Archeological Investigations in Cochiti Reservoir, New Mexico. Volume 4. Adaptive Change in the Northern Rio Grande Valley


Book Description

This volume is the final report concerning a five year long archeological project which was undertaken to recover information about cultural resources within the present area of Cochiti Reservoir in the northern Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico. Three previous volumes have summarized data recovered from intensive surveys and two seasons of excavation within the reservoir boundaries. These reports have served as basic documentation required by Federal law to mitigate the destruction of archeological remains caused by flooding. This volume serves as an interpretive and analytical synthesis of those data. In 21 chapters, the contributors to this report provide detailed analyses of settlement, subsistence and adaptive changes which characterize the human occupation of the northern Rio Grande Valley over the last four millenia. Papers are grouped according to broad cultural and temporal periods of adaptation-Archiac, prehistoric Pueblo and Historic Spanish-and emphasize analysis of residential size, subsistence pursuits and economic articulation of the occupants within the region during each period of adaptation. Particular emphasis is placed upon developing and evaluating a number of models proposed to account for settlement dynamics and adaptive change through time.




Archaeology of Bandelier National Monument


Book Description

These essays summarize the results of new excavation and survey research at Bandelier National Monument, with special attention to determining why larger sites appear when and where they do, and how life in these later villages and towns differed from life in the earlier small hamlets that first dotted the Pajarito in the mid-1100s.













Archaeological Semiotics


Book Description

This interdisciplinary book examines archaeology’s engagement with semiotics, from its early structuralist beginnings to its more recent Peircian encounters. It represents the first sustained engagement with Peircian semiotics in archaeology, as well as the first discussion of how pragmatic anthropology articulates with anthropological archaeology. Its central thesis is that archaeology is a distinctive kind of semiotic enterprise; one devoted to giving meaning to the past in the present through the study of materiality. It compliments standard studies of linguistics and reformulates contemporary theories of material culture. Providing an introduction to Saussure and a review of his legacy across structural, symbolic, and cognitive anthropology, Preucel goes on to present the Peircian alternative and highlights its influence on pragmatic anthropology. Of special interest are the discussions of the interrelations of structuralism and processual archaeology, poststructuralism and postprocessual archaeologies, and cognitive science and cognitive archaeology. The author offers two original case studies demonstrating how material culture pragmatically mediates social relations- one focusing on the aftermath of the Pueblo Revolt from 1680-1694 and the other on the New England utopian community of Brook Farm from 1842-1846. Throughout his analysis, Preucel emphasizes the close links between archaeology and other social sciences. But he also contends that archaeology, by virtue of the powerful ideological character of the past, can open up new spaces for discourse and dialogue about meaning, and, in the process, make a valuable contribution to contemporary semiotics.




Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt


Book Description

Archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and Native American scholars offer new views of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 that emphasize the transformative roles of material culture in mediating Pueblo Indian strategies of resistance and Colonial Spanish structures of domination.




The Pajarito Plateau


Book Description




Dynamics of Southwest Prehistory


Book Description

Emerging from a School of American Research, this work reviews the general status of archaeological knowledge in 9 key regions of the Southwest to examine broader questions of cultural development, which affected the Southwest as a whole, and to consider an overall conceptual model of the prehistoric Southwest after the advent of sedentism.




The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest


Book Description

In a groundbreaking book that challenges familiar narratives of discontinuity, disease-based demographic collapse, and acculturation, Michael V. Wilcox upends many deeply held assumptions about native peoples in North America. His provocative book poses the question, What if we attempted to explain their presence in contemporary society five hundred years after Columbus instead of their disappearance or marginalization? Wilcox looks in particular at the 1680 Pueblo Revolt in colonial New Mexico, the most successful indigenous rebellion in the Americas, as a case study for dismantling the mythology of the perpetually vanishing Indian. Bringing recent archaeological findings to bear on traditional historical accounts, Wilcox suggests that a more profitable direction for understanding the history of Native cultures should involve analyses of issues such as violence, slavery, and the creative responses they generated.