New Findings from the Far Western Puebloan Region: Papers in Honor of Margaret Lyneis

This special issue of the Kiva is published in honor of Margaret Lyneis, who passed away in 2016 at the age of 78, after a long and influential career as a teacher and scholar. These papers developed out of a session presented at the 83rd annual meeting of Society for American Archaeology (SAA), held in Washington, D.C. in 2018. Collectively, the papers provide a snapshot of current findings from the Virgin Branch Puebloan region, also referred to as the Far Western Puebloan region (Lyneis 1995). All of the authors in this volume have been influenced, either directly or indirectly, by the work of Margaret Lyneis, and owe a debt of gratitude to her meticulous and groundbreaking work.

Early Life and College Years

Lyneis was born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin in 1938 (Figure 1). She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Washington in 1959, and her master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1964 and 1968, respectively. Margaret began her career at a time when few women were involved in field research, and she was among a generation of women in the 1960s who helped change that. While still a graduate student, she wrote to the director of the Tule Springs Expedition to ask if she could participate. As she relayed to the senior author, she received a letter enthusiastically accepting her – because, she was told, they needed women on the project to type up the field notes and curation tags. Lyneis immediately wrote back that she did not intend to serve as a project secretary, but rather that she intended to participate in the fieldwork. Shutler relented and granted her a position on the field crew, and became so impressed with her work that he ultimately granted her responsibility for the Tule Springs Archaeological Surface Survey; a position that, according to Shutler, she handled with “imagination and considerable success” (Susia 1964:i; Figure 2).

Figure 1. Margaret Lyneis as an infant and young girl. (Photographs courtesy of Claude Lyneis).

Figure 2. Margaret Lyneis at “The Big Dig,” the Tule Springs Archaeological Project (photograph courtesy of Claude Lyneis).

Lyneis completed her dissertation in 1968. That study examined hunter-collector lifeways in the Warner Valley of south-central Oregon (Weide 1968), and demonstrated a fluidity in settlement and community patterns. Her study showed that between about 1500 B.C. and 500 A.D., indigenous lifeways were organized around the intense use of lacustrine resources on the valley floor that were supplemented by game from the uplands. Winter communities were large, though in the summer their inhabitants dispersed into family groups. This study provided an early contrast to the better-known Archaic adaptations of the nearby desert regions.

Her Career and Influence

After graduating from UCLA, Lyneis received a tenure-track position at California State University, Long Beach, a position that she held until 1974 when she accepted a position as Associate Professor and Director of the Pueblo Archaeology Facility at SUNY Binghamton. In 1976, she accepted a teaching position at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, where she would remain until her retirement in 2001.

Over a long career, Lyneis made important contributions to the archaeology of California, the Great Basin, and the Southwest. Her main focus was the western U.S., but she also worked briefly in the northeastern part of the country, where she directed a large archaeological project related to the construction of Interstate 88 in eastern New York (Plog et al. 1977). She even had one publication (Lyneis 1988) on antler and bone artifacts from a Neolithic site in Siberia. Documenting her contributions is complicated by changes in her marital status, which led her to publish as Margaret L. Susia (1962, 1964) and Weide (1968, 1974; Weide and Weide 1967), in addition to Margaret M. Lyneis (her maiden name), which she consistently used after 1978.

Lyneis also made important contributions to the developing field of cultural resources management beginning in the 1970s (e.g., King and Lyneis 1978). She was one of the participants in the Airlie House seminars (McGimsey and Davis 1977) that helped set standards and practices for cultural resources management. The report on this seminar concluded (among many other things) that state historic preservation plans were “an appropriate context in which to develop …  frameworks for judging the relative significance of archaeological properties” (McGimsey and Davis 1977:32). A few years later, Lyneis wrote an “archaeological element” planning document for the city of Las Vegas (Lyneis et al. 1978), and then coordinated and wrote sections of the first state-wide archaeological context for Nevada (Lyneis 1982).

Lyneis’ involvement in cultural resources management continued throughout her career. From 1980 to 1981 she served as President of the Society for Conservation Archaeology, and she frequently worked as a consultant or ceramic analyst for government agencies and archaeological contractors throughout her career.

During her time at UNLV, she continued her research into western North America, but shifted her focus to the California deserts and to southern Nevada. It was in her research into the then little-known Virgin Branch Puebloan culture where her impact would be the greatest. She directed several archaeological field schools in the lowland Virgin region, which were among the first field projects to be conducted there since the early twentieth century. The results of the field schools were published in a series of monographs, often co-authored with her students (Lyneis 1992a; Lyneis et al. 1989; Myhrer and Lyneis 1985).

Perhaps Lyneis’s most significant work is the monograph that she published on Main Ridge (Lyneis 1992a). In this manuscript, she established the importance of the “Lost City of Nevada” for understanding the prehistory of southern Nevada. The project began as an attempt to recover data through surface collection and mapping at a site that had been almost entirely excavated many decades earlier (Harrington 1927; Lyneis 1986a). Lyneis then expanded her analyses to incorporate the collections from earlier excavations, an undertaking complicated by incomplete documentation and the fact that the collections had been divided among several museums. Despite the obstacles, she clearly demonstrated the uniqueness of Main Ridge in the western Puebloan World and in its role in a thriving trade network that linked the Pacific Coast with the Puebloan cultures to the east. Perhaps most significantly, she identified a pottery distribution network that moved ceramic vessels from the western Colorado Plateaus to the Moapa Valley of southern Nevada. This network is unique in Southwestern prehistory in that it existed for more than 750 years, moved substantial quantities of both utilitarian and painted pottery across relatively long distances, and did so in the absence of any type of a complex social organization.

Another legacy that Lyneis left to the Virgin Ancestral Puebloan archaeology is a refined ceramic typology. Through careful description of ceramic attributes, including petrographic analysis, Lyneis clarified numerous aspects of the Virgin typology originally developed by Colton (1952). Most notable is her work on Moapa Gray Ware and Shivwits Ware, which were made in upland areas of northwestern Arizona, but distributed widely in the Virgin region. She conducted petrographic analysis of sherds from the Main Ridge site and the Arizona Strip and suggested that Moapa Gray Ware from both areas were tempered with crushed olivine-rich xenoliths from the vicinity of Mt. Trumbull and Tuweep, north of the western Grand Canyon (Lyneis 1992a, 2008b). Shivwits Ware, characterized by the use of dark-firing clays and crushed Moapa Ware sherds as temper, was first identified by Lyneis in 1992. Based on its temper and the color of its paste, Lyneis (1992) suggested that the production area for Shivwits Ware ceramics was on the Shivwits Plateau, where dark-firing clays are often found. In 2007, she helped organize a ceramic conference at the Museum of Northern Arizona. That conference led to several publications in Pottery Southwest revising Colton’s original Virgin region typology (Allison 2008; Lyneis and Hays-Gilpin 2008; Lyneis 2008b). Her approach using petrographic analysis was also used in the study of Fremont ceramics (Geib and Lyneis 1993, 1996; Lyneis 1994; Lyneis and Geib 1996), where she clarified the distribution and variability of igneous rocks used as ceramic tempers.

In other publications, Lyneis evaluated the degree of social complexity among the Virgin Branch people (Lyneis 1992b), and examined changes in social organization (Lyneis 1986b) and subsistence and settlement patterns (Lyneis 1996). As well, she wrote several overviews (Lyneis 1984, 1995, 2000) that still remain primary sources on the Virgin Branch culture. It is from information and ideas contained in these publications that the articles in this issue develop. After her retirement, Lyneis remained active until her death, both as an amateur potter (Figure 3) and as a research and author (Lyneis 2008a, 2008b, 2012; Lyneis and Hays-Gilpin 2008).

Figure 3. Margaret Lyneis at a pottery workshop in 2002.

Lyneis came of age as a scientist at a time when women archaeologists were few and far between, and when women’s contributions to the field often went unrecognized. Further, her chosen research area- the Virgin Branch Puebloan region- at that time was (and still remains) one of the most understudied areas of the North American Southwest. As such, Lyneis did not have an easy career trajectory; she must have encountered numerous obstacles in breaking down gender barriers, and countless challenges that come with studying an overlooked area. Her many contributions to the Virgin Branch culture are the result of decades of quiet, meticulous and dogged research; and have paved the way for future generations of women archaeologists and Virgin Branch researchers.

Articles in this Issue

The papers in this volume touch upon several themes prominent in Lyneis’s research. Allison and Sakai’s papers provide new information about the ceramic distribution network first identified by Lyneis, while Willis and Harry examine possible reasons why the network collapsed, from the vantage point of the upland region. Heidi Roberts and her colleagues also examine the topic of ceramic production and distribution, but from the perspective of the southern Nevada deserts. Harry and Perez build upon previous research conducted by Lyneis in the Moapa Valley to investigate the subsistence, social and economic changes that occurred during the Pueblo II-III transition. And finally, Paul Buck, Phil Mink and Phil Geib all examine settlement patterns of upland Virgin Branch populations and consider how they compare to those of other populations. These papers all build on the foundational work laid by Lyneis, and are written in honor of her memory.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

James R. Allison http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0706-8871