Power, autonomy, and inequality in Rio Grande Puebloan society, A.D. 1300--1672 (New Mexico)

This work examines the nature of inter-village power relations and potential sociopolitical inequality among the Jumanos pueblos in the Rio Grande region of central New Mexico throughout the Pueblo IV and early historic periods, from roughly A.D. 1300 to the late 1600s. The Jumanos pueblo cluster consists of four villages, Gran Quivira, Pueblo Pardo, Pueblo Blanco, and Pueblo Colorado. Data from three of the four villages, Gran Quivira, Pueblo Blanco, and Pueblo Colorado, were examined.; To characterize the nature of power relations among the Jumanos pueblos, inter-site differences in several activities identified as potential sources of power in many small-scale societies were examined, namely differential ritual performance, including the hosting of inter-community ceremonial feasts, and access to goods derived through long-distance exchange, including decorated ceramics, obsidian, and Plains bison. A series of analyses was able to track village participation in these activities through time and determine the degree to which the inhabitants of each pueblo differed in such prestige-enhancing behaviors.; Overall, there does not appear to be any strong centralization of power that may indicate the development of some form of inter-village sociopolitical inequality within the cluster. The most obvious patterns in the data imply a strong degree of autonomy or independence among the villages in terms of involvement in activities representing potential sources of power. Each pueblo as a group was able to engage in and sometimes dominate one or more sources of power. Such a pattern of action suggests that power relations and sociopolitical interactions among the Jumanos pueblos may have been quite dynamic, with the residents of each of the three pueblos often manipulating different sources of power or manipulating the same sources of power in similar fashions.; The findings of this study suggest that power was constructed in such a way to limit the domination of one particular village and the development of strong sociopolitical inequality or hierarchy among pueblos, the existence of which has often been asserted for other village clusters in the late prehistoric Puebloan Southwest. In doing so, this study highlights the need of archaeologists to reconstruct, rather than assume, the structure of sociopolitical systems in order to understand the development of inequality in small-scale societies.