Not waiting for the rain: Integrated systems of water management by pre-Columbian Pueblo farmers in north-central New Mexico.

Abstract

The purpose of this investigation is to further an understanding of aboriginal Pueblo agricultural tactics and strategies to buffer subsistence risk in ever-changing environments. I use archaeological survey data from the pre-Columbian Pueblo occupation of the Rio del Oso Valley in the Chama district of north-central New Mexico (ca. A.D. 1200/1300-1450/1550) as a case study. The research examines three issues. The first concern addresses the agronomic engineering principles that underlay the Pueblo farmers' physical modifications of the Rio del Oso environment for crop production. Reviewing a variety of historical and ethnographic information, I show that southwestern Pueblo farmers traditionally used a wide range of agricultural technologies for harvesting and conserving moisture for reliably producing crops under unpredictable, difficult climatic conditions. Consideration of the spatial relationships among the field features assemblages within microwatersheds covering only a few hectares indicates that the Rio del Oso farmers integrated their many different field types into ingenious, highly integrated water management systems. The second topic evaluates the social technologies that underlay how the Rio del Oso groups differentially deployed their farming technologies and practices to sustain their settlement of the valley over a span of three centuries by coping with a wide range of natural and social risk factors. Examination of the spatial and temporal systematics of individual field devices and their composite complexes suggests that the farmers intensified their efforts over time to harvest both quantitatively greater amounts and qualitatively different sources of moisture. The third subject investigates how the Rio del Oso populations modified their landscapes using their ideological technologies over time to make, maintain and extend use-right claims to dampen risk arising from expanding regional population levels. I document changes in certain kinds of archaeological features, identifiable as shrines based on ethnographic analogy, to build an argument that these changing patterns relate to the population's increasing concerns about agricultural land tenure issues. I also consider the supposition that the underlying principles unifying the spatial distributions of shrines, fields and habitation loci constituted a coherent system of physical and conceptual landscape transformation related to water management themes.