Living and Dying on the Periphery: The Archaeology and Human Remains from Two 13th-15th Century AD Villages in Southeastern New Mexico

About the Author\nJamie L. Clark is assistant professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University. She is coeditor (with John D. Speth) of Zooarchaeology and Modern Human Origins: Human Hunting Behavior During the Later Pleistocene.\nJohn D. Speth is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor emeritus of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. His books include Zooarchaeology and Modern Human Origins: Human Hunting Behavior During the Later Pleistocene (coedited with Jamie L. Clark); The Paleoanthropology and Archaeology of Big-Game Hunting: Protein, Fat, or Politics?; and Human Paleoecology in the Levantine Corridor (coedited with Naama Goren-Inbar).\nThe phrase "southwestern US/northwestern Mexico archaeology" tends to evoke images of multistoried villages and cliff dwellings. But on the eastern periphery of the Southwest, where mesas and mountains give way to vast grasslands, other types of villages once thrived. In this volume, archaeologists Jamie Clark and John Speth document the lives and lifeways of the people who inhabited two of these villages: Henderson and Bloom Mound. The villagers hunted bison on the plains and exchanged meat and hides with Puebloan peoples for pottery, turquoise, marine shells, and other goods. The origins of these close social and economic ties between bison hunters and village farmers, often referred to as “Plains-Pueblo interaction,” have intrigued anthropologists for generations. The excavations at Henderson and Bloom Mound provide fascinating new insights into when, how, and why these relationships came about.\nSummarizing results from eight seasons of research, Clark and Speth document human burials and associated grave offerings from the two sites. They discuss evidence for pathologies and trauma, raising questions about the nature and causes of violence that led to the demise of Henderson and Bloom Mound, and the abandonment of many other farming-hunting communities in the surrounding region.