With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Michael Adler and his colleagues will work in concert with cultural resource advisors from four Native American Pueblo tribes (Acoma, Laguna, Hopi, and Zuni) to enhance our understanding of ethnic identity and ancestral cultural affiliation. Cultural affiliation is essentially a claim that living groups make regarding their cultural and biological ties to ancestral peoples. As such, cultural affiliation is continually created and recreated as social groups tell themselves, and are told by others, about the past. At the heart of this research is to better understand the process of ethnogenesis, that is, the creation of ethnic group identity. We will tackle the concepts of cultural affiliation and ethnogenesis through an intensive study of the linkages between how present day communities, Pueblo tribes in this case, utilize oral history, archaeological information, and other sources of information on the past to define present and past cultural identity.
Specifically, the research partnership will integrate Pueblo oral history, archaeological observations, and ethnographic summaries of cultural information to investigate the links between modern Pueblo communities and Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo, a 13th-14th century ancestral Pueblo archaeological site located near Albuquerque, New Mexico. Tribal members with traditional knowledge of ancestry, migration histories, and other perspectives on the past will spend time with archaeologists at site, a place that is presently not culturally affiliated with any single Pueblo community. The collaboration will address the roles that native oral history, archaeological data, recognized sacred places, shrines, trails and landscape features play in the determination of cultural affiliation. Following the on-site consultations and discussions, cultural resource advisors will partner with the project specialists to write up the results of the findings. Drafts of research results will be edited and approved by each of the Pueblo communities to ensure that culturally sensitive or confidential information is not included in the reports.
The research will elucidate how present archaeological approaches to ancestral cultural affiliation can better incorporate the views of descendant populations into archaeological research. On a specific level, concepts of social identity and cultural affiliation are implicated in most archaeological research in the American Southwest. As such this research hopes to provide a model for how we can expand the research arena within which identity and affiliation are presently considered in the southwest. The research has practical and intellectual applications. A better understanding of cultural affiliation, the historically traceable shared identity between modern groups and ancient peoples, will benefit ongoing legal questions of cultural identity. Legal considerations of modern ethnic identity and ancestral origins presently comprise a significant component of most court cases involving Native American communities. Because claims of cultural affiliation can provide historically legitimized access to control of natural resources, political power, and legal rights to cultural patrimony, there is a real and significant benefit to expanding our understanding of cultural affiliation.
