Dissertation: Understanding Ritual Reorganization in Late Prehistoric Western Pueblos: A Case Study on Homol'ovi

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Under the direction of Dr. E. Charles Adams Mr. Vincent LaMotta will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. His goal is to understand the factors which permitted effective functioning and coordination of activities of late prehistoric period Pueblo people in the Four Corners region of the Southwestern USA. The period known as the Pueblo III-IV transition, beginning in the mid-13th century AD and continuing through the early 1400s was characterized throughout the northern Southwest by major demographic shifts. The Four Corners region was largely abandoned by 1300, populations having emigrated to a few large settlement clusters with some sites housing over a thousand people. By the mid 14th century, average settlement size had increased by up to 500% or more over levels of just 50-100 years before. Aggregated Pueblo IV communities departed radically from the more typical pattern of dispersed low-density settlements that characterized the prehistory of the region up to that time. While earlier Puebloan experiments with aggregated life were relatively short-lived, Pueblo IV community patterns persisted for centuries into the historic period. These characteristics of such communities have stimulated much debate about the social mechanisms that facilitated aggregation and integration. Several archaeologists have proposed that Puebloan peoples developed rituals which played a central role in effecting and sustaining this pattern. For many years the Arizona State Museum has conducted excavation at a series of Homol'ovi sites which span this transitional period and these will form the basis for Mr. LaMotta's research. He believes that "ritual sodalities" observed in the ethnographic present emerged during the late prehistoric period and served an important integrating function. A ritual sodality is a ceremonial organization whose membership cross-cuts kinship lines and which typically performs public and semi-public rituals. The problem, as Mr. LaMotta notes is how to identify solidalities in the archaeological record and distinguish them from other types of family and kin based ritual groups which also were likely to exist. He has developed a series of criteria which serve this goal and with NSF support will supervise the analysis of excavated faunal and floral remains to determine whether, and when in the archaeological sequence the data conform to the expected pattern. This research is significant for the insight it will provide into how complex societies arise and are maintained. The work will also contribute to training a promising young scientist.