A Hard Time to Date: The Scott County Pueblo (14sc1) and Puebloan Residents of the High Plains

Abstract

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Puebloan women (if not entire families) were incorporated into Apache Dismal River communities in western Kansas. In at least one site (14SC1), Puebloan people lived in a small masonry pueblo. We evaluate the timing and nature of the Puebloan occupation at 14SC1 and its relationship to the Dismal River population at the site. We use a Bayesian analytical framework to evaluate different models of the pueblo's use history, constraining 12 radiocarbon dates by their stratigraphic data and then comparing this framework with different temporal models based on the historical record. We conclude that Dismal River people lived at 14SC1 prior to the appearance of Pueblo migrants, sometime between cal AD 1490 and 1650. Construction and early use of the pueblo by migrants from the Rio Grande valley occurred between cal AD 1630 and 1660, and the pueblo was closed by burning sometime between cal AD 1640 and 1690. Site 14SC1 lacks Rio Grande Glaze Ware, and its residents seem rarely to have engaged with the groups in the Southern Plains Macroeconomy. Our results contribute to studies of indigenous community formation and Puebloan residential mobility during the Spanish colonial period.

Understanding the significance of migrants’ material culture

“…Given the rather tenuous links between 14SC1 and the Puebloan revolts, Hill and colleagues sent over a dozen samples from the three sites for radiocarbon dating. The new dates indicate that the occupation of the masonry pueblo at 14SC1 was most likely between 1600 and 1660 CE, while nearby sites 14SC304 and 14SC409 were occupied between 1680 and 1740 CE (Hill et al., 2018; Trabert et al., 2017). This work places the occupation of the 14SC1 pueblo before the Pueblo Revolts and 14SC304 and 14SC409 after the pueblo was burned and abandoned.…”

“…It is critical to reconsider the role that migrants played at different points in time for both the Great Plains and in so many other regions so that we can try to successfully identify material remnants of their movement and to consider the social lives of their objects. For over a decade, my colleagues and I have worked to understand and contextualize the migration of Puebloan peoples from northern New Mexico to the Central Plains after 1600 CE (Beck and Trabert, 2014;Beck et al, 2016;Hill et al, 2018;Trabert, 2017;Trabert et al, 2016Trabert et al, , 2017. The Scott County Pueblo (14SC1) has been the focal point of this analysis as it includes the remains of a seven-room masonry pueblo in present day western Kansas.…”

Enduring Traditions and the (Im)materiality of Early Colonial Encounters in the Southeastern United States

“…For the critical timespan encompassing the European settlement of North America (sixteenth through eighteenth centuries), calibrated radiocarbon dates intercept multiple points along the radiocarbon calibration curve and exhibit wide ranges of error spread across hundreds of years, foiling attempts to resolve time via radiocarbon determinations. Bayesian chronological modeling, however, combined with laboratory advances in radiocarbon dating (e.g., AMS dating), is allowing archaeologists to successfully use radiocarbon dating as an effective method of establishing high-resolution chronological frameworks for this critical time period (e.g., Ames and Brown 2019; Hill et al 2018; Manning and Hart 2019; Manning et al 2018, 2019; Thompson, Jefferies, and Moore 2019). Here, we contribute to this growing body of work by presenting a case of Indigenous endurance and resilience that has long been obfuscated by the difficulties of absolute dating and the uncritical reliance on materially based chronologies and typologies.…”