Examining the Pueblo II–III Transition in the Moapa Valley, Southern Nevada

Abstract

Based on the limited data available to her at the time, Margaret Lyneis proposed that the transition between the Pueblo II and Pueblo III periods in the Moapa Valley was marked by differences in social organization and subsistence strategies. Since then, additional data have become available from new archival research and excavations, making it possible to more fully investigate the ideas presented by Lyneis. In this paper, the newly-available data are used to re-evaluate the nature of the Pueblo II–III transition, and their implications for understanding the terminal Virgin Branch occupation of the Moapa Valley are considered.

Basado en los datos limitados disponsables a ella en ese momento, Margaret Lyneis propuso que la transición entre los periodos Pueblo II y Pueblo III en el Valle de Moapa estuvo marcada sobre diferencias en la organización social y las estrategias de subsistencia. Desde entonces, datos addicional han llegado disponibles de nuevos investigaciones archivos y excavaciones, permitiendo investigar más a fondo las ideas presentadas por Lyneis. En este artículo, los datos recientemente disponibles son utilizaron para reevaluar la natura de la transición del Pubelo II–III, y se consideran sus implicaciones para compriendir la occupación terminal de Virgin Branch del Valle de Moapa.

KEYWORDS:

• Virgin Branch Puebloan culture
• Pueblo II–Pueblo III transition
• social organization
• subsistence strategies
• interaction networks

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, National Park Service for the support of archival and excavation work conducted in the region since 2004, and the National Science Foundation for their support of the National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (NOSAMS) laboratory that provided some of the radiocarbon dates (i.e. those having the prefix OS) listed in Table 2. Comments by Helen Fairley and an anonymous reviewer greatly improved the content of this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Manifestations with architectural remains were given “House” numbers by the original investigators. “Houses” roughly correspond to what we might call a site today.

2 Surveys on the Paria Plateau (Mueller 1974), the Powell Plateau (Effland et al. 1981), the Walhalla Glades (Schwartz et al. 1981), the Kaiparowits Plateau (Geib et al. 2001), and Cedar Mesa (Matson et al. 1988) all have demonstrated a hiatus in occupation during this interval.

3 In the Virgin Branch region, sites having between 11% and 39% corrugated ceramics are typically assigned to the Late Pueblo II period; and those having 40% or more are typically assigned to the Pueblo III period (Allison 2000:73; Harry et al. 2013:387).

4 Interestingly, Lyneis (1986:Table 2) calculates an average of 3.9 m² of storage per habitation at House 47, a figure that is even less than that of Main Ridge. Lyneis does not address why House 47 is out of sync with her proposed trend of increasing storage, though it should be noted that this figure was based only on the surviving map of the site, since she did not have access to Harrington's field notes at that time.

5 Our ceramics come from systematic surface collections, in which all sherds larger than 2 cm were collected, and from screened deposits, in which all artifacts larger than ¼″ were collected. For this reason, we believe our figure of 47.6% is a better representation of the site's assemblage than the 30.3% figure obtained from the (presumably grab) sample curated by Harrington (Shutler 1961:9).