Tag: B. Sunday Eiselt

Culture, Society & Family Fossils & Ruins

Hiding in plain sight: How invisibility saved New Mexico’s Jicarilla Apache

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date February 12, 2013

A nomadic tribe pushed into New Mexico by frontier settlement, the Jicarilla slipped off the radar and became the last tribe to avoid forced settlement onto an American Indian reservation

Becoming White Clay A History and Archaeology of Jicarilla Apache Enclavement, Eiselt, SMU

North America’s Jicarilla Apache tribe cloaked themselves in trade, diplomacy, and intermarriage and nearly escaped incarceration on an American Indian reservation. How they did it has been a mystery of the historical American Southwest – until now.

“In some ways, the Jicarilla still remain invisible,” according to anthropologist B. Sunday Eiselt at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

The Jicarilla Apache, an amalgamation of nomadic tribes that in the 18th century migrated off the plains and settled in the northern Rio Grande of New Mexico, were accustomed to armed resistance, guerrilla tactics and inter-tribal warfare.

Reidus hilli, John Graf, SMU, coelacanth, Dipluridae,

They fought alongside the Pueblo Indians in the Revolt of 1680 and later resisted Comanche raiders, sometimes as contract fighters and security guards for the Spanish and American trade caravans. Then quietly, deliberately and peacefully they slipped off the radar of Spanish colonization and U.S. Manifest Destiny until 1888, when the Jicarilla became the last Native American tribe forcibly settled on a reservation.

Invisibility was no accident, rather a strategy for survival
“This was not an accident of history,” says Eiselt. The Apache, particularly the Jicarilla, were experts at invisibility — not just physically, but also socially and economically. For example, Jicarilla warriors on raids would paint themselves during the journey to the plains with white clay to avoid detection by their enemies.

The protocol beckoned supernatural or spiritual protections to bring the warriors home safely. Just as white clay was a warrior strategy for self-preservation, it stands as a metaphor for the primary message of the book.

“By ‘becoming white clay’ in their social and economic dealings,” Eiselt contends, “the Jicarilla turned the tables on non-Indian expansion and disappeared into the cultural fabric of the Southwest’s Pueblo colonies as other Native Americans were being forced onto reservations.” The Jicarilla, without firing a shot, not only avoided confinement and even extermination for nearly two centuries, they rescued their culture from extinction.

How did they manage it?
“The Jicarilla essentially colonized the colonies,” says Eiselt, an expert on the Jicarilla. “They became invisible to government authorities because they were always on the move, they intermarried with the Pueblo and Hispanic peoples, and they established long-standing trade with them. They disappeared by becoming essential, an everyday part of the frontier society of New Mexico, which sustained Spanish, Mexican and ultimately U.S. interests.”

Encapsulation of one society within a larger, dominant or more powerful society is a phenomenon known as enclavement. As a strategy it was not new to the ancestors of the Jicarilla. In fact, enclavement may have occurred multiple times as their Athapaskan ancestors migrated from Canada to the American Southwest beginning as early as the 12th century, Eiselt says.

That phenomenon, however, makes the Jicarilla difficult for scholars to study. Unlike Pueblo archaeology and history, the Jicarilla for the most part have existed outside the realm of historical scholarship in spite of their importance to the social fabric and the economy of New Mexican villages after the fall of the Spanish empire.

Today, bases of tipi rings such as the ones Eiselt identified during field work in the Rio del Oso Valley of New Mexico, are all that remain of historic Jicarilla homes in the archaeological record. Tipi ring stones would have been used to secure the superstructure.

Jicarilla contribution to New Mexico’s history is underappreciated
“Few scholars recognize how significant the Jicarilla contribution was to the survival of the traditional cultures of New Mexico,” says Eiselt, whose new book “Becoming White Clay” (U. of Utah Press, 2012) is a comprehensive study of one of the longest-lived and most successful nomadic ethnic group enclaves in North America. “There hasn’t been a whole lot of research into the Jicarilla, even though they’ve always been there and their contribution to New Mexican history is almost entirely underappreciated.”

Eiselt’s research drew on archaeological investigations, Native American land claims cases, U.S. government agency records, Spanish and Mexican records, oral histories and the tribe’s myths and legends. “Ironically, being invisible is not just how the Jicarilla are, but often how they are ‘seen’ or even missed by scholars of the Southwest,” Eiselt says. The tribe resides today on reservation land in northwestern New Mexico.

A definitive work on Apache history
“Sunday Eiselt has produced the definitive work on Jicarilla Apache history and archaeology,” says Ronald H. Towner, University of Arizona. “She uses a strong theoretical approach to enclavement and combines history, archaeology and ethnohistory to not only describe past Jicarilla movements and cultural development throughout the Southwest, but to explain how and why Jicarilla social organization at different scales structured that development during times of warfare, removal from traditional lands and economic stress. Eiselt’s scholarship is second-to-none.”

B. Sunday Eiselt is an assistant professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University and is active in anthropological fieldwork at the SMU Taos campus. She is author or co-author of books and articles on the Jicarilla and Hispanic societies of New Mexico, community-based and engaged approaches in archaeology and ceramic source geochemistry.

“The scholarship is broad, intrinsically sound, and highly significant to the discipline of archaeology today,” says John W. Ives, Institute of Prairie Archaeology and professor of Northern Plains archaeology, University of Alberta. “The author has a fluid, lucid style, making her subject matter readily approachable to both the professional and the interested lay reader.”

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Tags B. Sunday Eiselt, Dedman College, SMU Department of Anthropology

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NSF funds research to unravel Arizona’s prehistoric puzzle: The Hohokam ceramic industry

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 19, 2010

Can a manufacturing industry purr along without a class system of managers and workers? That’s part of a longtime mystery that may soon be solved: How did a prehistoric, egalitarian people called the Hohokam produce large quantities of decorated ceramic vessels without a “manager” hierarchy?

Archaeologists from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and the Cultural Resource Management Program of the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona have launched a unique research partnership to solve the puzzling mechanics of the large-scale industry.

The vessels were made in about 1000 A.D. by a culture archaeologists call the Hohokam. The ancient people used the pottery for daily serving, storage, and social and religious gatherings. Today’s Gila River residents, the O’odham, are descendants of the Hohokam.

The National Science Foundation is funding the research with a $134,636 grant.

Unprecedented partnership
Under the landmark research partnership, the tribe and SMU hope to decipher the mechanics of the Hohokam ceramic technology and manufacturing techniques.

The three-year project examines artifacts and ceramic production materials from 12 sites in the Sonoran Desert just south of what is now Phoenix, according to archaeologists and co-investigators Sunday Eiselt and J. Andrew Darling. Eiselt is director of the SMU-in-Taos Archaeological Field School and an SMU assistant professor in the SMU Department of Anthropology. Darling is director of the O’odham tribe’s Cultural Resource Management Program.

The analysis looks at a slice of time from 1000 A.D. to 1070 A.D. when production of the decorated ceramic pots, known as “red-on-buff,” was at its peak, said Eiselt and Darling.

Ritually regulated or a managerial elite?
The researchers will probe how a prehistoric society that was fairly egalitarian, without cities or strict social classes, was able to mass-produce ceramic pottery, Eiselt said.

The pottery was critical to a complex system of water management devised by the Hohokam. They used hand-dug canals to irrigate thousands of miles of desert, making the land suitable for growing a wide variety of farm crops.

As pottery specialists living along the middle Gila River, the Hohokam produced and perhaps traded thousands of vessels to the entire region in return for agricultural commodities from surrounding groups, according to the researchers.

“With production output at the level suggested by the millions of sherds and vessel fragments recovered from archaeological sites of this period, we would expect to find political hierarchies, craft specialists, guilds and mass-production techniques,” Eiselt said. “In this situation that wasn’t the case. The results have the potential to show that highly productive craft industries can occur in the absence of managerial elites.”

Hierarchical forms of management for mass-production are more familiar in the non-Indian world, Darling said.

“It’s been postulated by archaeologists that stratification and ranking can be superceded by alternative approaches to production in quantity,” Darling said. “That’s particularly true for societies whose traditional beliefs are not ruled by the bottom line or production and demand.”

Which theory is right?
Eiselt and Darling said the current study will test two competing hypotheses by probing the organizational principles and capacity of core Hohokam technological systems:

The first proposes that a number of villages were producing ceramics independently and trading them for agricultural products — such as cotton — to outside consumers.
The second proposes that ceramic manufacturing was highly concentrated in one or a few villages that were supplied with raw materials by other villages. That implies a greater level of inter-village coordination to create greater economies of scale at the expense of emerging settlement hierarchies.

“The competing hypotheses will be tested through geochemical and petrographic examination of raw materials and ceramic artifacts in order to determine how the Hohokam achieved such great economic and production success,” Eiselt said.

Petrographic thin-section analysis and chemical assays will target the components of red-on-buff sherds — including clay, temper and paint — to identify and characterize raw material sources and reconstruct patterns of ceramic manufacture, the researchers said.

The mineralogical and chemical composition of raw material from different geographical sources will be compared to ceramics from sites across the region.

“This will enable us to map the circulation of raw materials, not just finished products, and thereby identify, geochemically, not only resource trade, but the segmentation of tasks among producer communities, in so far as that existed,” Eiselt said.

From there the researchers can test whether ceramic manufacture for exchange was concentrated at independent centers, or whether there was a division of labor in the production and distribution of raw materials that was part of a broader system for enhancing production efficiency. It will also show whether or how the productive system connected with regional exchange or nascent market systems.

Building on existing Gila research
The project is part of the community’s efforts to recover information from archaeological sites impacted by centuries of development, said Darling. Work will take place on the Gila River Indian Community Reservation under the oversight of the Cultural Resource Management Program.

Results will aid the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project, an ongoing effort to restore water resources that were historically lost to the O’odham — previously called Pima — through diversion and damming, Darling said.

The research project builds on earlier fieldwork conducted by the Gila River’s tribal archaeology program. The tribe, in turn, hopes to benefit from SMU’s archaeological expertise, Darling said.

“This is building the tribe’s capacity to conduct scientific research on its own,” he said. “Through collaborative research projects with SMU the tribe is able to exercise its sovereignty in the areas of intellectual research and academic development — not just to inform the world, but to restore the past to the community for their benefit and for future generations at Gila River.”

Both entities benefit, Eiselt said.

“The Gila River Indian Community is investigating the past within the confines of its community with its own team of cultural resource specialists and highly trained archaeologists,” Eiselt said. “It is a rare privilege for SMU to collaborate.” — Margaret Allen

Tags B. Sunday Eiselt, Dedman College, SMU Department of Anthropology

Culture, Society & Family Fossils & Ruins Researcher news SMU In The News

“Archaeology” magazine looks at childhood archaeology research of SMU’s Eiselt

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date April 19, 2010

SMU archaeologist Sunday Eiselt leads the SMU-in-Taos Childhood Archaeology Project, a systematic and scientific examination of children’s lives through a community archaeological excavation project in the historic and picturesque plaza of Ranchos de Taos in northern New Mexico.

Journalist Julian Smith wrote about Eiselt’s research in the May/June edition of Archaeology magazine.

Sunday Eiselt

The research will provide new perspectives on the dynamics of Spanish and American occupation of New Mexico, says Eiselt, an SMU anthropology professor in SMU’s Dedman College. The plaza was once a hub of village life in Ranchos de Taos. But these days it’s notably absent of children. Their families have been driven to the outskirts of the Catholic village by a booming tourism industry that has pushed up property values.

Still, the children who lived there in decades past left their mark, says Eiselt, who for three years has led digging crews in some of the homes through her work in the SMU Archaeology Field School at the SMU-in-Taos campus. The crews have unearthed children’s artifacts up to 100 years old, including pieces of clay toys, tea sets, doll parts, clothing, mechanical trains, jacks, marbles, child-care implements, modern plastic Legos, Barbie doll parts, action figures and jewelry.

Eiselt’s pilot excavations in 2007 and 2008 revealed patterns that suggest children were integral to the workforce and household economy in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 1930s, the evidence shows, they were drawn from the workforce into the home and pulled as a consumer into the expanding commercial market as well as into the public education realm, Eiselt says.

Her interest in childhood artifacts is unique because children are rarely documented in archaeological narratives — particularly in the Spanish borderlands, where they appear as victims of slavery and boarding schools.

Eiselt specializes in the historical archaeology of native people of the Southwest.

EXCERPT

Excavated toys and games reflect the changing experience of childhood in New Mexico

By Julian Smith
The full moon casts a warm glow across the dirt plaza of Ranchos de Taos and the adobe walls of the church of Saint Francis of Assisi, made famous by the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe.

Inside the parish hall, archaeologist Sunday Eiselt of Southern Methodist University (SMU) faces a small crowd. She’s a little nervous. Eiselt is about to ask the residents of this conservative Hispanic community near Taos, New Mexico, for permission to dig up their backyards and the floors of their centuries-old homes. Today, the area is known as a ski town and a magnet for both the super-rich and hippie artists, but the community was founded in the 17th century, and is one of the oldest in the country.

Read the full online version. (A more complete story appears in the printed version.)

Tags B. Sunday Eiselt, Dedman College, SMU Archaeology Field School, SMU Department of Anthropology, SMU-in-Taos

Culture, Society & Family Fossils & Ruins

New Mexico “Childhood Archaeology Project” unearths centuries of change

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date September 15, 2009

Sunday-Eiselt%2Cgs.jpg Old restored homes — gentrified with galleries, shops and restaurants — ring the historic and picturesque plaza of Ranchos de Taos in northern New Mexico.

The plaza, once a hub of village life in Ranchos de Taos, these days is notably absent of children. Their families have been driven to the outskirts of the Catholic village by a booming tourism industry that has pushed up property values.

But the children left their mark, says archaeologist Sunday Eiselt, who for three years has led digging crews in some of the homes through her work at the Archaeology Field School of the SMU-in-Taos campus of Southern Methodist University. They’ve unearthed children’s artifacts up to 100 years old, including pieces of clay toys, tea sets, doll parts, clothing, mechanical trains, jacks, marbles, child-care implements, modern plastic Legos, Barbie doll parts, action figures and jewelry.

Eiselt’s interest in childhood artifacts is unique because children are rarely documented in archaeological narratives — particularly in the Spanish borderlands, where they appear as victims of slavery and boarding schools.

Her pilot excavations in 2007 and 2008 revealed patterns that suggest children were integral to the workforce and household economy in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 1930s, the evidence shows, they were drawn from the workforce into the home and pulled as a consumer into the expanding commercial market as well as into the public education realm, says Eiselt, an SMU anthropology professor.

Copy%20of%20ClayHOrseSmall.jpg Now Eiselt is launching the SMU-in-Taos Childhood Archaeology Project — thanks in large part to community relationships and trust formed over the past few years. A systematic and scientific examination of children’s lives will provide new perspectives on the dynamics of Spanish and American occupation of New Mexico, she says.

“When state resources and institutions are aimed at children’s lives, cultures are irrevocably changed,” she says. “We’re asking, ‘What can the archaeology of children tell us about the transformation of Hispanic Rio Grande communities over time?'” We’re investigating the impact of state expansion on child-rearing and education in the Spanish borderlands by examining childhood on the Ranchos de Taos Plaza.”

The Ranchos de Taos artifacts bear witness to changes the community has undergone over the past 200 years, she says. Settled by the Spanish in 1716, Ranchos de Taos ultimately absorbed many aspects of Anglo culture. The Catholic grade schools eventually closed, and Hispanic children were forced into the public school system.

“What we’ve learned so far is that as you go back in time children are harder to see because you don’t have the inundation of commercial toys,” Eiselt says. “During the Depression Era the plaza is fairly active. We see a lot of communal games like jacks that kids play together. Later in the ’60s and ’70s we see more toys that are individually based and that promote individual play.”

Now Eiselt has the blessing of Ranchos de Taos adults who are interested in their history and anxious to preserve their heritage. The plan is to include children in grades K-12 in the project with fully integrated activities such as oral history interviews, photographs, history education and hands-on excavating. Besides archaeological survey and excavation, Eiselt is digging through files at the state historical archives in Santa Fe. There she’s gathering clues about everything from riddles and toys to customs and education.

The Childhood Archaeology Project also will include analysis of images made by Works Progress Administration photographer John Collier Jr., who chronicled the Great Depression. Many of his photos are on exhibit at the University of New Mexico’s Maxwell Museum of Anthropology.

While excavation and research progresses, service projects in the local community also will continue as they have the past few years. University students at the field school work closely with property owners. Each summer 30 undergraduates engage in three weeks of hard labor to re-plaster the historic San Francisco de Asis, a church that’s not only venerated locally by its parishioners but also appreciated worldwide as a unique architectural monument.

“It shows our commitment to the community. The people understand we’re not here to exploit the children. Your hands really become part of this church,” Eiselt says. “More and more archaeologists are having to work in communities — not just in remote places. So we’re working with the descendants of the people we’re studying. It’s much more dynamic. The secret to this kind of archaeology is you don’t try to control it. You have to step back and let it unfold.”

Some of the village’s historical traditions include the deeply religious folk society of men called Los Hermanos Penitentes. Pervasive in New Mexico in the 1800s, members of the society carried crosses and flagellated themselves to atone for their sins. Public until almost the turn of the 19th century, the society was forced underground when Catholic clergy increasingly frowned on their practices.

“The student archaeologists have earned the trust of this lay brotherhood sufficiently to be invited to excavate a morada. These are the chapels where many of their rituals take place and so this is a great honor for us,” says Eiselt. Work begins next year in tandem with the Childhood Project. — Margaret Allen

Tags B. Sunday Eiselt, Dedman College, SMU Archaeology Field School, SMU Department of Anthropology, SMU-in-Taos

Culture, Society & Family Fossils & Ruins

New research partnership at The Archaeology Field School at SMU-in-Taos

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 15, 2009

The Archaeology Field School at SMU-in-Taos begins a unique education and research partnership this summer with students and faculty from Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., uniting two of the nation’s leading archaeology programs on Southern Methodist University’s New Mexico campus.

“This collaboration will create one of the strongest archaeology field training programs in the nation, if not the world,” said Mike Adler, SMU-in-Taos executive director. “It leverages the strengths of both institutions.”

SMU%20Taos%20entrance%20w%20bicyclists.jpg The goal of the Taos Collaborative Archaeology Program (TCAP) is to unite the strengths of SMU’s community-based archaeology and Mercyhurst’s excavation, documentation and analytical protocols to offer students an unparalleled archaeological training experience.

The SMU-in-Taos campus is sited on an archaeological treasure trove in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains within the Carson National Forest. Program participants have ready access to the restored Fort Burgwin, a pre-Civil War U.S. Cavalry cantonment, and the 13th-century Pot Creek Pueblo. The campus is located on New Mexico Highway 518 between Ranchos de Taos and Penasco. Open archaeological excavations on the SMU-in-Taos campus include the Laundresses Quarters.

SMU%20students%20at%20Taos%20dig%20site.jpg The first TCAP session was June 1 through July 15, and joined 12 students from SMU with 16 from Mercyhurst. SMU’s TCAP director is Sunday Eiselt, assistant professor of anthropology, and Mercyhurst field directors are Judith Thomas, a historic archeologist, and Joseph Yedlowski, a prehistoric archeologist.

SMU is now in its fourth decade of offering field archaeology at the Taos campus, and Adler estimates more than 1,000 undergraduate and graduate students have trained there.

“We have a lot to learn from each other,” Thomas said. “SMU is very strong in community-based archaeology and they have a top facility at which to study. We provide an intense, hands-on field archaeology experience using state-of-the art technology.”

SMU%20Taos%20site%20specimens.jpg The Mercyhurst group is supplying a new remote sensing device known as a gladiometer that works in tandem with computer software to detect features and structures buried at shallow depths, to generate subsurface maps and to better target excavation efforts.

The students will excavate at the Ranchos de Taos Plaza in the shadow of the historic San Francisco de Asis church, and in the homes and backyards of Ranchos de Taos residents whose willingness to work with SMU is a hallmark of the program. Students will also take part in the annual mudding of the church and will record rock art near the spectacular Rio Grande Gorge.

SMU%20Taos%20students%20in%20library.jpg SMU-in-Taos has offered summer education programs tailored to the region’s unique resources since 1973, but the rustic campus dormitories were impractical for use during colder weather. New construction, recent renovations to housing and technological improvements provided through a $4 million lead gift from former Texas Gov. William P. Clements and his wife, Rita, will allow SMU students to take a full semester of classes for the first time this fall.

Other donors have given more than $1 million to support the student housing. They include Dallas residents Roy and Janis Coffee, Maurine Dickey, Richard T. and Jenny Mullen, Caren H. Prothro and Steve and Marcy Sands; Bill Armstrong and Liz Martin Armstrong of Denver; Irene Athos and the late William J. Athos of St. Petersburg, Fla.; Jo Ann Geurin Thetford of Graham, Texas; and Richard Ware and William J. Ware of Amarillo, Texas. — Kim Cobb (Mercyhurst College contributed to this report)

Tags B. Sunday Eiselt, Dedman College, Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute, SMU Archaeology Field School, SMU Department of Anthropology, SMU-in-Taos, Taos Collaborative Archaeology Program

A nomadic tribe pushed into New Mexico by frontier settlement, the Jicarilla slipped off the radar and became the last tribe to avoid forced settlement onto an American Indian reservation

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