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Relations between Ethnology and Archaeology in the Southwest

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Elsie Clews Parsons
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Extract

In a recent paper in American Antiquity, Steward and Setzler have pointed out that appreciation and use of certain ethnological concepts would serve to direct archaeologists and to enrich archaeology. I would like to shake hands with them on this and as an ethnologist add a word or two about the interdependence of these two branches of anthropology, particularly among Pueblo cultures.

It is hardly necessary to make a general brief for the kind of interdependence that prevails in our Southwest, where extant cultures are historically related to cultures under archaeological research. There is no dispute that the living culture has light to throw upon the buried one. Theoretically no dispute; practically we are constantly surprised to find Southwestern archaeologists, even seasoned students, unfamiliar with the ethnological record and having to leave to the ethnologist interpretation of their data: plums for the ethnologist but a loss to the man who has been doing the work.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , January 1940 , pp. 214 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1940

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References

328 “Function and Configuration in Archaeology,” American Antiquity, Vol. 4, pp. 4–10. 1938.

329 As an illustration of detail well observed and peculiarly significant let me cite an observation by Roberts on finding in a kiva of the Village of the Great Kivas on the Zuni Reservation two rounded conical stones undoubtedly used here, as elsewhere, alongside the altar. Roberts observes that the stones were found tipped over on their side. (Bureau of American Ethnology, Bull. 111, p. 61, PI. 10b). This means that they were not amulet but fetis. stones, stones into which the Spirits came and went, because today stone fetishes or other kinds are put on their sides at the conclusion of ceremonials, after the Spirit has left. So here in this positional detail we have pretty good evidence for the existence of a whole religious system early in the eleventh century.

330 In the Snake-Antelope ceremony a small pit is dug in the dance court and covered with a plank, an improvised planked-over sipapu, on which the Snake men sprinkle meal and stamp; and in the Walpi Winter Solstice ceremony there is posturing or dancing on the plank of the sipap. in Chief kiva, just as on the plank over the pit altar in the Chief kiva of Acoma the shamans dance.

331 For the Zufii Scalp ceremony we see again a plank-covered pit in the dance court on which women dance to shake the hearts of the underground enemies. (For foot drum in California, see R. H. Lowie in American Anthropologist, Vol. 40, (1938), 174.)

332 Near the Taos house door there is a small pit for Filth or Refuse Boy and into it the wife of a man off deer-hunting will sprinkle cornmeal. Into a floor pit, the Jemez nursing mother will let fall a few drops of milk when she weans her infant in order to have milk enough for her next one. In a floor pit, Zufii keep prayer-images of domestic animals and money together with prayer-sticks which they have made and planted for increase.

333 But there is no evidence at all for the assumption popularized by Bandelier that boys or youths slept regularly in the kiva. In fact all that we know of Pueblo family or clan ways of life or of society organization militates against this assumption.

334 As when in his admirable report on the Piedra district in southwestern Colorado Dr. Roberts suggests that a row of stones archaeologically unaccountable is a clan boundary. Did those early Pueblos have clans? Do contemporary Pueblo clans use boundary stones for building sites? Are clans localized? (They are not.)