The Enshrined Pueblo: Villagescape and Cosmos in the Northern Rio Grande

Abstract

This paper investigates the material construction of Pueblo cosmology in the northern Rio Grande during and following the emergence of large aggregated villages at the end of the thirteenth century A.D. My central claim is that villages and the landscapes that surrounded them were mutually constitutive and need to be viewed holistically as components of integrated villagescapes that linked the dwellings of the living to the dwellings of ancestral spirits, and the social order of the village to the spatial order of the cosmos. "Village aggregation," in this sense, emerges as a misnomer given the radical geographic extension of ritual practice and constructed space that went hand-in-hand with residential agglomeration. I begin by synthesizing ethnographic evidence of Tewa and Northern Tiwa sacred geographies, paying close attention to the distribution and interpretation of archaeologically visible shrine features. I then use this ethnographic understanding as a basis for interpreting the archaeological evidence of the extensive complex of shrine features surrounding T'aitöna (Pot Creek Pueblo), one of the northern Rio Grande's earliest large villages.