Petrified Forest National Park, located a few hours east of Flagstaff, Arizona is world renowned for its deposits of Triassic-era petrified wood. This landscape also contains a rich cultural history, with over 10,000 years of human habitation and use preserved in over 1,200 documented archaeological sites. The majority of these sites are attributed to Ancestral Pueblo communities who dwelt in the Petrified Forest region for centuries, farming the landscape and creating one of the highest concentrations of petroglyphs found in the American Southwest. My research examines two sites which suggest differing forms of social power performed in the Petrified Forest landscape. The Mac Stod site is a small great house, possibly representing a far flung node of Chacoan ideology. Conversely, the Lacey Point site is a suspected shrine site centered in more local ideologies, which exhibits a surprisingly large and diverse artifact assemblage. Through an examination of petroglyphs, ceramics, and landscape I assess how Mac Stod and Lacey Point embody different forms of salient space in the Petrified Forest.
19 дек 2022
