The Pueblo Indian world in the American Southwest underwent a fundamental transformation between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Pueblo people who had been previously living in small hamlets and villages began to coalesce into large towns. Concurrent with the construction of these new communities was the development of unique socio-political and ceremonial systems similar to those encountered by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, and by anthropologists at the turn of the twentieth. In short, this was a period of Pueblo ethnogenesis, and a significant step in the process of becoming the Pueblo people of today. The modern Pueblo people speak multiple languages and live in 31 settlements, encompassing an area from the Hopi villages in northern Arizona to Taos Pueblo in northern New Mexico. Although the Pueblos (and their ancestors) share many similarities, from subsistence to cosmology, anthropologists have noted important distinctions in how these villages created their own unique social and ceremonial organisation, landscapes and identities. This has led archaeologists to enquire about the historical processes that can account for these similarities and differences. It is within this context that Spielmann’s volume, derived from 16 seasons of excavation and survey in the Salinas Province of central New Mexico, both supports and challenges our understanding of Pueblo history.
In much of the Pueblo world, the formation of large, aggregated communities with new social and ceremonial systems is attributed to the coming together of diverse peoples (migrant and indigenous populations) in the aftermath of demographic upheaval and reorganisation in the thirteenth century. While the precise circumstances are debated—and probably varied between ancestral Pueblo villages—acknowledging the impact of migration has been critical to the ongoing discussion and understanding of Pueblo history. An influx of migrants does not appear to have happened in the Salinas Province, where population estimates remain remarkably consistent between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries, even as the people who lived in jacal (wattle and daub) hamlets began to build the large villages that were eventually missionised by the Spanish. Still, the emergence of these large, complex towns shares similar traits with trends in other Pueblo communities to the north and west. What contributed to and catalysed these changes? The authors in this volume demonstrate that although the Salinas people persisted in place, they had dynamic and diverse ties with people from surrounding regions, some of which acted to transform Salinas society. Through eight chapters (excluding the Introduction by Spielmann), the contributors support their arguments using a wide range of data including settlement patterns, domestic and ritual architecture, and pottery (including ceramic petrography, INAA (instrumental neutron activation analysis), lead isotopes and stylistic analyses).
The Salinas Province offers Southwestern archaeologists an important ‘foil’ to re-examine models of Pueblo coalescence and ethnogenesis. As the Salinas people maintained a position that was both familiar but distinctively different from their neighbours, the contributors are able to take a ‘cross-scale analysis’ to understand the intersections between localised processes of change and larger pan-Pueblo transformations. This approach acknowledges both continuity (long-lasting ‘internal’ cultural processes) and change (dynamic participation and the influence of adjacent groups). For example, the emergence of Salinas village life appears to have been a largely internal development. The aggregation of communities cannot be explained as the result of inwards migration and was instead probably the result of local people coming together under the perceived threat of violence (Solometo et al., Chapter 3) and for access to reliable water for agriculture (Strawhacker et al., Chapter 4). The complex and segmented social organisation that arose in these aggregated communities also cannot be attributed to the coalescence of disparate people, but was instead the outgrowth of pre-existing tensions and social asymmetries (Chamberlin and Solometo, Chapter 2). The pattern of long-lived persistence continuity on the landscape allowed the Salinas people to develop a well-defined ‘homeland’, distinct but connected to the larger Pueblo world (Capone, Chapter 5).
As Graves (Chapter 6) documents, the persistence and transformation of the Salinas people can only be understood in the context of diverse and dynamic relationships with nearby regions: the Jornada Mogollon to the south, the Pueblos of the Rio Grande to the north and west, and the southern plains. He shows that between AD 1100 and 1400, Salinas identity was solidly part of a larger Jornada Mogollon tradition, evidenced by the widespread production, distribution and use of Chupadero Black-on-white pottery (Clark, Chapter 7). Over time, identity became more diverse and differentiated between the aggregated villages. This pattern cannot be explained by the arrival of immigrants, as in much of the Pueblo world, but instead was a result of the ways in which Salinas villages differentially embraced neighbouring cultural traditions. The contributions by Mobley-Tanaka (Chapter 8) and Herhahn and Huntley (Chapter 9) convincingly argue that from the fourteenth century, the Salinas people were actively engaging in larger pan-Pueblo ideologies, importing and making Rio Grande Glaze Ware, and that this engagement contributed to social and ideological transformation. Still, Salinas villages did not uniformly adopt these traditions, and Graves argues that elements of the Jornada Mogollon and those of southern plains groups continued to be important amongst the southern Salinas villages.
Understanding the specific interplay between these scales is essential in writing the history of the Salinas Province, but also provides Southwestern archaeology with a useful case study to re-evaluate our understanding of persistence and mobility. Although this volume’s primary audience will be archaeologists of the American Southwest, this is a strength and not a weakness. As the archaeology of the Salinas Province is interconnected with, yet distinct from, adjacent regions, the contributors to this volume provide a series of explanations to re-evaluate our assumptions of the development of Pueblo worlds. As an archaeologist who works 150km to the north with the Tewa Pueblo people, I found this Salinas case study useful in that it challenges my colleagues and me to focus on various types of mobilities, to think of both continuity and change, and to acknowledge the nuanced interplay between local and regional scales. I suspect that other Southwestern archaeologists, working from Hopi to Taos and everywhere in between, will similarly benefit from this unique perspective.
