Mimbres Social Organization at The Micro-Scale: Households at The ELK Ridge Site, Southwestern New Mexico

As a component of the ongoing work with the Elk Ridge research project, this thesis utilizes data acquired from previous excavations of the Elk Ridge site and from previous research in the Mimbres Mogollon region to examine how vernacular architecture reflects social organization at the scale of the household. Following Wilk and Rathje (1982) this approach views the household as a fundamental social and economic unit of past societies. Household is defined here as a group occupying a bounded residential space sharing in domestic activities and decision-making responsibilities (Roth 2012:137, Kramer 1982:637, Blanton 1994:5). Previous works within the Mimbres Mogollon region suggests interconnected rooms, those with doorways between them, and the spatial organization of rooms evidence that households were organized into kin based residential units (Shafer 1982). Household units are defined through patterns observed in the use of spatially bounded architecture of the site and household activities are reconstructed through an examination of interior features and artifact assemblages. Rooms are viewed as walled activity areas which both physically control access and metaphorically reinforce social relationships of individuals interacting with them (Rapoport 1969). The identification of certain modes of activity at the organizational level of the household produces a model starting from the smallest activity group and working outward allowing for investigation of variability between identified household units. This thesis attempts to identify households, explore their development over time and examine variability between them.