Spatially and temporally unpredictable rainfall patterns presented food production challenges to small-scale agricultural communities, requiring multiple risk-mitigating strategies to increase food security. Although site-based investigations of the relationship between climate and agricultural production offer insights into how individual communities may have created long-term adaptations to manage risk, the inherent spatial variability of climate-driven risk makes a landscape-scale perspective valuable. In this article, we model risk by evaluating how the spatial structure of ancient climate conditions may have affected the reliability of three major strategies used to reduce risk: drawing upon social networks in time of need, hunting and gathering of wild resources, and storing surplus food. We then explore how climate-driven changes to this reliability may relate to archaeologically observed social transformations. We demonstrate the utility of this methodology by comparing the Salinas and Cibola regions in the prehispanic U.S. Southwest to understand the complex relationship among climate-driven threats to food security, risk-mitigation strategies, and social transformations. Our results suggest key differences in how communities buffered against risk in the Cibola and Salinas study regions, with the structure of precipitation influencing the range of strategies to which communities had access through time.

Addressing archaeology's most compelling substantive challenges requires synthetic research that exploits the large and rapidly expanding corpus of systematically collected archaeological data. That, in turn, requires a means of combining datasets that employ different systematics in their recording while at the same time preserving the semantics of the data. To that end, we have developed a general procedure that we call query-driven, on-the-fly data integration that is deployed within the Digital Archaeological Record digital repository. The integration procedure employs ontologies that are mapped to the original datasets. Integration of the ontology-based dataset representations is done at the time the query is executed, based on the specific content of the query. In this way, the original data are preserved, and data are aggregated only to the extent necessary to obtain semantic comparability. Our presentation draws examples from the largest application to date: an effort by a research community of Southwest US faunal analysts. Using 24 ontologies developed to cover a broad range of observed faunal variables, we integrate faunal data from 33 sites across the late prehistoric northern Southwest, including about 300,000 individually recorded faunal specimens.

This paper draws upon James Scott's insights concerning the “public” and “hidden” transcripts of subjugated peoples to investigate Pueblo responses to Spanish colonization in the seventeenth century. We focus on the marked changes that occurred in the decoration of two ceramic wares produced in the Salinas Pueblo region of central New Mexico, and suggest that these changes express one aspect of native resistance to Spanish missionary efforts to eradicate Pueblo religious practices. We document that differences in the impact of missionization between the northern and southern Salinas pueblos led to marked and divergent changes in the ways women decorated glaze and white ware vessels. Women who made glaze ware bowls lived in villages under the direct control of Spanish missionaries, and appear to have deliberately simplified and masked the iconography on their vessels. Women who made white ware jars, however, lived in villages without resident Spanish missionaries. Following Spanish colonization, these women began decorating their vessels with detailed, diverse ritual iconography, apparently in an effort to reinforce, and probably to teach, religious knowledge.

Using bone-chemistry data, this project sought to assess the degree of dietary change that occurred among eastern border Pueblo populations due to prehistoric food exchange with hunter-gatherers on the Plains and to the arrival of Spanish colonists. In so doing we introduce a technique for dietary reconstruction that determines the range of diets compatible with bone-chemistry data from a particular population. The data are derived from samples of modern and archaeological plants and animals collected from the area surrounding Pecos Pueblo, and from archaeological humans recovered from Pecos itself. Bone-strontium concentrations were measured to monitor the relative proportions of meat to vegetables in the diet. Carbon and nitrogen stable-isotope ratios in food items and in bone collagen were measured to monitor the dependence on maize and bison meat. The results do not provide support for the hypothesis that bison replaced mule deer in the diet during the period of significant Plains-Pueblo trade. If bison, whose diets are relatively enriched in 13C had replaced mule deer, an increase in average δ13C values should have occurred. This, however, was not observed. A decrease in carbon-isotope values in the historic period suggests that either bison meat or maize or both decreased in importance in the Pecos diet and that dependence on wild plants increased.