Reading between the Lines: The Social Value of Dogoszhi Style in the Chaco World

Archaeologists have pointed to certain architectural or decorative designs as representing “elite styles” that mark status distinctions. We look at one such style—Dogoszhi—that was applied to several pottery wares across the Chaco World of the northern Southwest. Using a large database of ceramics, we test whether this style comprised an elite style or whether it signaled participation in a broader Chaco social network. We compare the distribution of Dogoszhi style to measures of settlement importance, including site size and network centrality, and we investigate whether this style occurs differentially at Chacoan great houses as opposed to small houses, or by subregion. We also compare its spatial distribution to an earlier style, called Black Mesa style, similarly applied to a number of different wares. Our results indicate that both styles were consistently distributed within Chaco communities (whether great houses or small houses) but variably distributed across subareas and most measures of settlement importance. We conclude that Dogoszhi style was used to mark membership in social networks that cross-cut great house communities, a pattern more typical of heterarchical rather than hierarchical social structures. Such variation questions the uniform category of “elites” and points to the ways that representational diversity may be used to interpret different regional histories and alliances.

Detrital sanidine 40Ar/39Ar dating confirms <2 Ma age of Crooked Ridge paleoriver and subsequent deep denudation of the southwestern Colorado Plateau

Crooked Ridge and White Mesa in northeastern Arizona (southwestern United States) preserve, as inverted topography, a 57-km-long abandoned alluvial system near the present drainage divide between the Colorado, San Juan, and Little Colorado Rivers. The pathway of this paleoriver, flowing southwest toward eastern Grand Canyon, has led to provocative alternative models for its potential importance in carving Grand Canyon. The ∼50-m-thick White Mesa alluvium is the only datable record of this paleoriver system. We present new 40Ar/39Ar sanidine dating that confirms a ca. 2 Ma maximum depositional age for White Mesa alluvium, supported by a large mode (n = 42) of dates from 2.06 to 1.76 Ma. Older grain modes show abundant 37–23 Ma grains mostly derived ultimately from the San Juan Mountains, as is also documented by rare volcanic and basement pebbles in the White Mesa alluvium. A tuff with an age of 1.07 ± 0.05 Ma is inset below, and hence provides a younger age bracket for the White Mesa alluvium. Newly dated remnant deposits on Black Mesa contain similar 37–23 Ma grains and exotic pebbles, plus a large mode (n = 71) of 9.052 ± 0.003 Ma sanidine. These deposits could be part of the White Mesa alluvium without any Pleistocene grains, but new detrital sanidine data from the upper Bidahochi Formation near Ganado, Arizona, have similar maximum depositional ages of 11.0–6.1 Ma and show similar 40–20 Ma San Juan Mountains–derived sanidine. Thus, we tentatively interpret the &lt;9 Ma Black Mesa deposit to be a remnant of an 11–6 Ma Bidahochi alluvial system derived from the now-eroded southwestern fringe of the San Juan Mountains. This alluvial fringe is the probable source for reworking of 40–20 Ma detrital sanidine and exotic clasts into Oligocene Chuska Sandstone, Miocene Bidahochi Formation, and ultimately into the &lt;2 Ma White Mesa alluvium. The &lt;2 Ma age of the White Mesa alluvium does not support models that the Crooked Ridge paleoriver originated as a late Oligocene to Miocene San Juan River that ultimately carved across the Kaibab uplift. Instead, we interpret the Crooked Ridge paleoriver as a 1.9–1.1 Ma tributary to the Little Colorado River, analogous to modern-day Moenkopi Wash. We reject the “young sediment in old paleovalley” hypothesis based on mapping, stratigraphic, and geomorphic constraints. Deep exhumation and beheading by tributaries of the San Juan and Colorado Rivers caused the Crooked Ridge paleotributary to be abandoned between 1.9 and 1.1 Ma. Thermochronologic data also provide no evidence for, and pose substantial difficulties with, the hypothesis for an earlier (Oligocene–Miocene) Colorado–San Juan paleoriver system that flowed along the Crooked Ridge pathway and carved across the Kaibab uplift.

Simulating prehistoric population dynamics and adaptive behavioral responses to the environment in Long House Valley and Black Mesa, Arizona

This project contributes to our understanding of human adaptability to environmental stress and climate change in Long House Valley and Black Mesa, Arizona from AD 800-1350. This was accomplished through the development of a series of agentbased archaeological models. The first stage, Disaggregation, created a model that simulated individual persons within the Long House Valley landscape, a departure from the household-level models common in archaeological modeling. The second stage, Demography, applied empirically derived fertility and mortality rates to these human populations to provide insight into the effects of such rates on population patterns. The final stage expanded the modeled environment to include Black Mesa and allowed for the migration of individuals and households between the two areas in response to varying environmental and demographic pressures throughout the study period. The results of this project indicate that the introduction of biological and ethnographic realism to a model can produce unexpected results, including those that deviate from the population patterns observed archaeologically. Despite these unexpected interactions, the results support the importance of variations in agricultural productivity in driving human migrations in the region. Future archaeological models should consider further exploration small-scale, local population movements and the effects of dynamically changing fertility and mortality rates.

Ecofeminist Activism and the Greening of Native America

Ancient female-centered Native American myths reveal pre-colonial attitudes about gender, gender roles, and sexuality as well as about human persons’ essential relations with the non-human world. Girls and women in these stories variously function as creators, embodiments of the sacred, and culture-bringers. After settler colonialism, the subsistence contract embodied in these women-centered myths was broken. On Native lands, unparalleled ecological disaster followed. Since then, Native people and their lands have suffered. Women and girls have doubly suffered from the colonizing culture and its patriarchal institutions as well as from their own cultures’ adopted misogyny. But in the last few decades, Native girls and women have taken the lead in rejecting the false choice between prosperity and sustainability. Their ecofeminist activism has spread throughout Native America, perhaps most successfully in the Southwest with the Hopi and Navajo Black Mesa Water Coalition and in North Dakota with the Water Protectors encampment on the Standing Rock Reservation to block the Dakota Access Oil Pipeline. This essay details those two inspirational projects that, in the words of Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz, bear witness to “a spring wind / rising / from Sand Creek.”

Late Quaternary loess and soils on uplands in the Canyonlands and Mesa Verde areas, Utah and Colorado

Thin loess deposits on the uplands of the southeastern Colorado Plateau have previously not been well studied. We sampled deposits and soils from trenches on Hatch Point (HP) mesa near Canyonlands National Park, Utah, and from two outcrops in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado. At HP, the oldest buried unit yielded 2 optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages of 10,370 and 7555 yr; the middle unit yielded 10 OSL ages from 6220 to 1385 yr; and the youngest unit had a single age of 1740 yr. At Mesa Verde (MV), three loess units are preserved in the two outcrops we examined; 6 OSL ages range from 51 to 17 ka. At least one buried soil is present between two units with ages of about 50 and 40 ka. The ages of the loess units in both study areas correspond well with OSL-dated dune sands in Canyonlands National Park and with dune sands on Black Mesa, Arizona. Particle-size distribution combined with chemical and magnetic data indicate that HP loess was derived mostly from nearby sandstone sources with a small component of far-traveled atmospheric dust, whereas MV loess was sourced both from the nearby sandstone and the San Juan River and its tributaries.

TREE-RING DATES AND NAVAJO SETTLEMENT PATTERNS IN ARIZONA

The historical timing and movement of Navajo communities in the U.S. Southwest continue to be key, but unresolved, issues. This paper analyzes tree-ring data to consider initial Navajo settlement patterns in the Little Colorado River watershed, Black Mesa, and nearby regions in northern Arizona. We are critical of previous studies that deem all tree-ring dates to be equally valid, so we present a new approach to systematically identify potential early Navajo sites. After analyzing hundreds of tree-ring specimens from 774 sites, we conclude that dendrochronological evidence offers moderate-to-high confidence that 18 Navajo sites in the study area were settled prior to 1882. These dendrochronological data support the hypothesis of a westward Navajo migration from the Dinétah, reaching Black Mesa in Arizona about 1840, other areas north and east of the Hopi Mesas in the 1850s, and land west of Hopi in the 1870s after the release of Navajos from Fort Sumner in 1868.