...While ceramics, settlement patterns, and communal architecture changed a great deal over time, the form that Ancestral Puebloan residential architecture took has remained surprisingly consistent. This form is the unit pueblo (alternately called “San Juan pattern” or “Prudden Unit”), which was used from ca. AD 600s to the late AD 1200s. Unit pueblos are found throughout the Ancestral Puebloan world and, along with other evidence from the PI to PIII periods, “suggests broad similarities in architecture and settlement patterns in these areas through time, as well as population movement between them” (Cameron 2008:19). In addition to these cultural attributes, Lipe (2006) argues that a shared Ancestral Puebloan social identity is expressed architecturally through the use of the Unit...
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...and they wove their clothing from looms. They made blankets, shirts, robes, aprons, kilts, breechcloths, socks, and belts using various vegetal fibers, animal hair, and human hair. They also made thick roves using split feathers or fur strips wrapped around a yucca fiber core. Matted fiber from juniper bark was used for diapers and menstrual pads, and for insulating sandal-clad feet during cold weather. They wore sandals, moccasins, and some snowshoes. Animal could have possibly provided material for some clothing. Necklaces, earrings, bracelets, arm bands, hair combs, and pins were made from wood, bone, shell, coral, and stone beads made of turquoise. 5. Pueblo religion is still based on maintaining harmony with the natural world. Puebloans probably help public and private ceremonies intended to benefit the community. Different parts of society may have been responsible for different events, each one important to the spiritual and material of the community. Important religious concepts and events were...
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...Known for their vibrant culture, the Ancestral Pueblo or Anasazi People formed a society full of life in the Four Corners Region of the Southwest between 800 and 1300 A.D. The Anasazi were a strong, determined people. Settlements survived in the middle of the desert for hundreds of years despite being greatly distanced at times from resources such as water and timber. The inhabitants at Chaco Canyon were perhaps part of the most complex society; their mass organization accomplished many things architecturally, agriculturally, socially, and scientifically. This thriving society had everything they needed. The Anasazi were miraculous architects and astronomers in having constructed fourteen “great houses,” which scientists believe were constructed according to the celestial movement of the sun. Various spiral carvings in rock, lead scientists to also believe they were able to map out the yearly cycle of the sun and 18.6 year cycle of the moon marking solstices and equinoxes....
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...Buffalo Kachina Webster dictionary defines a Kachina as “one of the deified ancestral spirits believed among the Hopi and other Pueblo Indians to visit the Pueblos at intervals.” The Pueblo’s are known to believe that the kachina spirits manifest themselves in performance and dance (Sayre, 2012, pg.21). Male tribesmen will adorn the kachina masks and will “become” the supernatural character. It is believed that through the dances, the represented kachina will embody the tribesman and its power will be portrayed. One representation of the kachina is an actual Native American Kachina doll. These dolls are often made for the tribes to sale. They are considered items of beauty only. In most cases if an individual is able to find a Kachina doll for sale, the Native Americans consider it to be of no ritual power or significance. The Kachina dolls history starts with the Hopi people. The Hopi Indians are the only people that make authentic kachina dolls. The carvers must participate in extensive training. Thorough religious studies along with master carving are part of that training. The earliest photos of the Kachina dolls date back to the late 1800’s. The Native Americas of the southwest began creating the Kachina dolls to explain to the children of their tribes the power of the Kachina’s. The dolls were merely an educational tool for the tribes. The Hopi children were instructed that these “dolls” were not to be played with but to be taken very good care of. ...
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...Mystery of the Anasazi Who were the Anasazi? Why did they live on the side of cliff faces? Where did they go? And what drove them to leave? These are the questions asked on “Mystery of the Anasazi” by the history channel. I will answer these questions as best as they can be answered with the information that is available to us today, as the Anasazi left absolutely no written documents other than some drawings on their cliff faces. Discovered in the late 19th century, the Anasazi lived in what we now know as the “Four corners” of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and surrounding areas and believed to have been in this area from as early as 1 A.D. until around 1150 A.D... Approximately 40-50 thousand people lived in this area. They grew corn, squash, and beans. At the center of this large area lies the great city of Chaco. Over 1,000 people were believed to have lived inside the city walls in the greatest prehistoric apartment complex. Crops did not grow well in this area so to feed the people smaller villages would travel many miles to trade crops for Turquoise, or shell jewelry, pottery, and other small prizes. These items were believed to have Godly powers to help their crop grow or to make it rain. They were very highly regarded and desired throughout the Anasazi Territory. The Anasazi lived like this in peace for hundreds of years to just one day vanish from the cities and smaller surrounding Kivas. The cities are carved from the rock of the canyons on the side...
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...Culture Summary for Nabajo As described by Adams, William Yewdale (2004), the Nabajo are an American Indian culture located in Arizona and New Mexico. They were often referred to as “Apaches” in sixteenth-century Spanish documents. Although they were referred to as this, so were many other Athapaskan-speaking groups of the New Mexico Province. After the sixteenth-century, they were always referred to as “Navajo” (or “Nabajo” in the Spanish language). No one is absolutely sure of the origin of the name but it has been speculated to be derived from the Tewa Pueblo Indian word for “cultivated fields”. This name was most likely given to the Navajo people because of their dependency on agriculture. The traditional home of the Navajo people has been on the Plateau’s of Colorado, northwestern New Mexico, and northeastern Arizona. The earliest known home of the Navajos was a location between the Jemez and Lukachukai mountains. This land is known as what is today northwestern New Mexico. Overtime, the Navajo moved westward and north towards parts of what is today Arizona and Utah. It is believed that the ancestors of the Navajo migrated southwest from western Canada. Today, the Navajo are located over a span of twenty-five thousand square miles in the four corners area of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. The Navajo are the largest Indian tribe in North America today with an estimated population of over two-hundred thousand people. The Navajo speak a branch of Apachean that is...
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...Christopher Cox Patricia Huhn English 121 20 February 2012 Education and Language Education and its effects on the individual is the primary focus of the essays by Richard Rodriguez, Leslie Silko, Firoozeh Dumas, and Gloria Anzaldua. Rodriquez’s “Achievement of Desire” illustrates how education can take the place of one’s cultural tradition in pursuit of knowledge. The loss of language is the focus of Silko’s speech, “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective”. “The F Word” by Firoozeh Dumas shows how profound words in one language can be funny in another, as well as hurtful. In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” by Gloria Anzaldua, she talks about how the education system tried to remove her culture by taking away her language. The two authors take opposite views on education and how it directly affected their lives. While embracing education by becoming a scholarship boy, Rodriquez shows how his desire for knowledge overcame his families’ desire for cultural tradition. Anzaldua expresses her feelings about how education continually tried to forcefully remove her Spanish heritage. The term “scholarship boy” came from Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy and means that the student must move between two culturally extreme environments during their progression of education. In Rodriquez’s account of his early educational experiences, he demonstrates Hoggart’s core definition of being a scholarship boy to the tee. While finishing his dissertation...
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...The Anasazi, also known as the Ancient Pueblo people, were a tribal group that settled in the regions of what are now a part of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. They had a distinctive system of houses, called Pueblos by Spanish Explorers. These houses were made of adobe. They used this material as it was an easily available insulator, which was needed in a region with hot summers and cold winters. The tribe lived in a region which saw little rainfall. However, they were still able to cultivate numerous crops such as corn, beans, and squash. This was a huge feat, considering the fact that this tribe emerged at around 1200 BC, a time when human technology was at its primitive stage. This was also a huge feat, because they had no contact with advanced civilizations of their time, such as the Greeks and Romans. The members of the tribe were able to accomplish this feat by creating an excellent irrigation system, and by implementing methods such as planting seeds deep in the ground (so that the roots can absorb more water and nutrition) and storing water for droughts. Since the Anasazi had to dedicate most of their time to agriculture, they had a limited amount of time for recreation. The tribe utilized this time by making pottery and jewelry. The Anasazi people constructed jewelry out of items such as stone beads, seeds, feathers, coral, bones, shells, abalone and stones, as these were easily available. The Anasazi made pots out of white and gray clay. Their pottery is...
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...The Anasazi, also known as the Ancient Pueblo people, were a tribal group that settled in the regions of what are now a part of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. They had a distinctive system of houses, called Pueblos by Spanish Explorers. These houses were made of adobe. They used this material as it was an easily available insulator, which was needed in a region with hot summers and cold winters. The tribe lived in a region which hardly saw rainfall. However, they were still able to cultivate numerous crops such as corn, beans, and squash. This was a huge feat, considering the fact that this tribe emerged at around 1200 BC, a time when human technology was at its primitive stage. This was also a huge feat, because they had no contact with advanced civilizations of their time, such as the Greeks and Romans. The members of the tribe were able to accomplish this feat by creating an excellent irrigation system, and by implementing methods such as planting seeds deep in the ground (so that the roots can absorb more water and nutrition) and storing water for droughts. Since the Anasazi had to dedicate most of their time to agriculture, they had a limited amount of time for recreation. The tribe utilized this time by making pottery and jewelry. The Anasazi people constructed jewelry out of items such as stone beads, seeds, feathers, coral, bones, shells, abalone and stones, as these were easily available. The Anasazi made pots out of white and gray clay. Their pottery is...
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...In the video “Eric Foner on the Pueblo Revolt” Eric Foner talks about Pope´ being the main religious leader to Indians in the Pueblo Revolt. This Revolt took place in the 1680’s in New Mexico. In 1598, Juan de Onate occupied the territories of northern New Mexico. The Spanish colonists arrived in New Mexico without sufficient supplies and turned to local Indian natives to obtain by threat food and essentials. The Pueblo Indians refused to give the Spanish colonists their food so they were an instant enemy to the Spanish colonists. The Spanish responded in many aggressive ways including burning down Pueblos. The rise of Christianity among the Spanish drove traditional pueblo Indian religion to a stand still. Spanish missionaries had been working towards exterminating the traditional Indian religion; the Spanish colonists wanted all of the Indians to convert to Roman Catholicism. The Spanish colonists did many things to try and reach this goal, such as breaking up places of worship and religious sights. The Spanish colonists even went as far as killing around 800 Indians and enslaving just as many, if not more. There were also differences in the economic practices of the Spanish colonists. During these years before the revolt, Pueblo Indians suffered lack of water, starvation, and death, all of these factors contributing to a far-reaching decrease in the Pueblo Indian population. Open resistance to the Spanish colonists demands resulted in ruthless consequences such as amputation...
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...Jim Sardonis’s artwork primarily surrounds nature and animal life in sculpture and jewelry form. “Reverence” is no exception to this fact, as Sardonis created two large stone whale tails that stand in Burlington, Vermont. His purpose for creating the piece was to have a “positive impact” and raise public awareness about “the plight of the whale” (Sayre 294). Creating the sculpture was a difficult task though because of the nature and durability of the black granite stone he used. It is not easy to cut and shape a heavy piece of material as Sardonis found, but the significance the black granite had to the meaning of the artwork was much more substantial and worth the difficulty. Sardonis had to use a variety of tools to sculpt the granite, including a large saw and hammer. He used the large saw to cut the stone close to the size he wanted and then proceeded to hammer off the rest because the pieces were easier to break off once small. The complete sculpture of black granite represented the whale both in color, durability, and permanence, which is what Sardonis’s intended. The funding for this project determined the process for creation and installation of the whale tails. Sardonis’s vision called for a very large amount of space, which he would not have been able to find without outside funding support. There were many factors to deal with, such as the weight of the stones, the location to create the piece, and the equipment used to shape the granite. With help from a local developer...
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...contentment. Because the desert did not provide the necessary food items to endure particular seasons, the O’odham for example traveled up the mountain in winter to a permanent water source such as a spring. In the summer months, the people would travel to arroyo mouths where they would construct brush dams to prevent flood runoff from ruining their varieties of corn, melons, tepary beans, squash and other crops. Harvest would therefore run around October and November months that would typically yield 1/5th of the O’odhams yearly food supply. When they were not seasonally traveling, the people of the desert would farm and gather wild foods such as cholla buds which nourished you before planting could start, pear fruits, mesquite, agave, and...
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...The Carrizo Wash watershed contains abundant archaeological evidence of Ancestral Puebloans and their predecessors, including a site containing some of the earliest evidence of maize agriculture in the American Southwest. Much of the dateable organic matter in the alluvial record consists of charred plant remains from archaeological thermal features. One goal of this study was to consider the archaeological implications of alluvial cycles and the area’s depositional history, especially in terms of prehistoric maize agriculture and the spatial distribution and surface visibility of archaeological sites. A more comprehensive and detailed understanding of the environmental conditions associated with southern Colorado Plateau prehistory is integral to refining archaeological interpretations and explanations of prehistoric human behavior on both local and regional scales. The initial adoption of maize agriculture ~2100 BC, the Chaco Phenomenon ~AD 1050–1130, and regional depopulation ~AD 1300–1350 are three of the most significant episodes in Ancestral Puebloan prehistory in the American Southwest. Current perspectives on the cultural processes and circumstances associated with these key prehistoric events have been limited by an incomplete understanding of the concomitant environmental conditions. Total annual precipitation and mean maximum temperature reconstructions have been inferred from...
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...far wider than any of the other prehistoric roads or trails of the Chaco cultural region, the road seems especially excessive in functional terms; it were more planned to be symbolic connections to prominence places rather than everyday means of transportation. In fact, Historic Pueblo cosmology may hold insights into the religious considerations underlying construction of the Great North Road. At important solar times, the Pueblo people traditionally re-enacted the creation as well as emergence events. One part of these ceremonies includes the journeys to certain mountains, canyons, caves and lakes, where they regard as Sipapu openings. It is believed to lie at the end of that northern road. As a primary direction in many of Puebloan cosmology, North is also the location of the Sipapu or the place of emergence that allowed he kachina spirit to travel northward from death and the grave, and southward to life and the cradle. When the people came out from the worlds below they stayed near the opening at Sipapu for a time, then moved south and stopped at a place where they lived for a long time. AS a result, a road to the north is described over which the spirits of the dead returned to the underworld. In a Pueblo origin myth, a religion leader emerges from the underworld and makes four parallels paths by clearing away the brush. Number 4 suggests the cardinal directions, important in many modern Pueblo religious texts and stories. The four clans travel these paths separately...
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...Pueblo Indians, by tradition, mined clay from their own undisclosed ancestral sources (Peterson 13). Nearly all vessels were smoothed to form polished backgrounds for patterns whose painting was done with dyes made from boiled plant or finely crushed metallic rock deposits (Peterson 24). Brushes were cut and formed from (the) chomped twig or yucca branch tips (Peterson 24). Varnish was practically never used for a glassy overlay; similarly, the potter’s wheel was never used for creation (of the vessels). Hardening of the vessels was done in an open-air bonfire at high temperatures (Peterson 25). Settlement of the Whites in North America and the push of the American Indians Westward almost abolished the art of making pottery. Considerable quantities of varnished containers and cookware made of metal became obtainable...
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