Social boundaries, immigration, and ritual systems: A case study from the American Southwest (New Mexico)

Migration, social boundaries, and ritual interact with one another to create a rich, complexly patterned material culture. This research examines the creation and maintenance of social boundaries within villages where some residents were immigrants. Evaluation of architectural, ceramic, and faunal data from the Lower Rio Puerco region, located in central New Mexico, indicates that 14th and 15th century social boundaries were affected both by aggregation of the local population into two large pueblos, as well as immigration of kin-based family groups into the area from the Western Pueblo region. This dissertation contributes to archaeological attempts to identify social boundaries by employing practice theory to help explain the seemingly contradictory patterns in material culture as reflecting the dynamic nature of daily decisions made by people attempting to negotiate their place in a new social landscape.; Architectural data, as well as pottery production and technological data, are presented to argue that immigrants moved into the study area during the late 1200s or early 1300s. Decorative and technological evidence suggests that pottery was used to signal group identity among people with a similar migration history, but was also part of a newly adopted ritual system that focused on social integration. This new ritual system may also have had aspects that emphasized competition between social groups.; The coalition of various groups into two large villages in the Lower Rio Puerco area would have required transformations in group identity, social organization, and power structures. Such transformations occur through daily attempts by village residents to reproduce their social order in the changed context of aggregation and interaction. During the Pueblo IV period, many villages were established that created different combinations of ideology and ritual to cope with the social stress brought on by disparate groups living together. This process fundamentally transformed the Pueblo social landscape, eventually leading to the diversity of villages we see today.