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The Taos Plateau in an expansive landscape etched with trails, rivers, roads, and arroyos. The smooth spaces of its open grasslands disrupted by the cavernous Rio Grande Gorge and volcanic conesâCerro San Antonio, Cerro de la Olla, and Cerro del Yutaâtowering thousands of feet in the air. Caused by cataclysmic eruptions some 20 million years ago, these mountains contain a rich archive of materials left behind by human occupants between roughly 5500 bce and the 19th century.4 As discussed by Sarah Schlanger, the sustained use of particular places is often a result of their unique ecological characteristicsâfor example, access to seasonal springsâor proximity to easily exploitable resources, such as workable stone. These land forms may also have particular topographic elements, like ridge tops or caves, which make them desirable locations as shelters, hunting locales, defensive outposts, or ceremonial sites. Places may become persistent because they were previously occupied.5 Over time, these locations become known and used by successive generations through orally shared knowledge. A growing body of evidence suggests that Indigenous people return to ancestral places both physically and spiritually through stories, songs, and prayers, evidence that contradicts archaeological models of use and abandonment.6 Rather than a cycle of intensive occupation followed by dispersion and migration human engagements with the landscape are better understood as a series of visitations, which vary in duration and frequency over time in response to changing ecological, economic, and social conditions.
The accumulative nature of most culturally modified places and landscapes pushes back against conventionalized archaeological chronologies, which organize human social processes into bounded temporal phases. As Rachel Crellin has argued, this block-time approach creates the impression that human history is a compilation of âperiods of stasis punctuated by moments of radical transformation.â7 The arrival of Europeans to the North American Southwest in the late 16th century has often been viewed by historians and archaeologists as the most âradicalâ of such transformative; propelling Indigenous people out of the dark primitivism of previous millennia and into civilization. Such block-time thinking has produced a tripartite chronological system (pre-historic, proto-historic, and historical periods) that places undue influence on the development of writing in recording history while glossing over the accumulative nature of such histories. As a growing number of scholars have pointed out, archaeologists need to attend to the dynamic ways that Indigenous people continuously adapted to changes in their locale and social environments over time.8 Rather than searching for material markers of disruption, this book seeks out small-scale evidence for change and continuity in human engagements with the landscape.
The persistent places of the Taos Plateau are connected together through trails etched across its vast expansesâmigration routes, pilgrimage pathways, trading throughfares, roads of conquest, and asphalt highways. Over the past 10,000 years, these trails have been used, expanded upon, and covered up by the inhabitants of the region, creating a rich, multi-vocal landscape. A focus on place-based movement in the northern Rio Grande sheds light on an often-overlooked facet of the regionâs archaeological recordâthe enigmatic record of residentially mobile communities. In the New Mexico, great quantities of ink have been spilt documenting how âsedentaryâ Indigenous people, and their immediate ancestors, constructed sophisticated agricultural landscapes using elaborate canal systems and extensive terrace networks.9 The study of pre-Hispanic farming systems in the region has been a hallmark of Southwest archaeology, dating to the landmark research of Adolph F. Bandelier and Frank Hamilton Cushing in late 19th century.10 More recently, archaeologists in the northern Rio Grande region have focused their efforts on studying the relationship between Indigenous settlements, their surrounding landscapes, and associated beliefs about land, water, plants, and animals. Drawing on Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, these studies have examined the subjective and objective creation of place within the region.11 This culturally grounded approach has done much to enhance our understanding of the occupational patterns and social systems of ancestral Tiwa and Tewa-speaking people. The scholarly focus on doing village-centered archaeology has meant that the short-term occupations which characterize a significant proportion of the archaeological landscape in northern New Mexico have gone comparatively understudied. By examining those places and the pathways created by highly mobile Indigenous communities, this book shifts scholarly attention away from the settlements and fields of the Rio Grande Valley and towards the ephemeral material signatures of human-environment interactions along New Mexicoâs borderlands.
In an effort to move away from the environmentally driven functionalist models often employed by archaeologists to interpret human mobility patterns, I draw upon an Indigenous worldview which posits an intimate connection between the spiritual and natural worlds. The approach taken up in this book builds on and moves beyond Lewis Binfordâs original definition of âplaceâ as a discreet and bounded locus of human behavior. Instead of simply adapting to the physical and natural environment of the Taos Plateau, Indigenous individuals and communities actively shaped these places through perception, cognition, and behavior.12 The archaeological record of such places reflects the material accumulation of distinct social meanings which are often quite different and occasionally antithetical to one another.13 In tracing out the deep histories of particular places on the Taos Plateau, this book aims to tease apart such instances of difference while highlighting the often-overlooked connections across peoples engaged in varying types of mobility.
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This is a book about place and how these places were used over time. It is also about the role of particular places within larger networks of mobility. These mobility systems were informed by a variety of factors, including changes in environmental and ecological conditions, the reintroduction of horses into North America, and the advent of steam-powered locomotion. These social and ecological developments form the back drop upon which I interpret patterns in the material record of the Taos Plateau. To varying degrees, each of the place-based chapters within this book discuss the ways in which changing environmental dynamics informed the socioeconomic practices of the regions inhabitants, the impact of horses on movement systems and inter-ethnic interaction, and the effects of industrial capitalism on regional demography and settlement patterns. What follows is a broad overview of these topics with the aim of providing a set of historical touchstones that the reader can reference as you make your way through the subsequent discussions of persistent places on the Plateau.
The climate and ecology
The Taos Plateau is part of the larger Rio Grande Rift Zone, extending from Chihuahua, Mexico, into Colorado.14 Despite only receiving 6â12 inches of rain per year, the area has a diverse ecology comprised of intermountain basins filled with sagebrush and semi-desert shrub, wetland and riparian areas, as well as piñon-juniper forests.15 While a largely high desert environment, ample water is provided by perennial lakes, known as playas, and intermittent mountain streams, which serve as tributaries to the Rio Grande.16
Over time, inhabitants of the northern Rio Grande region experienced several significant shifts in environmental and ecological conditions, which directly influenced subsistence choices, stone tool technologies, and residential patterns. The earliest human occupants in the Southwest experienced a cold, wet climate referred to as the Younger Dryas period, lasting between roughly 10,900 and 9700 bce.17 By 8000 bce, this cold period had ended and had been replaced by a warm, dry environment. Stable carbon isotope data collected from central New Mexico by Stephan Hall and William Penner indicate that between 8,000 and 4,000 BCE there was a gradual increase in mean annual temperature, from 10°C to 12°C, and a corresponding decrease in annual precipitation, from 400 to 320 mm.18 19 These climatic shifts were brought on by a decline in the number of annual El Niño events leading to a progressive decrease in spring flow and wet meadow formation as well as reducing sagebrush and grass pollen on the valley floor.20 This dryer warmer climate spurred the expansion of spruce-fir forests, ponderosa pine, and oak along the lower mountain slopes of Taos Plateau.19 For the next several thousand years, dry conditions and higher temperatures prevailed, with lake levels declining significantly over this time. Accompanying this increasing aridity was a marked transition in the types of tools and hunting strategies employed by Indigenous people. Rather than producing fluted spears for use in communal big game hunts, Indigenous communities developed a residential mobility pattern focused on exploiting smaller game within particular resource niches. Although tool styles and land-use patterns continue to evolve after 8000 bce, this seasonally based mobility pattern characterizes much of the regional archaeological record for the next 7,000 years. During this expansive time frame, Indigenous people living in the northern Southwest engaged in a sophisticated long-distance mobility round, centered on the exploitation of particular wild game and plant resources between the San Luis and northern Rio Grande Valleys.21
Around 2500 bce, paleoenvironmental data drawn from pluvial lakes, sand sheets, streams, rivers, and springs indicate a shift to cooler and wetter weather as the strength and frequency of El Niños increased. The increased frequency in El Niño events and associated shifts in rainfall intensity during this period are inferred from measurements of sand content from well-dated core samples taken from El Junco Crater Lake on the Galåpagos Islands.22 As springs rejuvenated, sagebrush stepp...
