No description available.

LA-UR-09-02500A wide range of theories - resilience theory and the study of complex adaptive systems, for example - are advancing our understanding of anthropological systems. Recently, anthropologists have applied the panarchy framework to study socionatural systems. This framework allows researchers to assess growth, conservation, release, and reorganization in this nested-cycle model that operates simultaneously at multiple spatio-temporal scales. The long time-depth of the archaeological record is a critical factor in our ability to investigate human behavior within the panarchy's set of nested adaptive cycles.Archaeological investigation in the US Southwest has focused on processes of aggregation and culture change due to varying environmental and social conditions; the Pajarito Plateau, NM, has been the subject of archaeological research since the late 1800s. The Los Alamos National Laboratory portion of the Plateau has been thoroughly surveyed for cultural resources, but has received less attention by scholars than surrounding areas, including Bandelier National Monument. I use the panarchy framework to build a model of Puebloan settlement, land use, demography, and adaptation to assess the utility of the panarchy model for anthropological systems and fill a void in archaeologists' understanding of the Puebloan Southwest.I analyze patterns of residential and agricultural land use during the Rio Grande Coalition and Classic periods (A.D. 1150-1600) for the Pajarito Plateau. I conclude that there is no major change in the use of various landscape ranges between these periods. I reconstruct regional Puebloan momentary population and investigate recent evidence that supports a San Juan Basin source of the dramatic population increase during the Late Coalition. I also investigate aggregation into large plaza pueblos, the development of craft specialization, agricultural intensification, architectural change, and increased participation in the wider Rio Grande marketplace economy as responses of households, clans, villages, and the entire Pajarito population to the highly fluctuating climate of the local landscape. I address these results within the panarchy framework. Further, I argue that the Pajarito Plateau system continued after the population dispersed into the Rio Grande Valley below, to be closer to reliable sources of water and the growing Rio Grande economy.

The Pueblo III period marks a critical shift in settlement location of Ancestral Puebloan people within the Mesa Verde region. Community centers during the Pueblo I and Pueblo II periods were built on mesa tops, whereas canyon-rims and alcoves became the preferred settlement location during the Pueblo III period. Beginning in the Pueblo I period, community centers consisted of linear roomblock villages. By the late Pueblo II period great house community centers influenced by the Chaco culture system spanned the Mesa Verde region. The Pueblo III period hallmarks the transition to canyon-rim villages and cliff dwellings. The location of these Pueblo III centers is thought to be related to the need for a defensive position on the landscape, and access to water sources. This shift in settlement locations undoubtedly led to change in the access to resources, such as water, arable farmland, and wild food plants and game. This study aims to evaluate whether the change in community center location impacted the accessibility to arable farmland and water sources immediately available to Ancestral Puebloan people throughout time. Specifically, several variables related to farming potential and hydrologic potential, including soil type, soil moisture, elevation, cropland suitability, distance to water sources, drainage density, and hydrogeologic units were evaluated. Nine community centers within the McElmo drainage area in southwestern Colorado ranging in age from the Pueblo II to Pueblo III periods were included in this study.

San Juan Red Ware was widely distributed throughout the Four Corners region of the U.S. Southwest between about AD 750 and 1100. Prior research indicates this ware is a marker of identity and was likely associated with feasting and other communal activities. A study of the distribution of this ware indicates that it was traded widely, but with significant variation in relative quantity between sites. This variation is likely caused by unequal access to this ware due either to a lack of access to the necessary exchange networks or by a conscious decision to not participate in the exchange of this ware. San Juan Red Ware became more widely dispersed after the first century of production, which may be indicative of increased integration between social groups. Several methods were used in this analysis, including inverse distance weighting, hexagon binning, fall-off curves, distance diagrams using Typenspektren, and social network analysis. An evaluation of these methods indicates some are more effective than others for this analysis, although the use of several complementary methods is recommended to provide a more comprehensive analysis.

This study analyzes the vernacular architecture of ancestral Pueblo kivas dating from the Pueblo II (A.D. 900-1150) and Pueblo III (A.D. 1150-1300) periods in the northern, middle, and southern San Juan regions in the American Southwest in order to shed light on communities of practice and their social, temporal, and spatial production practices. This research specifically examines kivas--or round rooms used for ritual and domestic activities--to address how architecture, as a symbolic system, emphasized the ways in which sign-objects were actively mediated by communities of practice and how their semiotic signatures can shed light on material expressions of ancestral Pueblo group identity. The theoretical perspectives used within this study are influenced by the work of educators and anthropologists analyzing the processes by which knowledge and skills are learned and transmitted from one generation to the next--these processes are responsible for the continuity of all material culture. This study adopts a community of practice approach to analyzing ancestral Pueblo kiva architecture for two primary reasons. First, the continuity of all material culture--including architecture--depends on the processes by which knowledge and skills are learned and transmitted from one generation to the next. Second, architectural production is an additive technology in which variations in learning frameworks are encoded as choices made by production groups during construction. The methodological applications used within this study are crucial to the identification and analysis of communities of practice in that additive vernacular architectural forms are encoded with learned production techniques. Learned production techniques were materially manifested as unique modes of fabrication and were recognized as the semiotic signatures of particular communities of practice. This study is the seedling from which larger research may germinate, providing insights into large-scale anthropological processes including identity formation and maintenance, population movement, the psychological effects of population aggregation, the nature and extent of social networks, the transmission and practice of learning, the production and movement of material culture, and the development and dissolution of political and ritual organization.

Although human land use in the industrial and post-industrial world has had demonstrable impacts on global climate, human land use may also improve or reduce the resilience of ecosystems to anthropogenic and natural climate change. This dissertation tests the hypothesis that low severity anthropogenic burning by prehistoric and protohistoric indigenous societies in the ponderosa pine forests of east-central Arizona improved the resilience of these forests to low frequency climate change. I use sedimentary charcoal, phosphorus, stable carbon isotopes, and palynology to reconstruct changes in fire regimes over the last 1000 years from seven radiocarbon dated alluvial sequences in five watersheds across a gradient of indigenous land use and occupation histories. Paleoecological evidence from occupied watersheds is consistent with small-scale, agricultural burning by Ancestral Pueblo villagers (between AD 1150-1325/1400) and anthropogenic burning by Western Apaches to promote wild pant foods (ca. AD 1550-1900) in addition to naturally frequent, low severity landscape fires. Statistical reconstructions of climate driven fire activity from tree-ring records of annual precipitation indicate that Southwestern forests were vulnerable to increased fire severity and shifts to alternative stable states between AD 1300-1650. In watersheds that were unoccupied or depopulated by AD 1325, paleoecological and sedimentological evidence is consistent with an increase in fire severity, whereas areas occupied and burned by indigenous people until AD 1400 did not yield evidence of increased fire severity. These results suggest that anthropogenic burning by small-scale societies may have improved the resilience of Southwestern forests to climate driven environmental changes.

This thesis presents the results of a multi-disciplinary investigation of a variant Ancestral Pueblo mortuary rite at Wallace Ruin, southwest Colorado (USA). This multi-storey building is one of four Lakeview Group great houses connected to the Pueblo II regional system centred at Pueblo Bonito of Chaco Canyon some 100 km to the south. From c. AD 1060-1150, Wallace Ruin functioned as a ritual-economic centre with a small residential component. Then, habitation of this great house, the Lakeview Group and all domiciles within 10 kilometres ceased. However, three or more decades later at least six rooms were used as a non-residential, Pueblo III mortuary facility for a minimum of 32 individuals. This utilisation was in marked contrast to the enduring Ancestral Pueblo practice of residential burial, usually in the extramural midden. The interrogation of several hypotheses regarding this anomaly entails a bioarchaeological approach that integrates skeletal evidence with spatial analyses regarding diachronic mortuary location choices at Wallace Ruin. Taphonomic methods that segregate bone displacements during corpse decomposition in a filled versus a void space provide accurate determinations of the depositional versus discovered mortuary microenvironments. The diachronic analysis of data from roughly 200 San Juan Region sites reveals additional ways in which Wallace’s Pueblo III mortuary program departs from longstanding communities of practice, whether great house or domicile. Chief among these are the use of a surface room floor and the postural arrangement of supine bodies with knees upright. These results, in combination with material culture evidence, form the basis of this thesis: The Pueblo III mortuary program at Wallace Ruin is a variant rite that entails a Mesa Verde Region reformulation of a Pueblo Bonito house society. The sanctioned retrieval of objects of memory offers a plausible explanation for intentional intrusions into two mortuary contexts. Beyond addressing questions concerning Wallace Ruin, a major contribution of this study includes advancement of the house society model as an interpretive scheme for evaluating Mesa Verde Region socio-ritual dynamics. This research also demonstrates the effectiveness of anthropologie de terrain (Duday, 2006) to retrospectively determine the original status of Ancestral Pueblo mortuary microenvironments. The refinement developed for this study, in which Range of Motion criteria are used to detect large-scale movements of lower limbs during corpse decomposition, is suitable for bioarchaeological analyses the world over.

Using dendroecological and archaeological methods and data we investigated the temporal dynamics of forest regeneration and fire history following depopulation of four large Pueblo IV period (1300-1600) villages on the Jemez Plateau, New Mexico. With tree rings we reconstructed the timing of reforestation on village footprints after depopulation–a novel approach to terminus ante quem dating of site occupation. Our tree-ring based forest age structure and fire history chronologies enabled us to reduce by 51 to 70 years the range of previous estimates of village depopulation dates derived primarily from terminal ceramic assemblages. One of the four village sites we investigated was depopulated in 1696, two were depopulated between 1625 and 1700 CE, while the fourth village was depopulated earlier (pre 1500), but the area was likely in continued use for agriculture or other seasonal purposes until the mid-1600s. Our results indicate that the Jemez were highly influential ecological agents. Forest structure and fire regime dynamics changed greatly after the departure of most people from these landscapes after circa 1650 CE. The terminus ante quem methods that we demonstrate in the Jemez Mountains have strong potential to constrain and refine low temporal resolution chronologies of human occupation at archaeological sites within other forested ecosystems of the Southwest and elsewhere.

This study assessed ways compositional analysis, facilitated by portable X-ray fluorescence technology (PXRF), can be applied in the museum setting to resolve provenance issues and other collections management questions. A major segment of the study evaluated PXRF as a non-invasive geochemical analysis technique to address concerns about whether the resolution of results is sufficient to draw meaningful conclusions. Compositional analysis, mainly facilitated by PXRF, was successfully applied to three clay artifact collections from the southwestern United States. Pottery sherds from Fourmile Ruin were analyzed using PXRF and compared to analyses from invasive wavelength-dispersive XRF and X-ray diffraction techniques. Expanding the data associated with the artifacts increases the collection's research value. The results of hierarchical clustering suggest further compositional analysis of Fourmile Ruin ceramics to verify this study's conclusions and evaluate current assumptions regarding where certain wares are produced. The iconic Pilling figurine collection was analyzed using scanning electron microscopy and PXRF to evaluate the authenticity of a figurine that had been returned after being lost for forty years. The geochemical tests confirmed the results from the basketry-imprint analysis that the returned figurine was the missing figurine, allowing the museum to restore the artifact's provenance. A pot being offered as a potential donation was analyzed using PXRF to evaluate if there was evidence of forgery or previous repair and help the museum decide whether or not to accept the donation. The study concluded the vessel has not been constructed or partially reconstructed using plaster of Paris. If the vessel has been constructed or partially reconstructed using pieced-together pottery sherds, they all came from a similar clay source. Based on these results, the museum decided to accept the pot as a donation. This study demonstrates the viability of PXRF as a useful geochemical research technique, particularly in cases where higher resolution invasive and destructive analysis techniques are not permitted. It establishes that PXRF can be used to authenticate and restore provenance both within a collection of objects and within a single object. Compositional analysis facilitated by PXRF can be a valuable tool in museum collections management and research.