people in their interpretations, Thirty Years Into Yesterday brings the story full circle to a stunning conclusion.
Prehistoric burial practices provide an unparalleled opportunity for understanding and reconstructing ancient civilizations and for identifying the influences that helped shape them.
