GENDERED ANALYSIS OF LITHICS FROM THE CENTRAL MESA VERDE REGION

Abstract

Archaeologists have emphasized men's activities and neglected the role of women in their analyses of lithic assemblages. In this study, I argue that both men and women created lithic debitage and used stone tools. I further argue that women created and used stone tools primarily in the context of activities conducted at residential sites; in contrast, men created and used tools away from the residential site. I build expectations for my analyses by examining ethnographic data. I use these expectations to examine lithic assemblages produced between A.D. 1050 and 1300 in the central Mesa Verde region. Women's use of lithics includes tools used in maize grinding, including the use of peckingstones to refurbish manos and metates. In contrast, men's activities included the production of projectile points; I demonstrate that this mostly occurred outside the village. I use these insights to examine Rosaldo's (1974) proposition that social and economic power is tied to gender and whether one's role includes access to public contexts or is restricted to domestic contexts. I conclude that that was not the case in the central Mesa Verde region where gender roles appear to have been complementary.

En sus análisis de conjuntos líticos, los arqueólogos han enfatizado las actividades de los hombres y han dejado de lado el papel de las mujeres. En este estudio, argumento que tanto los hombres como las mujeres creaban desechos de talla lítica y usaban herramientas de piedra. Argumento, además, que las mujeres creaban y usaban herramientas de piedra primeramente en el contexto de actividades en sitios residenciales; por el contrario, los hombres creaban y usaban herramientas fuera del sitio residencial. Construyo expectativas para este análisis a través de una examinación de datos etnográficos. Utilizo estas expectativas para examinar conjuntos líticos producidos entre 1050 y 1300 d.C. en la región central de Mesa Verde. El uso de líticos por las mujeres incluía herramientas utilizadas para moler maíz, incluyendo el uso de piedras para picar para arreglar manos y metates. Por el contrario, las actividades de los hombres incluía la producción de puntas de proyectil; demuestro que esto ocurría por lo general fuera de la aldea. Utilizo estas ideas para examinar la aseveración de de que el poder social y económico está ligado al género y al hecho de si el papel de uno incluye acceso a contextos públicos, o si se limita a contextos domésticos. Concluyo que eso no era el caso en la región central de Mesa Verde, donde los papeles de género parecen haber sido complementarios.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation under grant BCS-0408793, the Don Crabtree Scholarship from the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice, University of Idaho. This paper has benefited from the comments of Mark Varien, Patricia Crown, Timothy Kohler, Andrew Duff, William Lipe, Scott Ortman, William Andrefsky, William Walker, Josie Chang-Order, Patricia Flint-Lacey, Chris Nicholson, Elizabeth Stone, and Susan Vetter. The author would like to thank Lisa Young and other reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the manuscript. Special thanks to William Andrefsky, Paul Ermigiotti, and Jeff Rasic for replicating the projectile points, and also to Crow Canyon Archaeological Center for allowing me to use their facility and space while I was analyzing soil samples. Also, special thanks to Tracy Murphy at Anasazi Heritage Center for accessing and reanalyzing some lithic assemblages.

Notes

1 It is interesting to inquire how many of the “cores” in the assemblage are early stages of peckingstones. When one produces a peckingstone, “preforms” of the peckingstones look like multi-directional cores. These preforms or multi-directional cores have sharp acute angles for pecking other materials. To better understand this subject, I investigated the Yellow Jacket Pueblo assemblage and identified three different core types—bifacial cores, unidirectional cores, and multi-directional cores. Crow Canyon researchers collected a total of 112 cores from the pueblo, but seven cores were identified as just flakes. Thus, the total of 105 cores were analyzed for this purpose. About 21 percent of cores were bifacial cores; 30.4 percent were unidirectional cores; and 44.7 percent were multi-directional cores. Eighty one percent of bifacial cores were made of Morrison materials, whereas for unidirectional and multi-directional cores 92–93 percent were made of Morrison materials. In short, about the half of the cores collected from Yellow Jacket Pueblo identified as multi-directional cores made of Morrison materials. I believe that these were possibly manufactured as the preform of peckingstones.

2 The ratio of peckingstones and gray wares sherds is .00466 (470 peckingstones and 100,772 pieces of gray wares) at Duckfoot, whereas the ratio from Sand Canyon Pueblo is .00456 (375 peckingstones and 82,240 gray wares). This result suggests the frequency of peckingstone use is similar in the Pueblo I (Duckfoot) and Pueblo III (Sand Canyon) sites. In this comparison, I used the total number of gray ware sherds because studies have found that the accumulation of utility wares (gray wares) at a site can provide useful estimates of the occupation span and the population density of a site (Lightfoot 1994; Varien and Ortman 2005). Gray ware pottery counts, therefore, can be used to standardize differences between sites that are the result of population size and the length of occupation.

3 Although the nearest Kdb silicified sandstone quarry from Shields Pueblo is approximately 4.8 km (3 miles) and the distance between them is very close in comparison with that of the Sand Canyon Pueblo and Yellow Jacket Pueblo sites, residents of Shields Pueblo procured and used more than 70 percent of Morrison rocks for peckingstones. This suggests that the proximity distance of 2 km radius, as Varien (1999) used for his catchment analysis, does support my argument for a preference for certain tool types (i.e. peckingstones and projectile points) and their raw material types by genders in the central Mesa Verde region.

4 The microdebitage remains were collected from various activity areas in the villages. In the future, the study of floor assemblages would be worthwhile in order to identify locations where groundstone manufacture and projectile point manufacture occurred within the village boundaries.

5 I randomly selected sediment samples from these three sites. However, I only used sediments which included a recorded volume. For unprocessed sediments, I deleted sediments of less than 750 ml and more than 1200 ml. For heavy fraction soils, I analyzed only soils of more than 400 ml and less than 700 ml.

6 This sediment study is still primarily an examination for determining and identifying actual projectile point and bifacial manufacture within a village. There are several factors to consider for future research. First, sediment samples were collected and analyzed from three different villages. Second, sediment samples collected from these sites are relatively limited. People might argue that the Puebloans manufactured projectile points and bifaces in plazas or other open spaces within a village. I, however, argue that middens are a representation of the total accumulation of trash; thus, sediment samples from middens should represent sufficient amounts of small debitage from tool-sharpening and manufacture. Nevertheless, we still need to obtain more data to evaluate these findings.

7 I argue that pit-structures (kivas) in the central Mesa Verde region were used for both domestic and ceremonial purposes, and the use of pit-structures in this region is different to that in other contemporary and historical pueblos. There has been a great deal of research on household organization in the region (Lekson 1989; Lipe 1989; Lightfoot 1994; Varien 1999). This research has identified the architectural and extramural spaces used by the household. These previous studies reveal that in most cases buildings that archaeologists call “kivas” were used for domestic activities and were the focal structures for the household. The architectural suite used by the household therefore included above-ground rooms, the pit-structure or kiva, extramural work areas, and middens where refuse was deposited. Lekson (1988, 1989) was one of the pioneer archaeologists to argue that the prehistoric kivas in the central Mesa Verde region were used for both domestic and ceremonial purposes (also Cater and Chenault 1988; Lipe 1989; Lipe and Varien 1999a, 1999b). Ortman (1998, 170–173) also contends that the small size of kivas in the central Mesa Verde region indicates that both men and women in an extended family or in lineage-based kin groups used them. These smaller kivas generally contain evidence of domestic activity such as maize-grinding facilities and cooking pots, both associated with daily and ritual access by women (Mobley-Tanaka 1997). In short, prior to the depopulation of the central Mesa Verde region, kivas were utilized for domestic purposes with use for ritual on appropriate occasions (Lekson 1989; Lipe 1989, 55, Lipe and Varien 1999a, 1999b).