This paper investigates the material construction of Pueblo cosmology in the northern Rio Grande during and following the emergence of large aggregated villages at the end of the thirteenth century A.D. My central claim is that villages and the landscapes that surrounded them were mutually constitutive and need to be viewed holistically as components of integrated villagescapes that linked the dwellings of the living to the dwellings of ancestral spirits, and the social order of the village to the spatial order of the cosmos. "Village aggregation," in this sense, emerges as a misnomer given the radical geographic extension of ritual practice and constructed space that went hand-in-hand with residential agglomeration. I begin by synthesizing ethnographic evidence of Tewa and Northern Tiwa sacred geographies, paying close attention to the distribution and interpretation of archaeologically visible shrine features. I then use this ethnographic understanding as a basis for interpreting the archaeological evidence of the extensive complex of shrine features surrounding T'aitöna (Pot Creek Pueblo), one of the northern Rio Grande's earliest large villages.

As was the case throughout much of north-central New Mexico, the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries marked a period of rapid settlement pattern change in the Taos District as dispersed pithouse and small pueblo hamlets were replaced by tightly clustered pueblos and ultimately by the emergence of large aggregated villages. Here we consider the effects of this transition on the manner in which local potters procured raw clay for the production of black-on-white ceramics. Adopting the Rio Grande del Rancho drainage as our study area, we first outline the major clay sources within the drainage. We then report on neutron activation and petrographic analyses of both modern clays as well as archaeological ceramics from sites that span the settlement transition in question. These analyses suggest that settlement aggregation was accompanied by a noticeable reduction in the diversity and quality of clay sources used by local potters, most likely as a result of newly restricted procurement strategies associated with the formation of buffer zones between village aggregates. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implications of this trend with respect to the economic situation of early large villages in the area.