Dendroarchaeology of the Gallina

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With support of the National Science Foundation, Dr. Ronald H. Towner and students from the University of Arizona will conduct two seasons of research on the Gallina culture of northern New Mexico. The prehistoric Gallina have long been an enigma. Similar in many ways to other prehistoric Anasazi groups, the Gallina have been defined as a phase, and later, a separate culture. What is known is that the Gallina lived during a time of social and environmental changes that occurred across a broad area, but many questions about the Gallina remain unanswered in part because the Gallina chronologies have not been fully developed. Basic questions regarding Gallina population dynamics, settlement patterns, social organization, and adaptation to environmental change simply cannot be adequately addressed with the current chronological data. This project will remedy this situation for a key portion of the Gallina area. It will also contribute to our understanding of the effects of migration - not on migrants or host communities - but on communities along-the-path of migration streams.This project will significantly enhance understanding of the Gallina in specific and attainable ways. First, researchers will analyze more than two thousand tree-ring samples excavated from major Gallina sites in the 1970s, that were never submitted for analysis. These samples have now been transferred to the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research (LTRR) at the University of Arizona, where they will be analyzed and permanently curated As part of the tree-ring analysis, the team will develop internal site chronologies that will contribute to understanding Gallina social organization and demographics; they will also significantly enlarge the number of Christian-calendar dates and place the Gallina more firmly in time and space. Only one area map exists from earlier work, and it is woefully inadequate. The investigators will use modern Geographic Positioning Systems technology to map the previously excavated sites, and correlate them with the original field maps produced in the 1970s. Producing digital maps will significantly enhance current and future research efforts by providing detailed provenience information at the site, structure, and room level. Existing tree-ring reconstructions of precipitation will be used to elucidate aspects of precipitation variability during the Gallina occupation and relate that variability to Gallina social and demographic change. Finally, all previous and newly generated tree-ring dates from Gallina sites will be synthesized and all of data, except sensitive site locations, will be published on a website hosted by the LTRR. The broader impacts of the project will reach beyond the Gallina. The research will make important contributions toward understanding how and under what conditions various forms of social organization developed in the prehispanic Southwest. Models of such social formation processes will contribute to a broader understanding of human social organization during periods of demographic, climatic, and political stress. This project will result in significant advances in understanding Gallina cultural dynamics and social organization; it will illuminate important aspects of Gallina population dynamics, enhance anthropological theories of mixed-economy social organization, and augment our understanding of the impacts of migration on "intermediate" communities. The project will also contribute toward student training and development by employing both graduate and undergraduate students who will be involved in all phases of the project. It will also demonstrate the utility of existing collections that have been ignored for decades.