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Grant: Cannon National Parks Science Scholars Program

Author: Emily DONALD

Year: 2001

Project: The Archaeology of Music and Performance in the American Southwest

Country: US

2001 Research Topic: Cultural Sciences—What new knowledge can be learned from the study of existing park museum collections and data sets that can assist in cultural resource management and/or interpretation for visitors?

Student: Emily J. Donald, Anthropology Department, Columbia University

Dissertation Committee Members:

Sponsor and Graduate Advisor: Dr. Nan Rothschild, Barnard College

Chair: Dr. Terence D’Altroy, Columbia University

Other Members: Dr. David Hurst Thomas, American Museum of Natural History; Dr. Lynn Meskell, Columbia University; and Dr. Deiter Christianson, Columbia University

The Proposed Research

In the following proposal I outline the focus of my research, the methodology by which it will be accomplished, some preliminary results, and the ways in which it will contribute to the interpretations of prehistoric Puebloan life that visitors to the national parks and monuments experience. The proposed research has as its goal an understanding of the contributions of music and performance to leadership and political complexity in the prehistoric American Southwest. Scholars have long debated the quality of leadership and the degree of hierarchy present in Southwestern societies. However, few would argue that ritual and performance did not play substantial and meaningful roles in these communities. It is my assertion that the traditional separation of political authority from ritual authority in small-scale societies is artificial, and I hypothesize that ritualization (Bell 1997a and b, Potter 2000) was one source of authority that was exploited by leaders in the Southwest in prehistoric times. I further suspect that music was an important resource for creating ritual environments and experiences. My goal is not to recreate the sounds of prehistoric Pueblo music, and I also understand that not all kinds of performances will be visible in the archaeological record. I do believe that those performances most likely to have some material component will be formal ones usually defined as “ritual” (DeMarrais, Castillo, and Earle 1996; Schechner and Appel 1990). My research therefore will look at the archaeological evidence for the convergence of musical and ritual performances and political authority in the prehistoric Pueblo world.

Inquiry into the nature of the political organization of Puebloan peoples has a long history, yet there is ongoing debate on the nature and degree of authority and hierarchy in Pueblo societies. Early theories were based on the assumption that Puebloans were peaceful, egalitarian agriculturalists well represented by models of “tribal” societies as proposed by Fried (1967), Sahlins (1972), and Service (1962). More recently, scholars have observed that Southwestern societies are more complex than tribal models suggest, yet they don’t fit well into the “chiefdom” categories outlined by the above authors, Johnson and Earle (1984), and others. Most recently, a variety of theoretical approaches has resulted in a proliferation of models positing varying degrees of political hierarchy, ranging from communal and egalitarian (e.g. Saitta and Keene 1990) to hierarchical and based on land tenure (e.g. Sebastian 1992). While I do not intend to generate a new model of social and political organization in the course of my research on music, I do believe that research into the strategies surrounding ritual has relevance for these other models insofar as ritual was a source of authority, a means of social integration, and a symbolic expression of a group’s identity and worldview. As a modern musician and composer from the pueblo of San Juan has stated:

Dance, to Native Americans, particularly the more traditional cultures such as the Pueblos, is a central pillar of society. It means far more than socialization… It is living history, a pathway to the future, and an incorporation of the Pueblo interpretation of life and the cosmos around us. It is poetry and philosophy in motion… If there was no one here in San Juan Pueblo to carry on the songs and traditional dances, our whole society might fall apart (Estrada and Garcia 1992: 93).

This research, then, will focus on musical instruments and the social and physical contexts for ritual as a means of understanding changes in the degree of political complexity and leadership across time and space in the prehistoric Pueblo world. By correlating changing types and distributions of musical instruments with changes in ritual architecture (including Adler 1989, Hegmon 1989, Lekson 1988, and Smith 1990), site sizes, migration patterns, climatic changes, iconology (such as that associated with the kachina cult or the ubiquitous portrayal of the hunchbacked flute player Kokopelli [Slifer and Duffield 1994]) and other lines of evidence, I intend to investigate the degree to which musical performance was utilized for the purposes of ritualization by individuals in positions of power in the prehistoric Southwest.

There are three main areas of anthropological inquiry to which my own research relates: the body of theory surrounding non-complex or middle-range societies, the archaeology of the Pueblo peoples of the prehistoric American Southwest, and a growing field variously referred to as “archaeomusicology” or “music archaeology” (Hickmann and Hughes 1988, Seeger 1992). There is a substantial body of work that addresses the political organization of non state-level societies. Much of the early work assumed that egalitarianism was a basic state from which humanity had begun its evolution toward higher degrees of political complexity and social inequality (e.g. Fried [1967], Sahlins [1972], and Service [1962]). Scholars studying complex hunter-gatherers have, in some cases (e.g. Boehm 1993), suggested that the reverse is true—that human beings tend to establish hierarchical relationships unless there are institutionalized mechanisms that prevent this (e.g. by ensuring equal access to resources and discouraging self-aggrandizement). Others have advanced concepts such as heterarchy (Crumley 1995), sequential hierarchy (Johnson 1978, 1982), and utilized Marxist or other approaches (e.g. Feinman, Lightfoot, and Upham 2000; Hayden 1995; and McGuire and Saitta 1996), resulting in more sophisticated and subtle discussions of the nature of political authority and social inequality in non-complex societies. In my view, ritual authority should not be as sharply separated from political authority as has traditionally been the case among scholars more concerned with economic expertise or charisma when examining leadership in small-scale societies. My research will examine the implications of ritual performance (and its close ties with ideology [DeMarrais, Castillo, and Earle 1996]) for leadership strategies among members of non-complex societies, and contribute to the discussion of sources of social power and social equality in the context of the case study of the prehistoric American Southwest.

The prehistoric societies of the Southwest fall into the non-complex categorization, and yet they are far from simple. There is a great deal of ethnographic evidence for complicated social organization involving clans, moieties, kiva societies, sodalities, and a rotating system of ceremonial and political responsibilities that function both to integrate and differentiate members of individual communities, with implications for authority, social status, and access to physical, social, and spiritual resources on the part of any one person. According to the ethnographic record, members of each of the social institutions listed above had certain ceremonial rights and responsibilities, and there is evidence that ownership of ritual knowledge rivaled or surpassed the value of material possessions in many Southwestern cultures (e.g. Upham 1989). Thus an investigation of the social and physical contexts for ritual performance such as I am proposing will shed light on an important aspect of Puebloan social organization, leadership, and hierarchy.

The third area of study to which my research relates is that of archaeomusicology. For the most part, scholars of music in prehistory have been European, interested in the music of early European cultures or the place of music in human evolution (Blacking 1988, Levman 1992, Roederer 1984). A few scholars have assessed instruments from Central and South America (e.g. Olson 1986, Crossley-Holland 1980), while others have analyzed particular classes of musical instruments from North America (Brown 1967, 1971; Payne 1989, 1991; Sprague and Signori 1963; and Vargas 1995), or the impact of the contact period on indigenous native traditions (e.g. Nettl 1986 and Robertson 1992). No one has undertaken a project of the scale that I am proposing, which will result in a typology of instruments and an understanding of the relationships of changing instrument types and distributions to the history of social leadership and complexity in the Southwest.

In order to reach the goals stated above, it will be necessary to consider the available physical evidence of music and performance: the instruments themselves; depictions of musicians; and the physical spaces traditionally interpreted as settings for such activities. It will also be necessary to consider the social contexts and roles of performance, both cross-culturally and specific to the Pueblos, utilizing (albeit critically, with reference to Gould and Watson 1982, and Wylie 1982 and 1985) ethnographic and historic sources (including Densmore 1929 and 1957; Frisbie 1980, Gill 1987, Hammond and Rey 1927, 1929, and 1940; Ortiz 1972, and M. C. Stephenson 1894 and 1904, among others). I have clear reasons for choosing musical instruments over other classes of ceremonial objects. First, it is reasonable to assume that construction and use of some types would be restricted to those people with reason to access the knowledge necessary for their construction and use, and who could be considered craft specialists. Second, music is a common element of ceremony worldwide, and while details of actions and paraphernalia differ, the universality of music allows meaningful comparison. Third, the instruments themselves can be considered objects of prestige, whether because of the material from which they are made (e.g. flutes of golden eagle wing bones), the distance from which they were procured (e.g. conch shell trumpets and copper bells from Mexico), or the amount of labor invested in making them (e.g. a turquoise-encrusted bone flute).

I am using Olson’s four-part methodology (1990) for the analysis of musical instruments. The first step is musicology. I measure each instrument, note any morphological or decorative features, and examine museum records and other publications referring to it. I then enter the information into a Microsoft Access database for the purpose of developing typologies based on morphology and tracking distributions over space and time. The second step is iconology, looking at depictions of musicians and decorations on the objects themselves. My ongoing research has revealed depictions of musicians in rock art, kiva murals, and on pottery vessels. The third and fourth steps involve research of historic and ethnographic sources. I have found that the writings of Spanish chroniclers contain references to Puebloan music and musicians, and the body of ethnographic research is extensive. I am examining the same documents for references to the physical spaces in which ritual performances took place, particularly plazas and kivas. I have added a fifth step in the form of archaeological analysis of provenience information for each artifact, and contextual information for each site. My preliminary analysis is revealing changes in instrument distributions at the level of both the region and the site.

The information thus gathered takes on additional relevance when placed in the context of Southwestern prehistory. As Puebloan societies experienced changes in their physical and social environments, their strategies for living in those environments evolved as well. My preliminary results suggest that different kinds of musical instruments were used in different contexts, depending on the needs of the communities and the strategies of their social leaders. Stone kiva bells, for example, are found only in sites from the Pueblo IV period in the Rio Grande valley--communities for which kiva societies were a main integrative and governing mechanism. In strict contrast, simple bone whistles have a history of 1000 years and are found throughout the entire Southwest. Thus different instruments were used in different contexts, and defining the relationship between the instruments and those contexts provides a means to study the ritualization strategies of Puebloan leaders and the degree to which they relied upon ritual authority.

During the Pueblo IV period, Pueblo leaders were facing the problem of maintaining social integration in the face of decades of drought and the consequent regional-scale migration and reorganization that took place (Cameron 1995; Cordell, Doyel, and Kintigh 1994). In the Rio Grande Valley, they rose to the occasion. Changes in pottery and mural designs, architecture (including the construction of large, public plazas), and other lines of evidence all point to a flowering of Pueblo ritual and ceremonialism. This period of transformation is reflected in the instrument assemblage as well, indicating changes in ritual behavior as well as material culture. Higher numbers of more standardized bone flutes are found from large sites from this time period. A greater variety of instruments were being used at individual sites, and new instruments such as bone rasps, clay bells, and stone kiva bells were invented. What can be interpreted from all this is that different strategies were needed to integrate and manage the large, new communities in the face of the disintegration of the migration period, and that one approach was an increase in ceremonial elaboration. Ethnographic evidence reveals that religious and social authority came to be closely associated in the region, to the point where a priestly hierarchy virtually controlled the political life of the pueblos (Ware and Blinman 2000). Thus, the changes and adaptations made during the Pueblo IV period set the state for the Puebloan societies as they existed at the time of Spanish contact. Ultimately, the strategy of ritualization by ceremonial specialists proved to be a method of social organization and integration strong enough and adaptive enough to endure centuries of colonial occupation and give rise to quotes such as that I included above.

Because of the specific nature of the objects to be examined, the proposed research is reliant on the use of museum collections (Hedlund 1989). I have already contacted many curators around the country and obtained lists of the musical instruments from the Southwest housed in their collections. As of this writing, 300 musical instruments from the Laboratory of Anthropology in New Mexico have already been recorded, as have 120 instruments curated at Pecos National Historical Park, 170 instruments in the collections of the Western Archeology and Conservation Center, 75 from the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, 91 from the collection of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and 14 from the Robert S. Peabody Museum of American Archaeology. I am currently awaiting similar permission from additional institutions. Data collection at individual museums began in November 1999. It will continue as funding and curators’ schedules permit, with the end of 2002 as the anticipated cutoff date, at which point any remaining analysis will be completed and the writeup begun. It is predicted that the final version of the dissertation will be completed in 2003.

The collections housed at Pecos and WACC have proved particularly valuable because the amount of background information that is known about the sites in the National Park Service system provides a context for the artifacts themselves. In addition, many of the prehistoric regional centers such as Chaco Canyon are park service units, and any study of Southwestern prehistoric must address the roles of these significant places. Further use of collections from major park service sites in both private and federal collections is therefore integral to this research, as any discussion of regional-scale developments would be lacking without them. The resulting typology of instruments will be helpful to museum and interpretive personnel as well as other archaeologists in better understanding the instruments in their collections, and I am more than willing to share the more technical results of my research with those curators and researchers who express an interest. It will also allow for more instructive display of artifacts such as bone whistles and flutes by providing more contextual information about their construction and use. It has been my experience that musical instruments have special interest to the public, for they are objects directly analogous to objects used by modern peoples for similar ends, and a rich interpretive exhibit will likely be of particular interest. As far as the National Park Service is directly concerned, the results will be of use to interpreters endeavoring to explain to park visitors that Ancestral Puebloans had vibrant ceremonial lives, and that their activities were not confined to subsistence efforts. By explaining the roles of ritual and ceremonial specialists within Puebloan communities, my research will help avoid simplistic interpretations that artificially isolate ceremony from other aspects of Puebloan life and leave visitors with an oversimplified impression of life in prehistory. While this research is not confined to artifacts from archaeological sites within the current system of parks and monuments, I submit that a regional perspective is valuable for visitors in that it introduces the notion that people in Southwestern societies were not completely isolated from one another, and that there are archaeological sites outside federal land holdings as well as within them. In sum, while the kinds of artifacts my research addresses may be relatively limited in scope given the size and diversity of collections for National Park Service sites, the information that can be gained from them is unique and valuable both to other archaeologists and researchers and to the public at large when incorporated into interpretive efforts.

References

Adler, Michael A.

1989 Ritual Facilities and Social Integration in Nonranked Societies. In The Architecture of Social Integration in Prehistoric Pueblos, eds. W.C. Lipe and M. Hegmon, pp. 35-52. Occasional Papers of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center No. 1.

Bell, Catherine

1997a Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1997b Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Blacking, John

1988 Ethnomusicology and Prehistoric Music-Making. In The Archaeology of Early Music Cultures, eds. E. Hickman and D.W. Hughes, pp. 329-335. Third International Meeting of the ICTM Study Group on Music Archaeology. Bonn, Verlag für systematische Musikwissenschaft GmbH.

Boehm, Christopher

1993 Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy. Current Anthropology 34(3): 227-240.

Brown, Donald

1967 The Distribution of Sound Instruments in the Prehistoric Southwestern United States. Ethnomusicology 11: 71-90.

1971 Ethnomusicology and the Prehistoric Southwest. Ethnomusicology 15: 363-378.

Cameron, Cathy

1995 Migration and the Movement of Southwestern Peoples. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 14: 104-124.

Cordell, Linda, David Doyel, and Keith Kintigh

1994 Process of Aggregation in the Prehistoric Southwest. In The Organization and Evolution of Prehistoric Southwestern Society, ed. G. J. Gumerman. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

Crossley-Holland, Peter

1980 Musical Artifacts of Pre-Hispanic West Mexico: Toward an Interdisciplinary Approach. Monograph Series in Ethnomusicology, No. 1. Program in Ethnomusicology, University of California at Los Angeles.

Crumley, Carole

1995 Heterarchy and the Analysis of Complex Societies. In Heterarchy and the Analysis of Complex Societies, eds. R.M. Ehrenreich, C.L. Crumley, and L.E. Levy, pp. 1-5. Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association No. 6. Arlington: American Anthropological Association.

DeMarrais, Elizabeth, Luis Jaime Castillo, and Timothy Earle

1996 Ideology, Materialization, and Power Strategies. Current Anthropology 37(1): 15-31.

Densmore, Francis

1929 Papago Music. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 90. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

1957 Music of Acoma, Isleta, Cochiti, and Zuñi Pueblos. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 165. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

Earle, Timothy

1997 How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Estrada, Julio and Peter Garcia

1992 Bridging the Past and Present. In Musical Repercussions of 1492: Encounters in Text and Performance, ed. C. Robertson, pp. 89-99. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Feinman, Gary M., Kent G. Lightfoot, and Steadman Upham

2000 Political Hierarchies and Organizational Strategies in the Puebloan Southwest. American Antiquity 65(3): 449-470.

Fried, Morton H.

1967 The Evolution of Political Society. New York: Random House.

Frisbie, Charlotte, ed.

1980 Southwestern Indian Ritual Drama. School of American Research. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Gill, Sam

1987 Native American Religious Action: A Performative Approach to Religion. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Gould, Richard A. and Patty Jo Watson

1982 A Dialogue on the Meaning and Use of Analogy in Ethnoarchaeological Reasoning. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 1: 355-381.

Hammond, George P. and Agapito Rey

1927 The Gallegos Relación of the Rodriguez Expedition to New Mexico (1581-1582). New Mexico Historical Review 4:1-58.

1929 Expedition into New Mexico Made by Antonio Espejo, 1582-1583, as Revealed in the Journal of Diego Pérez de Luxán, a Member of the Party. The Quivira Society I, Los Angeles.

1940 Narratives of the Coronado Expedition, 1540-1542. Coronado Cuarto Centennial Publications, 1540-1940, Vol. II. Albuquerque.

Hayden, Brian

1995 Pathways to Power: Principles for Creating Socioeconomic Inequalities. In Foundations of Social Inequality, eds. T.D. Price and G.M. Feinman, pp. 15-86. New York: Plenum Press.

Hegmon, Michelle

1989 Social Integration and Architecture. In The Architecture of Social Integration in Prehistoric Pueblos, eds. W.C. Lipe and M. Hegmon, pp. 4-14. Occasional Papers of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center No. 1.

Hickmann, Ellen and David W. Hughes, eds.

1988 The Archaeology of Early Music Cultures. 3rd International Meeting of the ICTM Study Group on Music Archaeology. Bonn, Verlag für systematsche Musikwissenschaft GmbH.

Hedlund, Ann Lane, ed.

1989 Perspectives on Anthropological Collections from the American Southwest: Proceedings of a Symposium. Arizona State University Anthropological Research Papers No. 40.

Johnson, Gregory A.

1978 Information and the Development of Decision Making Organizations. In Social Archaeology: Beyond Subsistence and Dating, eds. C.L. Redmond et al., pp. 87-112. New York: Academic Press.

1982 Organizational Structure and Scalar Stress. In Theory and Explanation in Archaeology: The Southampton Conference, eds. C. Renfrew, M.J. Rowlands, and B.A. Segraves, pp. 389-423. New York: Academic Press.

Johnson, Gregory A. and Timothy Earle

1987 The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State. Standford: Stanford University Press.

Lekson, Stephen H.

1988 The Idea of the Kiva in Anasazi Archaeology. Kiva 53(3): 213-234.

Levman, Bryan G.

1992 The Genesis of Music and Language. Ethnomusicology 36(2): 147-170.

McGuire, Randall H. and Dean J. Saitta

1996 Although They Have Petty Captains, They Obey Them Badly: The Dialectics of Prehispanic Western Pueblo Social Organization. American Antiquity 61(2): 197-216.

Nettl, Bruno

1986 The Western Impact on World Music: Change, Adaptation, and Survival. New York: Schirmer Books.

Olsen Dale A.

1986 Towards a Musical Atlas of Peru. Ethnomusicology 30(3): 394-412.

1990 The Ethnomusicology of Archaeology: A Model for the Musical/Cultural Study of Ancient Material Culture. Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology Vol. 8, pp. 175-197. Los Angeles, University of California at Los Angeles.

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1972 New Perspectives on the Pueblos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Payne, Richard

1989 Indian Flutes of the Southwest. Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society 15: 5-31.

1991 Bone Flutes of the Anasazi. Kiva 56(2): 165-177.

Potter, James M.

2000 Ritual, Power, and Social Differentiation in Small Scale Societies. In Hierarchies in Action: Cui Bono?, ed. M. Diehl, pp. 195-216. Carbondale: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University.

Roederer, Juan

1984 The Search for the Survival Value of Music. Music Perception 1(3): 550-356.

Sahlins, Marshall

1972 Stone Age Economics. New York: Aldine.

Schechner, Richard and Willa Appel, eds.

1990 By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sebastian, Lynne

1992 The Chaco Anasazi: Sociopolitical Evolution in the Prehistoric Southwest. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Service, Elman R.

1962 Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective. New York: Random House.

Slifer, Dennis and James Duffield

1994 Kokopelli: Fluteplayer Images in Rock Art. Santa Fe: Ancient City Press.

Smith, Watson

1990 [1952] When is a Kiva? Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Stephenson, Matilda Cox

1894 The Sia. Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Report No. 11, pp. 3-157. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

1904 The Zuni Indians: Their Mythology, Esoteric Fraternities, and Ceremonies. Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Report No. 23, pp. 1-634. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

Upham, Steadman

1989 East Meets West: Hierarchy and Elites in Pueblo Society. In Sociopolitical Structure of Prehistoric Southwestern Societies, eds. S. Upham, K. Lightfoot, and R. Jewett, pp. 77-102. Boulder: Westview Press.

Vargas, Victoria D.

1995 Copper Bell Trade Patterns in the Prehispanic U.S. Southwest and Northwest Mexico. Arizona State Museum Archaeological Series 187. Tucson: Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona.

Ware, John A. and Eric Blinman

2000 Cultural Collapse and Reorganization: The Origin and Spread of Pueblo Ritual Sodalities. In The Archaeology of Regional Interaction: Religion, Warfare, and Exchange Across the American Southwest and Beyond, ed. M. Hegmon, pp. 381-409. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

Wobst, Martin

1978 The Archaeoethnology of Hunter-Gatherers, or the Tyranny of the Ethnographic Record in Archaeology. American Antiquity 43: 303-309.

Wylie, M. Alison

1982 An Analogy by any Other Name is Just as Analytical: A Commentary on the Gould-Watson Dialogue. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 1: 382-401.

1985 The Reaction Against Analogy. In Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, Vol. 8, ed. M. Schiffer, pp. 63-111. New York: Academic Press.

Emily J. Donald

92 C County Rd. 78

Santa Fe, NM 87501

(505) 820-7918 hm

(505) 988-6801 wk

ejd11@columbia.edu

Education:

1994 B.A. with honors in both anthropology and music from Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR, 97219

1998 M.A. in archaeology from Columbia University, New York, NY 10027

1999 M.Phil. in archaeology from Columbia University, New York, NY 10027

Papers Authored:

Donald, Emily

n.d. Determining Archaeological Site Conditions for Entry into ASMIS, 1999-2000. MS on file at Bandelier National Monument.

Donald, Emily and Heather Atherton

n.d. The Salt Creek Road Archaeological Survey, 2001. MS on file at Canyonlands National Park.

Donald, Emily and Glenn Simpson

n.d. National Historic Landmark Nomination for the Twenty Mule Team Wagons in Death Valley National Park. MS on file in the Architectural Conservation Division, National Park Service, Santa Fe, NM.

Dudley, Peter and Emily Donald

n.d. Tsankawi Unit Cultural Resources Inventory, 1999. MS on file at Bandelier National Monument.

Papers Presented:

Aug. 13, 1999 The Archaeology of Music and Performance in the American Southwest. Presented at the Pecos Archaeological Conference, Show Low, Arizona.

April 15, 2001 The Archaeology of Music and Performance in the American Southwest. Presented at the Society for American Archaeology Conference, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Current Projects:

Collaboration with Rory Gauthier, archaeologist at Bandelier National Monument, on a volume of H.P. Mera’s archaeological site maps and other works

Work Experience:

Feb. 2000 to Present: Archaeologist in the Conservation Division of the National Park Service Intermountain Support Office. Duties include cultural resource database creation and management, electronic document archives development, archaeological survey, archaeological site condition assessment and documentation, stabilization treatment recommendations, writing national register and national historic landmark nominations, Section 106 compliance, and other aspects of cultural resource management. For a reference, contact Jim Trott in the conservation division at (505) 988-6795, jim_trott@nps.gov.

Sept. 1999 to Feb. 2000: Archaeology Technician at Bandelier National Monument. Duties included completing the archaeological survey at the Tsankawi Unit of the Park (including establishing GPS coordinates) and writing up the results, as well as constructing modules for the Archaeological Site Management Information System (ASMIS) database and entering data on the 2200+ sites within park boundaries for use with Environmental Impact Statements and other cultural resource management decisions. For a reference, contact Rory Gauthier at Bandelier National Monument (505) 672-3861 x543, rory_gauthier@nps.gov.

May through July, 1998 and 1999: Archaeologist for the American Museum of Natural History at the site of San Marcos Mission, New Mexico. Responsibilities included remote sensing with a soil resistivity meter, and all aspects of excavation and processing of artifacts during a normal field season. For a reference, contact Dr. David Hurst Thomas at the Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th St., New York, NY 10024-5192, (212) 769-5890, thomasd@amnh.org. During the summer of 1998 I also volunteered at Mesa Verde National Monument, working with the post-burn field crew in the condition assessments of archaeological sites burned in the recent fire, and in the stabilization treatments done to protect the sites from increased runoff and erosion.

School Year during 1998 and 1999: Teaching Assistant for classes taught in the anthropology department at Columbia University, specifically: Rise of Human Society, Rise of Civilization, and Introduction to Anthropology. Responsibilities included grading assigned papers and exams, leading discussion sections and reviews for exams, occasional full lectures, and assigning final grades. For a reference, please contact Dr. Nan Rothschild, Anthropology Department, Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, (212) 854-4315, roth@columbia.edu. Alternatively, contact Dr. Terence D’Altroy, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, (212) 854-2131, tnd1@columbia.edu.

May through July 1997: Laboratory Director for the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School held in Pinedale, Arizona for the excavation of the Bailey Ruin and Cothrun’s Great Kiva. Duties included all aspects of excavation in addition to those of organizing, cleaning, and packaging artifacts and teaching those techniques to the field school students, and the recovery of botanical materials through flotation. For a reference, please contact Dr. Barbara J. Mills, Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona, (520) 621-9671, bmills@ccit.arizona.edu.

Dec. 1996 through Aug. 1999: Independent Contractor working to update the List of Classified Structures databases for the National Park Service offices in Santa Fe and Denver, and for Dinosaur National Monument. Hours and pay varied. I also worked for independent computer consulting firm constructing and managing Access databases for various companies.

Oct. 1994 through Aug. 1996: Archaeology Technician for the Southwest Regional Office of the National Park Service. Responsibilities included formatting the Bandelier Archaeological Survey Report; entering archaeological survey data from Petroglyph National Monument into Dbase; and creating 3-D computer models of archaeological sites using Photomodeler. In particular, I was the primary person responsible for carrying out the photography, fieldwork, and data entry for the List of Classified Structures for the entire Southwest Region and for portions of the Colorado Plateau Region. For a reference, contact Catherine Colby at (505) 989-7838, clcolby@earthlink.net.

June through Sept. 1994: Student Conservation Association Volunteer at Bandelier National Monument. Projects included trail monitoring, controlled burn monitoring plot installation, visitor center display set up, data entry, and collection and analysis of archaeological artifacts from revegetation plots as part of the Section 106 compliance process. No reference available.

Honors, and Awards:

2000 Special Service Award from Canyon de Chelly National Monument for condition assessment work during the summer field season

1997-1999 Three Stigler Summer Research Grants from Columbia University

1996 4-year Faculty Fellowship to Columbia University and Lorrin T. Brownmiller Anthropology Scholarship

1996 Citation of Excellence from the National Park Service Denver Office for work on the List of Classified Structures

1990-1994 12 trimesters on the Deans List at Lewis and Clark College, Rene J. Ratte Award nominee, Rae Seitz Music Scholarship, Scholastic Excellence Award

I hold membership in the Society for American Archaeology, the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society, and the New Mexico Archaeological Society

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