By Reuven Sinensky, Laboratory Manager at Crow Canyon Archaeological Center
For much of the last century many archaeologists working in the region that is now the northern U.S. Southwest adopted models informed by evolutionary theory to explain the changing social, economic and political strategies of Ancestral Pueblo peoples through time. When first proposed, the interpretative power of such step-like models were revolutionary for southwestern archeology. Similarities and differences in architecture and material culture were recognized as evidence of change through time. The over-simplified version of this narrative posits that Ancestral Pueblo peoples became increasingly invested in maize agriculture and more sedentary as time passed, and eventually, social, economic, and political differentiation between communities emerged.
In the broadest sense this steady step-like narrative does explain some important and universal aspects of human history—at some point in the distant past people across the globe were more mobile and lived in smaller groups, and eventually, in many parts of the world, people became more sedentary, began living in larger groups, and developed new ways of organizing themselves that eventually led to the founding of world-renowned ancient villages and cities like Pueblo Bonito, Cliff Palace, Teotihuacán, and Rome. This highlights a strength and a weakness of long-term archaeological chronologies—they tend to homogenize the past by positing all-encompassing and unidirectional narratives for culture change that span millennia. Such portrayals, however, inevitably oversimplify the social and economic diversity that existed within any year, decade, generation, or century, and often ignore the unique histories and traditions of contemporaneous communities living within what southwestern archaeologists have defined by as discrete “culture areas” (for example, “Ancestral Pueblo,” “Hohokam,” “Trincheras,” “Mogollon,” “Eastern Basketmaker,” and “Western Basketmaker”). But please, do not take my word for it! In a seminal 2002 book chapter Hopi elder Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, a member of the Greasewood Clan from Paaqavi explained:
> Traditional western anthropological viewpoints all too often confine themselves to a narrow scientific theory. As a result, archaeologists have chosen to pursue their inquiries and offer conclusions within neatly bounded material culture packages (e.g., Mogollon, Sinagua, and Anasazi—the last term offensive to Hopi people, who prefer the term Hitsotsinom). Convenient? Yes. But nevertheless, narrow and restricted…One can imagine the diversity of clans interacting with one another (Kuwanwisiwma 2002:162).
As our understanding of Ancestral Pueblo peoples across time and space has grown, and archaeological techniques have become more refined, a picture has emerged that is far more complex and better aligned with the perspectives of our descendant community partners—Pueblo Ancestors were diverse and had distinctive traditions that rarely fit into tidy boxes.
But why were families and communities of Ancestors living in the same geographic regions during the same periods of time diverse if broad-scale changes spanning millennia are highly visible archaeologically? The answer lies in the lived experiences of Ancestral Pueblo people—the decisions made by individuals, families, and communities in the ancient past were informed not only by the environmental and technological constraints intrinsic to living in a particular place at a specific point in time, but by distinctive histories of movement and interactions between people, landscapes, plants, and animals experienced by community members and their ancestors.
In a 2017 interview Lyle Balenquah, a member of the Greasewood clan from Paaqavi explained his perspective on the history of his ancestors:
> When I talk about clan history I definitely have to look at it, at myself and look at the history of the Southwest on a smaller scale so to speak, in the sense that who I come from, the group of people who were Greasewood Clan before me, they have a history and knowledge that is specific to them, and maybe their other related clans as they travelled across the landscape and gathered all of the knowledge through those movements. And then you talk to somebody from a different clan and their migration histories are different. They travelled through different landscapes, they had different encounters and experiences and so that set of knowledge and understanding is unique to them.
> And so, as they moved across the landscape maybe there were times when they did have to split up for various reasons. So, one clan would go the other way and the other would go the opposite. But somewhere along the way they would have the understanding that they would come together and that coming together would be based on that shared identity that they had among themselves (interview with Lyle Balenquah, as quoted by Hopkins, Kuwanwisiwma, Koyiyumptewa, and Bernardini 2021:17).
Lyle Balenquah has also given multiple recent Crow Canyon webinars addressing this topic in greater detail (see Lyle’s 2023 webinar: Seeking my Center Place, and his 2024 webinar with colleagues Nate Francis, Ritchie Sahneyah, and Autry Lomahongva: Return Migrations).
By refining our expectations for the cultural and socioeconomic diversity that existed in the northern U.S. Southwest within specific periods of time we can more confidently assess how contemporaneous peoples with distinctive histories interacted with one another, innovated, adopted and spread novel ideas, shared or rejected new ceremonies and social institutions, moved together, split up, and came together again. One issue with such an approach is that archaeologists are trained to identify shared patterns—too much heterogeneity in the archaeological record tends to make us uncomfortable! Moreover, if we are interested in understanding shared and distinctive traditions within and between contemporaneous communities in the ancient past this requires high-quality, systematic, and detailed studies of contemporaneous, well-dated communities that are multifaceted, labor intensive, and remarkably time consuming.
Diversity Amongst Early Farmers
In the northern U.S. Southwest the interval that spans the transition between Basketmaker II (450 B.C.E.–C.E. 400)—the period when Ancestral Pueblo farmers began investing heavily in maize agriculture, and Basketmaker III (C.E. 550–700)—a period when new crops, technologies, and shared social institutions were rapidly adopted across broad swaths of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado, represents one of the most transformative yet poorly understood periods in Ancestral Pueblo history (see Crow Canyon’s Basketmaker Communities Project for an example of a C.E. 550–750 community in the Central Mesa Verde Region). Throughout this era farmers adopted an array of new domesticates, technologies, traditions, and political arrangements that served as foundational elements for burgeoning Ancestral Puebloan societies. Compared to the intervals that immediately proceeded and followed, however, the transitional interval connecting these two periods was one of cultural and socioeconomic heterogeneity—some groups adopted to new crops and technologies, and experimented with new forms of socioeconomic and political organization while others did not.
Because so much of the research on early farmers in Southwestern U.S. has focused on placing Ancestral Pueblo societies within a long-term trajectory of cultural change, fewer studies have explored the foodways, material culture, or mobility practices of contemporaneous, well-dated communities within spatially restricted areas during this transitional period. I undertook such a study for my recently completed dissertation research at UCLA, and presented some of the findings of this work at the recent Southwest Symposium archaeological conference in Chihuahua, Mexico.
The results suggest that communities of this era were more dynamic than often portrayed in broad sweeping models. Some groups of C.E. 250–400 farmers, for example, were heavily invested in maize farming yet remained very mobile, while others were less invested in maize agriculture yet experimented with living in large sedentary villages. During the C.E. 400–550 interval contemporaneous farming groups heavily invested in maize agriculture living only a few miles from one another maintained highly distinctive architectural traditions, manufactured ceramics using very different production techniques, and relied on divergent land-use strategies—one spatially extensive and the other spatially restricted. Even though individuals within these groups interacted with one another for six generations, farmers within each community maintained distinctive traditions rooted in their unique histories.
Lessons from the Past
Living side by side with neighbors that have a combination of shared and distinctive traditions is not something that is unique to the modern world. Our identities are complex, rooted in the histories of our ancestors, and yet, ever-changing and tied to our own lived experiences. Given the xenophobia that is so prominent in modern political discourse, I think it is worthwhile to reflect on the cultural diversity that has long been central to the social fabric of people Indigenous to the lands that so many of us now call home.
Citations
Balenquah, Lyle J. 2017. Interviewed by Maren P. Hopkins, T. J. Ferguson, and Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa at the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, Kykotsmovi, Arizona, August 4, 2017. Recording and Transcription on File, Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, Kykotsmovi, Arizona.
Hopkins, Maren P., Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa, and Wesley Bernardini. 2021. Hopi Perspectives on History. In Becoming Hopi: A History, pp. 15–26. Edited by Wesley Bernardini, Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa, Gregson Schachner, and Leigh Kuwanwisiwma. University of Arizona Press.
Kuwanwisiwma, Leigh. 2002. Hopi Navotiat: Hopi Knowledge of History. In Prehistoric Culture Change on the Colorado Plateau: Ten Thousand Years on Black Mesa, edited by Shirley Powell and Francis E. Smiley, pp. 161–163. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
Photo Captions
Figure 1. Reuven at the village of Mata Ortiz, Chihuahua, Mexico.
Figure 2. Comparison between C.E. 200–550 (top) and C.E. 550–700 (bottom) residential and communal architecture. Not the contrast between the informal site layout above, and the more organized site layout below. Illustration courtesy of Reuven Sinensky.
Figure 3. C.E. 200–550 Ancestral Pueblo ceramics with numerous mending holes on the surface of a habitation site in northern Arizona. Photo courtesy of Reuven Sinensky.
Figure 4. The author presenting at the Southwest Symposium in Chihuahua Mexico. Photo courtesy of Kate Bishop.