Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: The Protohistoric Tewa World: Coalescence and Identity in the Northern Rio Grande Region, New Mexico

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Samuel Duwe, under the supervision of Dr. Barbara Mills, will examine the ways in which group identity was created and transformed among ancestral Pueblo communities during population coalescence, or the process of regional populations nucleating at larger but fewer sites. More specifically, this research will focus on the Classic Period (A.D. 1325-1600) Tewa villages of northern New Mexico. Over an approximately 250-year period forty large villages underwent population coalescence. By the time of Spanish colonization in A.D. 1598, only six Tewa villages remained occupied. Although the causes of this residential restructuring have been the focus of a century of research, few studies have examined the social effects on the movers themselves. Investigating group identity, or the ways in which individuals and collectives are distinguished from other individuals and collectives, allows for a clearer understanding of how human social networks were organized in prehistory. Using group identity as a proxy for social change, this research attempts to understand how Tewa villagers adapted their social systems during a period of dramatic upheaval, and how coalescence contributed to the formation of the historic Tewa identity encountered by the Spanish colonists and Anglo explorers and anthropologists. This research will measure changes in ancestral Tewa group identity during coalescence in three dimensions: where and when people were moving across the landscape, ceramic exchange relationships within and outside the region, and changes in the elaboration and use of ritual spaces. Focusing primarily on 11 large pueblos, Duwe will map sites, surface collect artifacts, analyze pottery from surface collected and museum collections, and conduct chemical compositional analyses. The intellectual merit of this proposed research is three fold: regional, archaeological, and anthropological. This project will make substantial regional contributions to the archaeology of the Northern Rio Grande and the Greater Southwest. The research will provide chronological and spatial data for both residential and ritual features, as well as the first large-scale chemical analyses of clay and ceramics for the Tewa pueblos. The methodologies used in this research will be important for other archaeologists working in the Greater Southwest and in prehistoric societies worldwide who study similar processes of population coalescence and residential reorganization. The model used in this study will further archaeological discourse in using theoretical programs such as identity and coalescence by presenting an increasingly complex and nuanced understanding of human behavior. In broader terms, the proposed research will have practical applications to the ethical and political aspects that permeate modern anthropological research, especially the cultural affiliation of present-day peoples to past settlements. Because this project tracks the formation of historic and modern Tewa Pueblo social identity, the data collected in this project will provide information on indigenous groups that may support links to contemporary populations by looking beyond traditionally defined archaeological culture areas. This information will be disseminated in site tours and talks with local Pueblo communities, as well as detailed reports. Such information will be useful in determining cultural affiliation and past landscape use.