Interpreting a Multiple Burial in an Early Ancestral Pueblo Village

This chapter describes a multiple burial on a house floor in an early Ancestral Pueblo Village in Southwestern Colorado. A survey of contemporary burials in Pueblo I (AD 700–900) villages reveals that house burials from this period are not common, but neither are they unique or uniform. Tracking thirty years of interpretation of this burial points to the importance of fine-grained contextual taphonomy, and suggests that we expand the scope of what is considered to be normative burial and body position. The changing archaeological interpretation of this Mesa Verde Region burial highlights the place of mortuary treatment in the evolving narrative of the political and social history of large early villages.

Temporal Variation in Obsidian Procurement in the Northern Rio Grande and Its Implications for Obsidian Movement into the San Juan Area

Arakawa and colleagues (2011) use temporal changes in obsidian source patterns to link the late thirteenth-century abandonment of the Mesa Verde region to Ortman's (2010, 2012) model of Tewa migration to the northern Rio Grande. They employ Anthony's (1990) concept of reverse migration, inferring that an increase in Mesa Verde–region obsidian from a specific Jemez Mountain source reflects the scouting of an eventual migration path. Weaknesses of this inference are that only obsidian data from the Mesa Verde region were used in its development and that the model does not consider the complexities of previously documented patterns of settlement and stone raw material use in the northern Rio Grande. By examining source data from parts of northwestern and north-central New Mexico, we find that the patterning seen in the Mesa Verde obsidian data is widespread both geographically and temporally. The patterns are more indicative of a change in acquisition within a down-the-line exchange system than a reverse migration stream. Population trends on the southern Pajarito Plateau, the probable source of the acquisition change, suggest ancestral Keres rather than Tewa involvement in thirteenth-century obsidian distribution.