Ben A. Nelson

Fallow Valleys: Asynchronous Occupations in Southwestern New Mexico

ABSTRACTThis article suggests that archaeologists have underestimated both the mobility ranges of agriculturalists and the length of time required to complete a full cycle of mobility. A large part of the problem is that individual valleys have been regarded as regions, so that when occupation ceases in a valley, the whole region is said to be abandoned. Models of collapse, abandonment, and ethnic replacement are constructed to account for these illusory discontinuities, which disappear when the field of observation is appropriately widened. These issues are considered in the context of prehistoric southwestern New Mexico. The authors review occupations dating from A D. 1150 to 1450, when occupational histories are easiest to discern, and then turn to the earlier part of the Puebloan sequence from A.D 1000 to 1150. It is suggested that during these periods, valleys may have been left fallow periodically while populations moved elsewhere to allow the regeneration of critical resources.

Symbolic bones and interethnic violence in a frontier zone, northwest Mexico, ca. 500–900 C.E.

Significance Persistent interethnic violence has affected some global regions for centuries. Recent research reveals that major outbreaks are often prevented or limited by creative social action. In the prehispanic Northern Frontier of Mesoamerica, approximately 500–900 C.E., people of different ethnic backgrounds struggled for standing in a shifting sociopolitical landscape. Evidence is consistent with long-term social violence, but also with the use of the dead to communicate a range of symbolic messages. Complex arrays of human skeletal material commemorated past physical conflicts, possibly discouraging their repetition, while also connecting the living symbolically with a metaphysical realm inhabited by ancestors and deities. This article highlights the postmortem agency of the dead and illustrates their roles in structuring social relations. Although extensive deposits of disarticulated, commingled human bones are common in the prehispanic Northern Frontier of Mesoamerica, detailed bioarchaeological analyses of them are not. To our knowledge, this article provides the first such analysis of bone from a full residential-ceremonial complex and evaluates multiple hypotheses about its significance, concluding that the bones actively represented interethnic violence as well as other relationships among persons living and dead. Description of these practices is important to the discussion of multiethnic societies because the frontier was a context where urbanism and complexity were emerging and groups with the potential to form multiethnic societies were interacting, possibly in the same ways that groups did before the formation of larger multiethnic city-states in the core of Mesoamerica.

Prehispanic Northwest and Adjacent West Mexico, 1200 B.C.–A.D. 1400: An Inter-Regional Perspective

Northwest Mexico and West Mexico include four to five times as many named cultural areas equivalent to those known in the US Southwest, all with independent yet also connected histories. Together these changing cultures formed the bridge that connected the US Southwest with Mesoamerica. We review some aspects of regional diversity and moments of inter-regional relations, beginning with early agriculture and sedentism in the north. We trace the northward spread of rising regional centers and the appearance of some of the tangible elements of connection. This review shows that specialized production was more sparsely distributed than archaeologists once thought. Cultural identities were gained and lost; yet material connections persisted, and with the advances of past decades archaeologists can better characterize their occurrences, if not yet the mechanisms that produced those connections.