Roth-Lived Lives: Individuals in Mimbres Pithouse Communities

We often view the occupants of past pithouse and pueblo villages as households or groups, seeing them as a collective rather than as individuals who lived, worked, played, and interacted within a community. Our recent work at several pithouse and
pueblo sites in the Mimbres Mogollon region of southwestern New Mexico has documented the presence of individuals that enhance our understanding of daily life in these communities. In this presentation, I use data from excavations at two pithouse sites, La Gila Encantada and Harris, as well as the pueblo site of Elk Ridge, to highlight individuals who lived at these sites. I will discuss the information we used to determine their presence and how thinking about individuals in the past can help us further explore the dynamics of communities in the past.
Speaker Barbara Roth is a Professor in the Department
of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas
who studies prehistoric cultures in the Southwestern
United States. She has conducted research on the
transition to agriculture in the Southwest and currently
works in the Mimbres Mogollon region of southwestern
New Mexico examining household and community
organization during the Pithouse and Classic period
pueblo periods. She has directed excavations at several Pithouse period sites and more recently worked at the Elk Ridge site, a large Classic period pueblo in the Mimbres River Valley.