Abstract
Violence has often been portrayed as an endemic feature of the Ancestral Puebloan world. Yet detailed analyzes of actual lethal injuries often contradict these sweeping generalizations about historical trends. To explore situational violence among Ancestral Puebloan groups, I reframe the atypical disposal of bodies at Arroyo Hondo as vehement acts. Physical trauma that results in an individual’s death are decisive transformative moments – a decision event that ruptures an individual’s immersed lived experience. The notion of vehemence conceptually situates violence as one kind of intensive aggressive act directed at individuals. Vehemence also circumscribes decisive moments when situational violence emerges as a moral act. Finally, I read vehemence through Puebloan notions of personhood to situate acts of violence within a Tewa universe.
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Notes
- 1.
In my original analysis, I discounted the possibility that the skeletal trauma exhibited by these individuals could be attributed to violence (Palkovich, 1980: 20–21). At the time, our speculations centered on the accidental collapse of structures as a plausible explanation for the observed trauma and deaths of these individuals.
- 2.
12-G-5-7.
- 3.
This man’s well-healed Colles fracture was an earlier injury, apparently unrelated injury.
- 4.
12-G-5-3.
- 5.
12-G-5-2.
- 6.
These three body segments were numbered separately during excavation (a skull designated 12-G-5-6, articulated legs designated 12-G-5-5, and an articulated right arm and hand designated 12-G-5-8). Size, robusticity, age, and sex accessed for each body segment all fell within the same age range, a female between her mid-30s to early 40s at the time of death. Based on the morphological consistencies among these body segments and the lack of other isolated human remains in the vicinity of the Kiva’s floor, I concluded these remains were body segments from a single adult female.
- 7.
12-G-5-4.
- 8.
12-G-5-4.
- 9.
12-16-37-3.
- 10.
12-16-37-4.
- 11.
12-18-15-IN-4.
- 12.
Each of these individuals also exhibited metabolic skeletal pathologies discussed in Chap. 3.
- 13.
12-18-15-IN-2.
- 14.
12-18-15-IN-1.
- 15.
12-18-15-IN-3.
- 16.
12-18-39-IS-1.
- 17.
Individual 6: 12-16-29-2.
- 18.
Individual 7: 12-16-36-4-1.
- 19.
Individual 8: 12-G-D4-4-1.
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Palkovich, A.M. (2024). Vehemence and Community Violence. In: Bodies, Ontology, and Bioarchaeology. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56023-1_8
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