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current projects

vecino archaeology and the politics of play
My childhood archaeology project investigates the impacts of American expansion on child rearing and education in the Spanish borderlands through an archaeological examination of childhood on the Ranchos de Taos Plaza of northern New Mexico (1790s - 1970s). The project traces these hidden impacts through excavation at historic schoolyards, households, and trash scatters associated with Hispanic villages. Additional information is provided by oral history interviews and archival research on the schools, toys, and folklore traditions of children.

Novel theoretical concepts today portray play not merely as an activity that is easily contrasted with work. Rather work and play are manifestations of attitudes and cognitive dispositions that promote certain social values over others. Play socially embeds young actors in the present and prepares children for future roles in society. Archaeological research on the changing role of play in children's lives promises to provide new perspectives on the dynamics of the Spanish and American occupation of New Mexico, which continue to be relevant to descendent Hispanic communities today.

This research is part of a larger project investigating the emergence and persistence of northern New Mexico Vecino culture from the period of the late Bourbon reforms through the U.S. Territorial Period. The childhood project aims to investigate the underpinnings of identity transformation in Vecino society through a focus on children's shared experiences through time. Other aspects of this work have included vecino women's ceramic production and interethnic interactions as well as research on the spiritual landscapes of Taos including Penitente moradas and Hispanic rock art expressions.

hohokam social complexity and ceramic production
With National Science Foundation support, Andrew Darling and I have undertaken a three year study of Hohokam ceramic production along the middle Gila River Valley in central Arizona. The Hohokam regional system reached its apogee during the middle Sedentary Period from A.D. 1000-1070 when it spanned some 80,000 sq. km of the Sonoran Desert. Pottery specialists along the middle Gila River supplied this large system with thousands of vessels in return for agricultural products from surrounding groups. Such large-scale craft production is typically associated with complex societies, with guilds and mass production techniques. Yet, the Hohokam were relatively egalitarian, with neither cities, nor an extensive division of labor, nor marked social stratification. How, then, in the absence of more complex social systems, was production among the Sedentary Period Hohokam organized to create greater economies of scale?

Detailed metric, petrographic and geochemical analyses of ceramic raw materials and objects will enable us to trace the movement of pottery resources to test two competing hypotheses related to this question. The first proposes that multiple communities acted independently to produce ceramics. The second proposes that ceramic manufacturing was highly concentrated in one or a few villages that were supplied with raw materials by other villages. Both hypotheses may account for high levels of ceramic yield, but the latter implies a greater level of inter-village coordination to create greater economies of scale at the expense of emerging settlement hierarchies.

metal-tipped points of the american southwest
My dissertation focused primarily on women and ceramic circulation. Ceramics, however, tell only part of a larger story. Work at Apache archaeological sites in the Rio del Oso Valley near Abiquiú (my primary study area) also revealed a vibrant trade in metal products between men that I was not able to fully explore. Jicarilla men were heavily involved in the production of metal-tipped arrows that they traded to their Hispanic neighbors in return for decorated tinworks and tinklers made by Vecino men. This counter-intuitive finding has led me to undertake a larger study of ethnographic arrows in museum collections attributed to Apache, Navajo, Comanche, Ute, and Pueblo makers.

Battle site archaeologists working on Apache sites in southern New Mexico have recorded a wide variety of metal points and have suggested that some of this variation is due to differences in the production techniques and styles attributed to Apache, Comanche, Ute, or Navajo makers. Historic documents and photographs reveal that arrows from these different groups are culturally diagnostic and that they can be distinguished from each other based on comparison of materials, shaft designs, and fletching techniques. However, these diagnostic parts rarely preserve in the archaeological record. Archaeologists instead must develop ways to distinguish the more durable metal points that are found in base camps and on battlefields.

So far I have measured over 400 arrows from multiple institutions and legacy collections, including those at the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Natural History, the Peabody, the School of Advanced Research, and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Initial findings indicate that metal tips also may be assigned to ethnic makers with a relatively high degree of confidence. Additional research on metal-tipped arrows promises to reveal a great deal of information about men’s economies and interactions (some of them violent) that enabled horse nomads such as the Jicarilla to adjust to the unfolding conditions of contact.