Historical Contingency and the Prehistoric Foundations of Moiety Organization among the Eastern Pueblos

Abstract

Past discussions of Eastern Pueblo moiety organization in the American Southwest have been dominated by structural-functionalist positions and have proposed that moieties emerged in this area in order to facilitate the social integration of large, aggregated villages. This paper revisits the question of moiety origins from an archaeological perspective, presenting new data from the ancestral Northern Tiwa region that document the presence of a dual division as early as the late thirteenth century at the large village of T'aitona (Pot Creek Pueblo). Consideration of the village's position within the local historical trajectory suggests that moieties were initially established there as a means of formalizing the social relationships between a local population and a recently arrived group of immigrants. The paper ends by arguing that these sorts of specific historical phenomena must be granted greater causal significance in the explanation of Eastern Pueblo moiety origins.