The appearance of iconographic-style pottery at fourteenth-century Pueblo villages in east-central Arizona marked an important shift in the decoration of pottery. These polychrome containers were painted with elaborate imagery that contrasts with earlier geometric-style traditions. Remarkably, though the type was circulated and copied throughout the region, we still know very little about how it was used. This paper addresses that issue by analyzing surface abrasions on a large corpus of White Mountain Red Ware whole vessels. Our research not only examines changes in the uses of Ancestral Pueblo ceramics during the late prehispanic period, but underscores the importance of use-alteration studies to interpreting the biographies of ancient objects.

Aggregated villages with large, central plazas appeared across the Western Pueblo region of the US Southwest by the fourteenth century AD. We view the adoption of this settlement form not strictly as an adaptive response to economic and social circumstances, but rather as a reflection of changes in the social relations of power and conceptualizations of community in the Pueblo world. Enclosed plazas became a form of panoptic architecture, structuring what were intrinsically unequal social relations between individuals or groups and the entire communities of which they were a part. This process has implications for the emergence of new power relations in pre-state societies.