Ways of Being at Arroyo Hondo Pueblo

Abstract

This study portrays how life was constituted for villagers living at the fourteenth century Ancestral Puebloan settlement of Arroyo Hondo. By drawing on new materialist approaches, I offer multiple sketches of how the embodied experiences of individuals were immersed as layered, entangled, and deeply meaningful worldly encounters. Diffractive configurations emphasize how people and bodies were co-constituted through unfolding worldly relationships that continually resituated and remade them. Multiple ontologies also highlight the process of inquiry as immersed experiences that are entangled with the ontologies of contemporary Puebloan people. The work of Rina Swentzell and other Puebloan scholars offer ontological perspectives that convey their sense of deep cosmological connections within the Puebloan world. Comparing these ontological approaches shows how anthropological narratives are deeply entangled with Indigenous understandings of the world.