Andrew I. Duff

Ceramic micro-seriation : Types or attributes ?

Duff, Andrew I. (1996). Ceramic Micro-Seriation: Types or Attributes? American Antiquity 61(1):89 101.

Prehistoric Population Dynamics in the Northern San Juan Region, a.d. 950–1300

ABSTRACT If there is one distinctive event typically associated with the Northern San Juan region it is the “sudden abandonment” of this area in the late thirteenth century. Yet, examination of the process of migration reveals that it is seldom sudden and is often best understood as a historical process with a distinct demographic structure. Analyses of several regional data sets are used to estimate population ranges for the Northern San Juan region for the period between A.D. 950 and 1300. These data, in turn, provide the basis for a discussion and evaluation of the process of population growth and eventual emigration from the region.

History and process in village formation: Context and contrasts from the Northern Southwest

Two processes characterize the later precontact history (twelfth-fourteenth centuries) of the northern part of the American Southwest: aggregation of people into large towns and depopulation of large regions. These processes have been explained as the result of environmental, economic, and social factors, including drought and warfare. Using a theoretical perspective based on Pauketat’s “historical processualism,” we argue that aggregation and depopulation are partly the result of historical developments surrounding the expansion and collapse of the Chaco regional system. We present our understanding of the Chaco regional system from the perspective of historical processualism; then, historical developments in the northern San Juan and Cibola regions-northern and southern frontiers of the Chaco world-are compared. The northern San Juans historically close ties with Chaco Canyon, the post-Chaco regional center at Aztec, and other factors ultimately resulted in the region’s depopulation. In the Cibola region, ties with Chaco were more tenuous and use of Chacoan ideology appears to have been strongest in the post-Chaco era, though no post-Chaco regional center emerged. Instead, large towns developed. Built on novel combinations of independent histories, ritual, and experience with Chaco, large towns enhanced stability. They were encountered by early Spanish explorers and some persist to the present day.

Post-Chacoan Social Integration at the Hinkson Site, New Mexico

ABSTRACTThe century following the collapse of Chaco is often viewed as a time of cultural backsliding. However, imposing sites with Chaco-inspired public architecture provide evidence of large communities, dating between A.D. 1200 and 1275, that laid the organizational foundations of well-known Pueblo IV towns. This article reports on excavations at one such Zuni-area settlement, the Hinkson site. In this site, 32 residential room blocks surround a great house complex that includes an unroofed, oversize great kiva, a nazha, and roads. The Hinkson site appears to be the center of a 250 square kilometer community with 70 room blocks and nearly 900 rooms. Recognition of these multi-room block communities with public architecture permits a reformulation of current concepts of post-Chacoan, Anasazi social integration and provides a more plausible bridge between the Chacoan and Pueblo IV periods.

Obsidian Evidence of Interaction and Migration from the Mesa Verde Region, Southwest Colorado

A growing body of evidence demonstrates that ancestral Pueblo people living in the central Mesa Verde region of the U.S. Southwest maintained long-distance contacts with other Pueblo peoples. Questions of Pueblo interactions through time and across space have traditionally been addressed using ceramic sourcing data. This research uses obsidian source data to argue that, from A.D. 600 to 920, residents of the central Mesa Verde region obtained obsidian from throughout the U.S. northern Southwest, but that from A.D. 1060 to 1280 they acquired obsidian almost exclusively from the Jemez Mountains area of north-central New Mexico. In addition, importation of obsidian from the Pajarito Plateau increased during the period of population decline in the Mesa Verde region, and population expansion on the Pajarito. Characteristics of the obsidian assemblage from central Mesa Verde region sites also suggest that Jemez obsidian entered the region primarily in the form of finished arrows, arrow points, and arrow-point preforms. We argue that these patterns reflect return migration by early immigrants from the Mesa Verde region to the northern Rio Grande, an early stage in the development of a migration stream between the two regions.

The role of a Chaco-Era great house in the Southern Cibola Region of West-Central New Mexico: The Largo Gap great house community

Largo Gap is one of several late Pueblo II (a.d. 1050–1130) Chaco-style great houses located in the southern Cibola region of west-central New Mexico. This region is at the interface of two Southwestern cultural areas: Mogollon and Pueblo. We report results of survey and excavation research at the Largo Gap great house and associated community to explore the role great houses in this region served for local populations, as well as their articulation with other great houses across the “Chaco Sphere.” The results identify Largo Gap as an architecturally “Chacoan” structure and that use of this structure incorporated both Mogollon and Puebloan material culture. The use of ceramics from both ancestral culture groups indicates that the local community was multi-ethnic, and suggests a socially-integrative role for the great house within this region.

Debitage Stylistic Variability at Cox Ranch Pueblo

Abstract This paper applies the method of stylistic flake analysis of to the analysis of debitage from two middens from Cox Ranch Pueblo, a late Pueblo II (ca. 1050–1130) period habitation site in west-central New Mexico. Previous research has suggested the multiethnic nature of site occupation based on the presence of two distinct methods for the manufacture of utilitarian ceramics and the sites location at the interface of two of the Southwests traditional culture areas. This study samples debitage from two of the largest middens, each associated with a residential roomblock at the site, to determine if any of the stylistic trends found among the ceramic artifacts could be detected within the debitage from the site. Results show that there are in fact two different styles of flint knapping at the site, though both styles are present within each of the two midden assemblages. It is concluded that these two stylistic groups may relate to the two ethnic groups suggested to have co-resided at the site.