Vehemence and Community Violence

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.

Violence has often been portrayed as an endemic feature of the Ancestral Puebloan world. Described as “badly treated bodies” (LeBlanc, 1999: 176), “hostile attacks” (Creamer, 1993: 154; also see Haas and Creamer, 1996), and “spectacularly brutal” events (Lekson, 2002: 614), skeletal trauma is cited as evidence of pervasive intercommunity violence, raiding, tribal clashes, and warfare. Yet detailed analyzes of actual lethal injuries often contradict these sweeping generalizations about historical trends (e.g. Martin, 2000: 284, 2016). Treating all instances of violence as equivalent erases the complex underlying causes of these events (e.g. Kohler et al., 2014). Skeletal analyses document the varied circumstances that led to injuries (e.g., Martin, 2000; Harrod, 2017; Martin & Tegtmeyer, 2017; Stodder, 2010). There are also instances where the atypical disposition of bodies doesn’t necessarily reflect a violent act or even disrespectful treatment of the dead (Stodder, 2020). In a critique of the bioarchaeological evidence of violent behavior, Martin (2016) asserts that important differences in the kind and intensities of violent acts in the Ancient Southwest require a more nuanced approach.

Given violence does not arise exclusively from inter-group strife, archaeological evidence of bodily trauma cannot be uncritically equated with warfare. The exercise of authority, power, and agency within a group situates violence and even brutality as potentially acceptable, sanctioned, necessary, or even desirable. Violence should not be merely objectified by focusing on the trauma of individuals nor reduced to the infliction of pain, trauma, or death (Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois, 2004). Violence may constitute an embodied morality carried out as an accepted course of action (Olsen & Csordas, 2019). Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois note that in many instances,

…violence is not deviant behavior, not disapproved of, but to the contrary is defined as virtuous action in the service of generally applauded conventional social, economic, and political norms. (2004:5).

Even excessive, pathological, or gratuitous eruptions of violence may reflect necessary actions that are communally sanctioned through a shared sense of moral responsibility. Rather than conceptualizing violence as a cultural universal, treating violent acts as situated,

…take[s] seriously the category of evil, and not only as an indigenous cultural category but as an interpretive analytic category. This does not require conceptualizing evil as a universal or transcendent category and is more fruitful with a notion of “situational evil” that identifies the specificity or singularity of evil in discrete events and the manner in which evil or ethical conduct emerges in the way actors construe and respond to those situations. (Csordas, 2013: 527).

Bioarchaeological evidence of bodily harm reflects dramatically different enactments of situational violence, such as instances of communal massacres (e.g. Osterholtz & Martin, 2017), vulnerable non-combatants in times of conflict (Martin & Tegtmeyer, 2017; Kohler & Kramer-Turner, 2006), gendered structural violence (e.g. Martin, 2000; Harrod, 2017), hobbling and torture (Osterholtz, 2012, 2014), social coercion (Tegtmeyer & Harrod, 2017), witch executions ((Ogilvie & Hilton, 2000), and even genocide (Komar, 2008; Potter & Chiupka, 2010; Stodder, 2010). Different kinds of encounters can lead to violent acts, not all of which rupture community norms. Thus, “badly treated bodies” reflect situational violence co-constituted through configurations of individuals, things, spaces, and historical circumstances (e.g. Martin & Osterholtz, 2020). Physical bodily harm is just one possible outcome of contingent emergent violence.

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, reading vehemence through Puebloan personhood situates acts of violence within a Tewa universe.

8.1 Violence as Vehement Acts

Whitehead (2004) writes that western notions of violence usually focuses on aggressive behaviors that cause physical bodily harm (also see Schinkel, 2010; Perez, 2019). Such perspectives fail to distinguish between violence that lacks physical manifestations such as verbal abuse, scorn or discrimination, and violence as extreme aggression that results in physical harm. Violence is also conceptualized as acts that require the participation of a perpetrator, a victim, and an observer (Riches, 1986). Yet violent acts also can be socially constructed through and experienced by collectives or communities (e.g. Stewart & Strathern, 2002; Wilkes, et al., 2019).

Conceptually, violence is an ambiguous description that fails to distinguish departures from accepted social norms from the ways in which a behavior is enacted, such as an assault. Whitehead notes that violence generally alludes to the quality of an action but not it’s behavioral form. He reimages the enactment of violence as vehemence, a notion that captures differences in the range, intensity, and intent of threatening behaviors. As a concept, vehemence can also effectively characterize behaviors that may be construed as ambiguous acts of violence, such as sorcery or rape,

Although there is a … a lexical bias toward understanding violence as primarily physical and bodily, violence as vehemence is present in many other forms of experience. … Violence is always a matter of degree, intensity, and culturally competent judgement, which constructs such vehement actions as violent. (Whitehead, 2004: 61–62).

In moments where individuals assert dominance or respond to perceived evil, vehemence articulates how cultural norms of mortality and culpability are enacted relative to bodily harm. It addresses behavioral ambiguities by incorporating a broader range of actions that situate malevolent acts. When viewed as situated evil, not all malevolence – even bodily assaults that result in death – may necessarily be judged as abusive, aggressive, or even violent. Given the broad range of violent events that occurred in the Ancestral Puebloan Southwest (Martin, 1997, 2008, 2016; Martin & Aikens, 2001; Martin et al., 2001, 2008, 2010; Stodder, 2020), the concept of vehemence helps to parse the intent of these aggressive acts.

Engaging the notion of vehemence also resonates with Holbraad and Pedersen’s (2017) ontological approach of “thinking through things”. By emptying out the conceptual baggage of violent acts, vehemence situates the degree and intensity of malevolent actions, including those that lead to physical bodily harm. Whitehead notes that violent encounters are performative and historically contingent,

It is the excessive (and so often monstrous) nature of violence – not its pain or physicality – that induces attempts, both theoretical and practical, to control, limit and legitimate such excess. In terms of violent performance, the search for forms of excess that exceed such legitimate limits and control precisely produce the catalog of atrocity and horror as a reflection of the historic and cultural meanings of prior violent acts. The universe of violent acts is thus constituted by the historical and cultural knowledge of violent actors, and the performative felicity of a given violent act that is itself part of the wider meaning of violent acts, just as interpretation of the culture and history of violent actors is needed if nonparticipant observers are to understand the meanings of their violence. How violence is inflicted, on whom and when, has to be joined to a consideration of why violence occurs in that specific context. (2004: 63).

Poetical narratives thus explicitly articulate violence as performative events relative to the immersed experiences of individuals and communities (Freeman, 2017). Treating vehemence as a decision event also highlights the importance of the spaces and moments in time when such actions occurred. Spaces are physical imperatives and constraints that situate vehement acts.

Larkin describes the built environment of buildings, roads, and other infrastructures as “matter than enable the movement of other matter” (2013: 329). Buildings and spaces can emerge as subjects that embody and scaffold how experiences are contained, mediated, and shaped. Events are thus situated by and unfold through the spatial configurations and physical qualities of their contexts (Humphrey, 2008). At Arroyo Hondo, the affordances of adobe buildings and plaza spaces situated violent acts, connecting these events to the villager’s previous affective experiences and memories. The characteristics of spaces (such as the configurations of buildings and the physical constraints of plazas), sensory experiences (such as the views of distant mountains, the sensations of walking through plazas, and the feel of the wind), and previous spatial encounters all co-constituted how these violent experiences were perceived in the moment.

Archaeologically, embodied sensory experiences and the affordances of things and spaces can provide insights about the personal, social, and public impacts of events. Thus, archaeological contexts help situate and differentiate the degrees and intensities of violent encounters.

8.1.1 Individuals and Decision Events

Vehemence directed at a particular person are moments when an individual becomes the subject of a violent event. Some subjects may be explicitly identified and targeted by violence while others may be happenstance victims due to their age, gender, or social identity. Victims of vehement acts have a situated presence in moments when a particular identity is imposed upon them. Circumstances thus dictate when perceived differences force some individuals to stand out from others.

In exploring the notion of lived experience, Humphrey (2008) proposes that “reassembling” individuals as subjects can identify moments of sudden dramatic changes that distinguished everyday life from an event that sets apart particular persons (also see Bodenhorn et al., 2018). She writes that,

…what propels someone from the everyday moves among various personae of their lives into such a sharpened state is a rupture of intelligibility, which splits apart the previous state and the one which follows. This rupture, … what I have called a decision-event, does not cut off the multiplicities of the individual but rather recomposes them, or ‘archives’ past identities, by fixing on the new, momentous one of the subject. The event is then a creative switch. In that it separates off times, the time of before and the time after, it can be considered itself as a-temporal; it could be an instant or more likely drawn out over a sequence of happenings; in either case, it breaks apart earlier bodies of knowledge or re-jigs them by forcing them to be seen in a particular light. (2008: 374–375, emphasis added).

Humphrey suggests an individual’s ruptured worldly intelligibility are moments when they are perceived to have changed in fundamental ways. Such ruptures do not necessarily erase how an individual was previously entangled in everyday life (that is, their multiplicities) but lend salience to some aspect their lives that now pervades who they have become. For Humphrey, these individuals suddenly take on qualities distinct from their previous everyday existence. They become different because they are seen to now possess a distinctive understanding or intelligibility of the world.

Decision events are salient decisive moments when an individual experiences a dramatic shift in their identity and becomes the focus of attention as a subject. These moments not only have a crucial transformative impact on that individual, but their transformation influences the lives of others. For example, Halemba (2018) describes an event in Dzhublyk, Ukraine where two young girls experienced a religious vision. These girls described seeing a beautiful woman covered with flowers who was standing on a cloud that identified herself as the Virgin Mary. Within weeks of this witnessing, the site of this religious apparition was transformed into a pilgrimage destination, replete with a newly built chapel and stations of the cross.

This religious vision was a decision event that not only ruptured and changed the lives of these young girls but impacted the lives of others. Shortly afterward, many individuals declared that they too perceived the Virgin Mary at the site, claiming to see apparition of the Holy Virgin among the branches of trees or appearing as dancing lights (Halemba, 2018: 102–104). These believers shared this rupture to everyday life as a transformative religious experience. Some even dramatically changed their lives, quitting their jobs to lead pilgrimages or to raise funds that supported the Dzhublyk site. These experiences were also materialized for others through a new church building, tours of Dzhublyk as a pilgrimage site, and information pamphlets offered to pilgrims.

For Humphrey, decision events are specific moments that rupture everyday life and identify specific individuals as the emergent subjects of these experiences. These individuals are transformed because their different worldly perception created a positive or revelatory rupture in their lives. Such singular emergent moments are often characterized as heroic or even divine events. By transcending their everyday lives, individuals emerged as the focal point and catalyst of change by generating new worldly configurations, beliefs, and knowledge.

However, Das (2007, 2018) argues that the ruptures of decision events are not just moments of positive or revelatory change. These events also can be transgressive moments that starkly set individuals apart from the world. Das points out that the routines of life are not merely unthinking repetitions of daily habits. Daily life can also confront pernicious inescapable conditions such as poverty, illness, and starvation. Such discriminatory conditions can marginalize everyday existence to the point that even simple day-to-day survival is an achievement (Das, 2018: 57).

Under some circumstances, decision events are moments when an individual emerges as a subject who confronts the conditions that endanger or marginalize daily existence. Actions that emerge from these ruptures are anchored in and reinforce a fidelity to a group’s beliefs rather than force a dramatic break from them. In these circumstances, ruptures confront the debilitating pervasive conditions that entrain daily life. The emergence of individuals as subjects in such instances elicit responses that “require a deeper dwelling in the everyday rather than an escape from it” (Das, 2018: 60). Das suggests that decision events can be focal moments that trigger responses to broader community horrors such as murders, genocide, and structural violence.

Decision events may also reflect ruptures that confront evil. Whitehead (2004) and Viveiros de Castro (2014) suggest that some concept of evil or an “enemy” is integral to a group’s identity and cohesion, “…the incorporation of enemies into the group was itself fundamental to the overall reproduction of society” (Whitehead, 2004: 70). Evil thus pervades everyday life as ruptures that emerge and must be confronted at decisive moments.

The idea that evil can be situational frames the nature and singularity of maleficent acts. Circumstances shape how an individual’s actions may be judged as a malevolent threat to a group’s cosmological beliefs. For example, Kapferer’s (2003) distinguishes witchcraft and sorcery as having different moral culpabilities. Situational evil defines witchcraft as immoral because such acts are always deemed to be unambiguously malevolence. On the other hand, sorcery is acknowledged as ambiguously amoral. Sorcerers and shamans can elicit protections against evil through their specialized knowledge (that is, they possess other “intelligibilities”). Yet these individuals also can invoke these same abilities and knowledge for destructive malevolent purposes. Sorcerers and shamans thus occupy ambiguous positions of power and authority since their compelling other-worldly abilities make them equally capable of asserting evil rather than good.

When identified as acts of evil, misfortunes may be attributed to a shaman or others whose specialized abilities and knowledge are perceived to endanger the group. Once deemed a malevolent force, the shaman emerges as a subject and is targeted so that the conditions that threaten daily survival can be resolved. Other individuals also may emerge as subjects if they are perceived to possess or embody a different intelligibility that endangers the community. Decision events are constituted as vehement acts when individuals thought to be disruptive subjects are confronted and held responsible for the evils within a community. As Whitehead suggests, vehement actions enhance community cohesion by asserting core beliefs to preserve daily life. Circumstances dictate when and how breaches that threaten a group’s social cohesion become dangerous or intolerable. Decision events emerge at moments when vehemence transcends suspicions, and the community reasserts its moral authority over evil.

In this diffractive configuration, I engage the notions of vehemence, individuals as subjects, and decision events to explore the bodies deposited in unusual contexts at Arroyo Hondo Pueblo. During the fourteenth century, some individuals may have been perceived as malevolent beings within Puebloan cosmology. I consider how the notion of vehemence situates the deaths of several Arroyo Hondo villagers held responsible for ruptures to village life. I explore how the atypical disposal of bodies, acts of physical harm, and enchained decision events were public acts that asserted boundaries between good and event, and shaped village life in its’ aftermath. Conceptualizing these deaths as vehement acts reframes the violence at Arroyo Hondo as socially sanctioned necessary measures to combat malevolent forces.

8.2 Life as Transitions, Transformations, and Ruptures

In Chap. 5, I argue that Puebloan cosmology structures an individual’s worldly existence through dualities that shape everyday life. In this worldview, individuals are partible and permeable beings who are defined by life transitions and cosmological transformations. Yet how individuals were perceived was also shaped by ruptures.

Puebloan duality is constituted through cyclical events that unify time and space, such as seasonal cycles and human life cycles (Ortiz, 1972: 143–144). These dualities express the balance and harmony of the Puebloan world as structured pairs, such as ripe/unripe and summer/winter. Ortiz characterizes human existence as “a slowly revolving giant cylinder on which are imprinted the generations” (1972: 144). Individuals are situated within this the larger cosmos where the self is submerged,

Just as there are no marked status distinction and just as individual-centered rites are little elaborated in contrast to group ritual, so do world view notions take on a group character”. (1972: 153).

Ortiz writes that duality is also an avenue for responding to evil,

If the Pueblos have conquered the dilemma of death, they do not know what to say about evil. … Witchcraft is the only general answer, and it is not a very good one. …. Outsiders everywhere are regarded with ambivalence at best or feared as possible witches. Thus what intellectual solutions the Pueblos have formulated for the problem of evil cannot fully reconcile the presence of strangers in cosmic (tribal) space. The only good solution they have formulated is for deviancy among the uninitiated young who can be discussed as ‘raw’ or ‘unripe’, and therefore not yet fully human. Finally, it is not that the Pueblos have not accepted evil as a part of the reality of life; it is just that they do not know how to handle it”. (1972: 145).

Puebloan cosmology not only defines and structures an individual’s place within an ahistorical spacetime, it also informs ways of being-within-the-world through concepts of deviancy and evil. Though an individual maintains a physical presence in the world, their identity and personhood are carried by their spirit as it returns to the underworld at death. Transformations between life and death connect those recognized as Tewa with the underworld. However, uninitiated community members such as infants and young children are considered deviant since they are not yet fully human. Defining their deviancy as unripe implies the potential of infants and children to become fully Tewa. It establishes their existence and place within the metaphoric generational cylinder as a becoming that is not yet achieved. The notion of “not yet knowing” (“not She t’a”) conveys the sense that a child is a naïve vulnerable being who is not yet a person.

This state of innocence contrasts with the only other class of non-persons, or witches (chuge ing, Ortiz, 1969: 140). Witches are unwanted dangerous spirits who bring ill fortunate to those considered persons,

Witches do not exist… independently of the three living categories of being, because they recruit their members from the living and lead a parallel existence with them in this life. Because witches live on the unexpired lives of their victims, it is believed they must continually kill or perish themselves. Thus witchcraft is a shadowy but parallel partner in this life; it is a spectre which stands ever ready to invade the other three human categories. (Ortiz, 1969: 140).

Witches take human form only through occupying the bodies of the living. Since witches are non-persons, their spirit is prohibited from returning to the underworld (Simmons, 1974). Instead, it lingers among the living waiting for the opportunity to possess another human (Goldfrank, 1967; Ortiz, 1969). Witches are dangerous, in part, because they can be anyone – male or female, young or old. The knowledge and power of witchcraft can be shared through family relationships, or passed on to those who are recruited (Fox, 1967: 265). Even young children may be suspected in families thought to harbor witches. Since witches seek out vulnerable lives, children as non-persons are particularly vulnerable to possession by these evil spirits (Darling, 1999). Being vulnerable to a witch’s possession highlights Puebloans as permeable beings where hidden evils can penetrate anyone’s body. In this sense, individuals perceived as witches rupture the social order. Severed from their former identity and transformed into non-beings, individuals perceived as witches become subjects deemed responsible for worldly ills and misfortunes.

Puebloan cosmology emphasizes life transitions and transformations as orderly processes. However, the intelligibility of evil that marks witches as transgressive beings threaten this orderliness. Their fluid ability to possess other bodies imperils a community’s continuity and cohesion since anyone can pose a threat once their body is possessed by a witch’s spirit. Unlike the ritual path that eventually endows children as beings within Puebloan society, witches persist only as an evil influence. Ruptures that threated ways of being-within-the-world are as much a part of Puebloan cosmology as continuity and orderliness.

8.3 “Witches Are Everywhere”

Based on ethnographic homologies, witchcraft is a pervasive explanation for acts of violence documented at Ancestral Puebloan villages. Puebloan narratives and origin stories are replete with accounts of witchcraft (e.g Cushing, 1979; Geertz, 2011; Hawley, 1950; Hill, 1982; Hoebel, 1952; Lummis, 1894; Ortiz, 1969; Parsons, 1927, 1933, 1936, 1939; Simmons, 1974; Smith & Roberts, 1954; Stevenson, 1894, 1904; Titiev, 1942; White, 1930, 1962; also see Darling’s comprehensive review, 1999). These accounts convey the sense that witches permeate all aspects of everyday life, that witches are “everywhere” (Parsons, 1939: 67). As personifications of evil in Puebloan society, witches are held responsible for drought, illness, and other misfortunes – from minor to catastrophic. Witches are malevolent spirits that take human form by permeating the bodies of the living through negative energy. Lovern and Locust (2013: 153–155) observe that the Hopi equate “energy” with power as a life force that protects them and their families. Witches (buaka) prey upon others by draining their spiritual energy and creating hardships. Witches don’t necessarily directly cause droughts, misfortunes, and illness directly, but create spiritual imbalances, disharmony, and negative energy. The actions of witches are cited to explain why some events occurred; misfortunes, accidents, or illness are merely instances that reflect how individuals were drained of their spiritual power. This partitioning of cause and effect means that restoring or “healing” an individual’s spiritual energy will not necessarily reverse or “cure” their underlying physical illness (Lovern & Locust, 2013: 97).

Witches exist as non-beings by preying on vulnerable individuals who are not yet Tewa, and on the unexpired lives of those not yet freed to return to the underworld (Ortiz, 1969: 140). These malevolent beings are dangerous because they manifest evil through the bodies of others. Through their actions that fall outside the carefully structured balance and orderliness of Puebloan cosmology, witches are integral to the production of Puebloan society (Whitehead, 2004; Viveiros de Castro, 2014). Witches were also a likely presence in Ancestral Puebloan cosmology as a source of earthly disharmony and misfortune. Vehemence directed against witches reflect acts of necessary violence that was essential for maintaining social cohesion within a village. The forms and intensities of violence that occurred at Ancestral Puebloan villages also reflects vehement responses directed at perceived ruptures in communities that were already marginalized through pernicious disease ecologies and inadequate sustenance.

8.4 Vehement Acts at Arroyo Hondo Pueblo

At Arroyo Hondo, vehement acts were decisions events situated by village’s history and its’s place as a large fourteenth century Puebloan settlement in the Northern Rio Grande. Though Arroyo Hondo participated in trade that flourished among these fourteenth century settlements (e.g. Crown et al., 1996; Habicht-Mauche, 1993), Schaafsma notes the lack of Kachina cult iconography at Arroyo Hondo indicates more conservative ritual practices were observed at this village (Schaafsma, personal communication 2015). The number and configuration of kivas also played an important role in situating life at Arroyo Hondo since the village’s enclosed plazas contained only three small kivas – fewer than most other contemporaneous settlements. The arrangement of roomblocks also created plaza spaces that structured daily life and ritual activities in new ways.

Plazas were public spaces where ritual performances created compelling experiences of social integration (e.g. Crown et al., 1996; Graves & Van Keuren, 2011; McGuire & Saitta, 1996; Kroeber, 1917: 186). Village life was enspaced and situated by these physical settings where day-to-day activities were embedded and intensified within the confines of the settlement’s layout and architecture. These spaces were also sources of power for ritual specialists with privileged access to specialized knowledge. As Whiteley (1988: 68) points out, “ritual action, because of its intent to affect instrumentally the conditions of existence, is simultaneously political action”. Thus, individual plazas created arenas where ritual and social authority could be exercised by sodalities and kindreds. However, Parsons’s ethnographic accounts highlight individuals in positions of power as vulnerable to accusations of them being witches (1939: 154). During the fourteenth century, Ancestral Puebloan kindreds resided in close proximity for the first time, and confronted the demands of intensified social relationships and ritual authority on a daily basis.

Puebloan cosmology situates all of life as contained within the sacred spaces (Ortiz, 1972: 143). Space is configured by six directions – the 4 cardinal directions, the sky, and the underworld. The Middle Place centers the Tewa world’s earthly connections to the underworld. This center is not a fixed place per se but is repeatedly materialized through plazas, kivas, entire villages, and other spaces where illusion and reality meet. These spaces create paths that facilitate the flow of life (Swentzell, 1990: 26–27, 1988). All aspects of Puebloan worldly existence are shaped by spatial orientations and movement through these spaces. Puebloan villages are thus situated through broad spiritual relationships conceived as a spherically structured space that articulates levels of existence and flows of life that extend in all directions.

Dualities structure everything within the Puebloan world. Portrayed in Puebloan emergence stories, this core concept unifies notions of time and space as an ahistorical timelessness (Ortiz, 1972: 143). Ortiz (1972: 140–145) also points to the “almost inexhaustible” ways in which structure, symbolization, and space can be elaborated and endlessly reproduced. He emphasizes the precision and care with which spaces in Puebloan villages are structured and oriented relative to cosmological notions. Expressions of Puebloan cosmology are similarly highlighted in historical narratives and contemporary village traditions. However, not all cosmological notions are uniformly held, nor are identical enactments of rituals practiced. In some instances, similar rituals are afforded different, even contradictory meanings and purposes at different villages. Yet the underlying structure of the Puebloan universe was broadly constituted through ritual practice and citational references. Within this dualistic cosmology, acts of evil were a part of everyday life situated and enspaced within the village’s structure. These spiritual boundaries and organizing concepts also offer insights about several decision events that occurred at Arroyo Hondo.

8.5 The Atypical Disposition of Bodies

Nine adults, five young children, and one adolescent were recovered from atypical contexts, all dating to a forty-year period when the village was well established. Read as decision events, the disposition of these bodies at Arroyo Hondo were vehement acts situated and enspaced within a broad Puebloan cosmology. Other vehement acts also occurred and were materialized, such as the fragmented remains of an adult left on the floor of second story room and an adult male shot with an arrow.

8.5.1 Death in Kiva G

A group of five individuals was recovered from the floor of Kiva G (Fig. 8.1). The remains of four articulated middle-aged adults – one woman and three men – lay directly on the Kiva’s floor. Scattered segments of a partly articulated skeleton represent the remains another woman. Her articulated legs lay on the floor while her right arm and skull were scattered in the wall/roof fall debris just above the floor. Four these adults exhibited traumatic blunt force injuries.¹ My brief descriptions offer a sense of the assaults direct at these individuals as this event unfolded.

Fig. 8.1

Distribution of skeletal remains on floor of Kiva 12-G-5. Rocks are stippled, other features hatched. (From Palkovich, 1980, Figure 19, page 22. Drawn by Richard W. Lang. (Reprinted by permission from Pueblo Population and Society : The Arroyo Hondo Skeletal and Mortuary Remains, by Ann M. Palkovich with an appendix by James Mackey. Copyright 1980 by the School of American Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico. All rights reserved))

One adult male² experienced the most extensive skeletal trauma.³ His right radius, ulna, and hand exhibited extensive fractures. These were defensive injuries he suffered when he held his right arm up to protect himself. Crushed patches of bone on the distal end of both femurs, and a fracture to the proximal end of his left fibula indicate his knees were clubbed from behind. He also exhibited fractures and crushing of his right fibula. Trauma to the back of his head fractured his occipital and both parietals, separating these skeletal elements from the rest of his skull. The force of this trauma also fractured the basilar portion of his occipital along the lambdoidal suture, separated the right malar and maxilla, and shattered his nasal bones. Blunt force trauma severe enough to fracture the base of the skull is fatal. This man suffered fractures to his ribs and scapula along the midline of his back, and on both sides of his rib cage. He was clubbed on his back and both sides of his torso. His pelvis was also extensively fractured; the distal ends of both femurs and areas of his pelvis were crushed. Though he attempted to protect himself by raising his right arm, this man was clubbed and perhaps also stoned to death.

Another man⁴ exhibited a similar pattern of extensive blunt force trauma. He suffered a fracture that ran length of his right humerus along with fractures to his right clavicle, radius, and ulna when he raised his right arm to protect himself. He also sustained fractures to his left clavicle and ulna. Severe chest trauma fractured and crushed his manubrium and gladiolus. Fractures to the medial ends of 9 ribs and fractures to his scapula indicate his was clubbed on his back. Fractures and crushing at the proximal ends of both tibias, longitudinal fractures of his left tibia, and fractures at the proximal end of his right fibula indicate the back of his knees and lower left leg were clubbed. He also suffered fractures to his pelvis and sacrum. Trauma to both sides of his head fractured his maxilla. The force of these blows also separated and fractured his squamosal suture and were transmitted through the sphenoid and base of the skull. This assault was severe enough to cause his immediate death.

One woman⁵ experienced trauma to the right side of her head that separated the right lambdoidal suture and squamosal sutures, fractured the right greater wing of the sphenoid, and the zygomatic process. These fractures extended to the base of her skull and separated her left lambdoidal suture adjacent to the mastoid process. She exhibited no other skeletal trauma, and there was no evidence of defensive injuries. However, her cranial trauma was immediately fatal.

A partly disarticulated body just above the Kiva’s floor were the remains of second adult female.⁶ Her articulated legs lay on the Kiva’s floor while her right arm and skull were intermingled with the wall/roof fall fill just above the floor. She suffered a fractured right femur as well as perimortem spiral fractures and crushing of the proximal end of her right tibia. These fractures indicate she was clubbed in the back of the knees. She also exhibited perimortem crushing of both pelves and the proximal end of her right femur. The spinous process of her seventh cervical vertebra was crushed, indicating her neck had been clubbed from behind. She exhibited no cranial trauma.

The remaining adult male⁷ exhibited no perimortem skeletal fractures. Since clubbing or stoning does not always cause skeletal trauma, its’ possible he too may have been clubbed, stoned, or experienced other fatal soft tissue injuries. However, his remains did exhibited post-mortem breakage and crushing that resulted from the compressive pressure of wall and roof fall on his body after the Kiva collapsed.

This was a brutal attack. These individuals suffered severe traumatic injuries from peri-mortem blunt force trauma. Some skeletal elements exhibited patches of micro-fracturing typical of crushing injuries. Four of these individuals were purposefully assaulted in the same manner – they were subjected to severe disabling blows to the knees and arms, their torsos were beaten, and they received fatal blows to the head that caused their immediate deaths. The adult male with no skeletal trauma may also have been similarly clubbed to death.

Large rock slabs were found on or adjacent to the victims’ bodies as they lay splayed out on the Kiva’s floor. These slabs were purposefully used to injury these victims and damage their bodies. Creamer (1993: 95) speculated the victims were stoned to death. Its’ possible these individuals were stoned once they were inside the Kiva. However, forcefully hurling large flat rocks inside the close quarters of this structure would have been awkward. Once trapped inside, the victims could have avoided rocks thrown down on them through the Kiva’s narrow roof entrance. Instead, its’ likely these victims were incapacitated, rendered unconscious, or were already dead when their bodies were left on the Kiva’s floor. Dumping corpses into kivas through narrow roof entrances has been noted at other sites (e.g. Kuckelman, 2012, 2020). Other accounts indicate kivas were immediately abandoned and burned, or were purposefully collapsed after such events (e.g. Luebben & Nickels, 1982). The large slabs intermingled with these bodies were used to forcefully injure these individuals, and likely caused at least some of the observed peri-mortem fractures and crushing bone damage. The patterns of skeletal trauma suggest at least one of these individuals⁸ was still conscious and was tucked in a defensive posture when he sustained some of his injuries. Though heavy stone slabs may have been purposefully hurled at the bodies of these dead and dying victims, these stones may also have been thrown onto their bodies to symbolically seal them inside the Kiva.

At some point Kiva G collapsed. The weight of the dense adobe wall debris, vegas, latias, and the dirt roof fill crushed these bodies, causing some perimortem damage. While blunt force trauma typically causes fractures, crushing usually occurs when extreme sustained pressure is applied to the body. After death, bone retains a resiliency for some weeks so immediate post-mortem damage can mimic peri-mortem trauma. However, once fats and other organic substances leach from a bone, the remaining calcium substrate breaks very differently. The crushed bone exhibited by these bodies resembles the damage patterns found in fresh bone. None of the remains exhibited fractures, crushing, or weathering damage typically seen in dry bone. This suggests that the skeletal damage caused by kiva’s collapse occurred immediately after or within a few weeks following the deaths of these individuals.

8.5.2 Death in Roomblock 16

The bodies of two adult females lay awkwardly splayed out on the floor of Room 12-16-37. One female⁹ exhibited fracturing and separation of her basilar/lambdoidal suture as well as a pressure fracture to one right rib. The other female¹⁰ exhibited fracturing and separation of the lambdoidal, basilar, and sphenoidal sutures as well as some sacral fractures. These women exhibited no perimortem defensive injuries. Their bodies also had no old, healed fractures from previous assaults or accidental injuries. These skeletons had no crushing injuries, indicating this structure remained intact when this room was abandoned. The context of these bodies as well as the injuries suffered by these women suggest they were the victims of violent assaults. Each woman was clubbed and suffered bone fractures similar to the victims in Kiva G. Severe blunt force head trauma caused their immediate deaths.

These victims were left on the floor in a single-story room that contained with no open doorways connecting it to other rooms (Shapiro, 2005: 69, Fig. 5–6). Closing off or abandoning this room after these assaults occurred would have sealed off these victims without altering access to adjacent rooms. Though some rooms elsewhere in the village were damaged by fire, this room was not burned or otherwise disturbed after these assaults. The room’s location along Plaza C’s southern wall also may have been significance given its’ close proximity to the village’s primary cosmological underworld connection. At a later point in time, these intact bodies were covered with roof fall and wall rubble once this room was leveled and a new structure was built on the rubble.

Four other individuals – two adults, an infant, and a child – were found on the floor of a nearby room. Excavated by Nelson in 1914 (designated as Nelson’s room 12-16-N1b, n.d.), his brief notes indicate these bodies were also splayed out on or just above the floor. Though Nelson described these bodies as accidental deaths, the disposition of their bodies on the floor suggest they too were victims of fatal assaults.

8.5.3 Death in Room 12-18-15

A cluster of three young children ages three, four, and four ½ were recovered from the midden fill of Room 12-18-15. The partial remains of an adolescent were also found with the bodies of these young children. Charred portions of the floor and walls indicate Room 12-18-15 had been burned at some point in time, and was then later cleared of roof fall and wall rubble. The shell of this now abandoned room was eventually filled with trash, and was one of only a few abandoned rooms where trash had been deposited. Dating to the waning years of the village’s first occupation, the bodies of these children and adolescent were disposed of in this room’s midden deposit. Though originally categorized as formal interments, this is the only instance at Arroyo Hondo where multiple individuals had been buried together.

The bodies of these children were deposited in partly flexed positions and laid haphazardly on top of each other. The disposition of these bodies suggest they were simply dumped together, unlike other bodies located in trash middens that had been carefully bundled and interred in prepared graves. Though the articulated skeletal remains of these children were largely intact, only portions of the right leg and a few arm fragments of a thirteen-year-old adolescent¹¹ were recovered. The rest of this individual’s skeleton had eroded away.

These children were the victims of assaults and each suffered a similar pattern of trauma.¹² The three-year-old¹³ suffered severe blunt force head trauma to crown their head that fractured their face and cranial vault into multiple pieces. Greenstick fractures were present at the mid-point of most of this child’s ribs. The four-year-old child¹⁴ also suffered similar severe blunt force trauma to the crown of the head. A radiating fracture centered on the sagittal suture ran from the peak of the vault, fractured both parietals, and separated the coronal, sagittal, occipital, and left temporal sutures. This fatal fracturing and sutural separation extended to the base of the skull. Greenstick fractures of seven left ribs and one right rib were also present. This child’s upper and lower incisors exhibited fractures at the alveolar margins indicating they had been forcefully knocked out.

The four ½ year-old¹⁵ also suffered severe blunt force trauma to the crown of their head. The entire length of the coronal suture was separated from the malar, frontal, and temporal on both sides. On the left side of the skull, separation of the spheno-temporal suture extended to the spheno-parietal sutures. This child’s recently fused occipital squamous suture was fractured and separated along with the occipito-temporal suture. This was continuous with a comminuted fracture that ran posterior to the right mastoid. Most of this young child’s ribs exhibited greenstick fractures. This child’s extensive cranial trauma was fatal.

All three children were brutally beaten to death in the same manner by fatal blows to the head and severe clubbing of the torso; one child’s front teeth had been knocked out. Their bodies were then dumped together in an abandoned trash-filled room.

Its’ difficult to ascertain how the eroded remains of the juvenile buried with these young children related to this single decision event. Other than some weathering, there was no fracturing, cutting, damage, or other manipulation of these remains. Since the recovered portions of this individual’s arm and leg did not exhibit any damage, it was not possible to determine whether this individual had also been physically assaulted.

8.5.4 Isolated Remains

Room 12-18-39 contained the fragments of a small adult male skeleton.¹⁶ At some point, this room eroded and its second story floor and wall debris collapsed into the room below. These skeletal remains were contained in the floor fill of this second story room. Dry-bone breaks exhibited by recovered skeletal elements indicate this man’s body had been buried elsewhere long enough for bone’s organic matter to leached out. The remains of this man had been disinterred from another location, the bones manipulated post-mortem, and then deposited in two separate clusters. Fragments of his skull and mandible formed one cluster. The vertical breaks in his cranium were post-mortem damage that occurred well after death. This dried skull broke into pieces when it was dropped or smashed. These cranial pieces exhibited no crushed areas or cut marks. However, there were red ochre stains on the mandible.

The second cluster of bone contained this man’s right tibia, fibular, and complete foot as well as portions of his right forearm and hand. These leg bones had been disinterred as an articulated unit. These remains exhibited no cut marks, were not crushed or fractured, and had not been manipulated in any other way. However, his right wrist and hand had been purposefully manipulated. Both his radius and ulna exhibited perimortem crushing and linear cut marks. Vertical breaks indicate these skeletonized bones had been broken off just above the right wrist. The radius fragment was stained with red ochre. Artifacts associated with this second story floor indicate this room was still being used when the remains of this man were deposited on the floor. This floor debris included two manos and two anvil stones with red ochre stains. These objects may have been the source of the red ochre that had been rubbed on this individual’s radius and mandible. Its also possible other objects deposited on this floor such as a deer mandible, shell beads, projectile points, and a flake of mica may also have been used to animate the ritual manipulation of these human remains.

Sometime after the death, selective portions of this young man’s partly decomposed body were removed from his grave. His skull and right lower leg were removed, and his right hand broken off just above the wrist. His dried skull was smashed on the second story floor of this room while his leg and arm bones were deposited in a separate cluster on the floor. Red ochre was rubbed directly on his mandible and radius fragments after they had been broken. Though hundreds of isolated human bones were scattered throughout the village, these were the only remains that had been manipulated and then deposited in a second story room.

8.6 Violence, Acts of Vehemence and Being-With/Within-The-World

In discussing the nature of violent acts, Whitehead (2007) writes,

In order for an act of violence to be considered legitimate, it needs not only to have the expected pragmatic consequences but also to be judged appropriate. Therefore, among the key questions we must address are how and when violence is culturally appropriate, why it is only appropriate for certain individuals, and the significance of those enabling ideas of appropriateness to a cultural tradition as a whole.

We therefore need to pay more attention to the generative schemes for culturally appropriate behavior – as well as the historically constituted matrix of symbolic and ideational forms upon which cultural representations, expressions, and performances are based. (2007: 5–6).

Though ethnographic narratives offer insights about Puebloan vehemence, these accounts reflect the historical contingencies that shaped violence in the post-contact Puebloan world. Beginning in the sixteenth century, violence was a primary colonizing tactic used to subjugate Puebloan populations – first by the Spanish and later by Americans. Both Spanish and American authorities exercised military control to stop the killing of witches. By asserting its’ colonial authority over witch accusations, the state legitimized its own exercise of violence through military and judicial force that simultaneously delegitimizing Indigenous acts of interpersonal violence. Colonial powers viewed the violence carried out by Native groups against those accused as withes merely as unjustified instrumental actions.

A poetical narrative illustrates how retelling an origin story about “newness” places the suppression of interpersonal vehemence in relationship to important historical events (Tedlock, 1988). As recounted by Andrew Peynetsa on March 26, 1965, two late nineteenth century military encounters at Zuni were moments when witches were “saved”. Around 1898, a villager named Tumahak was accused of being a witch (an aahalhikwi). In a letter to the Army, Tumahak asked the military to intercede (“that man called the soldiers out of spite, in order to get the whole town stretched out”, Tedlock, 1988: 319). Responding to this complaint, three Army calvary units were dispatched from Fort Apache and Fort Wingate. The calvary camped along the edge of the village and threatened the villagers with violence by setting up a row of cannons facing the town. Though Zuni’s Bow Society was responsible for the Pueblo’s military and police functions, the Army interceded and arrested members of the society. Cannons and arrests were acts of proxy violence the Army deployed to abrogate Zuni’s sovereignty – actions that also resulted in the Bow Society’s subsequent decline. These military actions also disrupted the ritual retreat of the Medicine Society whose specialized knowledge also included acts of warfare.

Prior to this incident, “witches were strung up mainly in order to extract confessions; those who made convincing confessions were considered to have lost their power and were released” (Tedlock, 1988: 320). Since the Bow Society was also responsible for providing protection against witches, this military incident was blamed for leaving the village defenseless against the destructive acts of witches. According to Peynetsa, “things were going perfectly well when this happened. … Why did those soldiers come to Zuni? It was none of their business” (Tedlock, 1988: 319–320).

By the late twentieth century, violent bodily harm directed at Puebloan witches had been largely supplanted. “Convincing confessions” had become the primary means of stripping witches of their power (Tedlock, 1988: 320). In addition, models of civil governance imposed on Puebloan villages by Spanish authorities undermined and curtailed the power of traditional groups such as the Bow Society. By the 1890s, American officials considered the Zuni Bow Society’s limited authority as restricted solely to civil police functions in the village. By arresting members of the Bow Society, the Army yet again delegitimized the Society’s traditional responsibilities to protect the village against witches. Eventually the Army commander accepted the explanation that the accused was a suspected witch, thus averting bloodshed (“the Zuni’s were not mowed down”, Peynetsa cited in Tedlock, 1988: 320). Yet by imprisoning members of the Bow Society, Zuni villagers were “stretched out” or rendered defenseless against witches,

The Bow Priests were locked up at Luuna. Having been locked up, they lived on that way, they ended up stretched out. …. The way things are going now, if a witch is caught, he doesn’t get strung up, because of the American way of thinking. …. Even if I catch a witch right now, I can’t do anything. (Peynetsa cited in Tedlock, 1988: 318–320).

Peynetsa’s narrative highlights the stark ontological disjunctions between western views of legitimate violence and those of the Zunis.

Colonial authorities engaged in relentless efforts to subjugate Puebloan groups by legitimizing and sanctioning military and judicial control as forms of proxy violence. Once Indigenous practices were supplanted, Puebloans were unable to confront the emergent everyday evil actions of witches. Culturally sanctioned vehement acts were delegitimized and could no longer be openly practiced. Undermining the protections against witches within Puebloan cosmology did not change the ontological status of witches, however. Witches remained central as “enemies” to the production and cohesion of society. Yet vehement acts integral to maintaining a group’s social cohesion had been delegitimized over many centuries of Puebloan subjugation. Colonial authorities used proxy violence to undermine the ontological foundation of Puebloan society. Given intersubjective violence directed against witches was aggressively suppressed by colonial authorities for centuries, its’ implausible to image that all violent acts in prehispanic Puebloan contexts solely reflect only warfare or raiding (e.g. Kohler et al., 2014). Vehement acts directed against witches was integral to Ancestral Puebloan society.

Propositions about vehemence in the past must necessarily incorporate a complex range of actions, not just materialized instances of bodily harm. Nuanced historical contingencies encompass distinctive acts of “necessary evil” directed at many kinds of enemies. Articulating the elements that co-constitute the situated performances of vehemence helps to identity who and what shaped Ancestral Puebloan responses to the emergent dangers villagers faced in everyday life.

8.6.1 Situational Evil

Situational evil aptly characterizes the nuances of vehement acts in Puebloan prehistory. By placing Puebloan notions of beings and persons in relationship to culpability, one can articulate what constituted socially sanctioned vehement acts. Kapferer (2003) notes that moral culpability for violence differs between witchcraft, sorcery, and other malevolence acts. Situational evil characterizes witchcraft as immoral acts because they reflect inherently unambiguous malevolence. By contrast, sorcerers or medicine men walk a fine line of situated amorality because their specialized knowledge is not just protective but has the potential to be destructive.

As non-beings, witches stand apart from the dualities of Puebloan life and cosmology. Ethnographic narratives describe witches as evil forces generally responsible for the ills that befell a village (e.g. Parsons, 1939; Titiev, 1942; Geertz, 2011; also see Darling, 1999). Witches are dangerous, in part, because they can be anyone – male or female, young or old. The knowledge and powers of witchcraft passes through families, can be taught to those who are recruited, or can be shared among individuals who organize themselves into witch societies like other ritual groups. Witches were usually adults who acted alone, though witch executions were sometimes directed at families, implicating both adults and children with long-established kinship ties (Fox, 1967, Darling, 1999).

The killing of witches was a dangerous, heavily ritualized task undertaken only by members of specific ritual societies (e.g., the Bear Society at Santa Clara, Hill, 1982; the Flint, Giant, Fire societies at Zia, White, 1930, 1962; and the Medicine Society at Isleta, Parsons, 1939). Since witches primarily appear in human form, violent acts were directed at individuals thought to embody a witch’s spirit (Parsons, 1939). Physical trauma was necessary to render the body useless for the witch’s spirit (Goldfrank, 1967; Ortiz, 1969). The interrogation of witches traditionally included physical trauma (such as clubbing, torture, bludgeoning), execution, dismemberment, defleshing, cutting, body pounding, crushing of body parts, and burning (Darling, 1999; Ellis, 1968, 1970, 1979; Goldfrank, 1967; Fox, 1967). The form and intensity of violence was often dictated by the danger a witch posed to the community. Clubbing was insufficient to eliminate the most dangerous witches; extensive dismemberment and burning of the body after death was required. Witches could ultimately be destroyed by turning their spirits to dust (“nang opah”, Oritz, 1969: 40).

Though embodied witches are dangerous, the greater concern is the witch’s spirit. Because witches are prohibited from returning to the underworld, their spirit lingers among the living waiting for the opportunity to possess another human (Simmons, 1974; Goldfrank, 1967; Ortiz, 1969). Acts of purification that use ash and smoke create protective boundaries against witches, while aggressive acts that use arrows for their ritual protections and strength can drive away or outright kill witches (Darling, 1999). While vehement acts invoke different measures – only some of which involve violence or bodily harm – all are deemed appropriate relative to the dangers that witches pose..

8.7 Boundary Making and Being-With/Within-The World

Reimaging violence as vehemence places the circumstances under which violent acts emerge in relationship to bodily harm. Vehemence is relational since bodily harm does not always reflect the same kinds of immersed experiences. Vehemence is a becoming, a fundamental boundary-making process in Barad’s sense where violent acts instantiate distinctions between a community and its perceived dangers or “enemies”. Boundary-making processes are recounted in Puebloan narratives where numerous actions and things separate the underworld from the living (e.g. Parsons, 1939). The distinctions between being-with-the-world and being-within-the-world also articulates who and what was considered “others” or dangerous beings. This distinction also situates the forms and intensities of vehemence relative to Puebloan cosmology.

The notion of being-with-the-world emphasizes an individual’s socially saturated intersubjective engagement with other individuals (see Chap. 4). These social experiences can also encompass violent encounters. Being-with-the-world socially defines and situates the roles enacted by perpetrators, victims, and observers. Focused on the consequences of vehement person-to-person acts, it centers bodies and individuals. Events in this case situate individuals relative to violent acts that resulted in bodily harm and/or death. By contrast, being-within-the-world more broadly focuses on how situational evil is co-constituted relative to a group’s cosmological beliefs as acts of social cohesion. By focusing on the forms and intensities of vehemence, being-within-the-world articulates the differences that mattered in events by decentering individuals. Events were thus not just momentary violent acts direct at individuals but situations that entangled bodies with things, spaces, and societal relationships. Being-within-the-world situates performative events as acts of social integration often carried out in public spaces (Bell, 1997; Bloch, 1974; Goffman, 1974; Turner, 1969). Vehemence thus enacts different mechanisms of social integration to assert dominance, to combat perceived malevolent forces, or to address circumstances that disrupt a group’s cohesiveness.

In some instances, skeletal trauma highlights intersubjective events that resulted in serious bodily injury. Such vehement acts targeted and subjugated specific individuals through selective repeated sub-lethal assaults that inflicted psychological as well as physical harm (Hoaen, 2020; Martin et al., 2010; Martin, et al., 2012; Martin & Tegtmeyer, 2017). These individuals embodied traumatic injuries directed toward them as “others” – that is as captives, enemies, or other subjugated individuals. For example, women at the prehistoric Southwestern site of La Plata were targeted and subjugated through gendered violence (e.g. Martin, 1997, 2008; Martin et al., 2001, 2008, 2010; Martin & Akins, 2001). Intersubjective notions of being-with-the-world situate these women as the victims of violent encounters. At La Plata, severe though sub-lethal bodily harm were vehement acts repeatedly used to assert physical control, power, dominance, and authority over specific women as captives. Their embodied trauma reflects the otherness of these women, emphasizing their being-with-the-world as outsiders and victims. These vehement encounters were also purposeful public performances intended to entangle a group as collective witnesses to sanction these violent acts (Whitehead, 2004; Whitehead & Finnström, 2013). Repeated psychological and physical sub-lethal traumas were forms of intersubjective gendered violence that enslaved these women. Enacted social norms maintained the otherness of these women even though their presence did not threaten the community’s cosmological or social order.

By contrast, the distinctive patterns of bodily injuries at Arroyo Hondo suggests these encounters were ritualized vehement acts intended to reinforce cosmological harmony. The absence of healed sub-lethal injuries at Arroyo Hondo indicates these victims were not subjected to repeated physical beatings, unlike the subjugated women at La Plata. These were not outsiders but villagers who suddenly became differently situated or transformed into subjects through a decision event. Perceived as witches, these individuals were village residents who threatened the social order and wellbeing of the entire settlement.

Each of the individuals disposed of in Kiva G, in Roomblock 16, and in the trash filled room in Roomblock 18 were subjected to similar ritualized patterns of trauma. Every individual suffered fatal head trauma. Patterns of skeletal trauma indicate these victims were beaten and clubbed in specific ways. Clubbing their knees initially incapacitated these victims; a few individuals tried to protect themselves during the assault. Ethnographic narratives suggest clublings, and beatings were necessary measures to render the body uninhabitable for witches. Each of these individuals died from fatal blows to the head.

However, at least one violent act was directed against the dead. Well after his body began to decompose, one man’s corpse was selectively disinterred. His skull, mandible, and portions of right hand and leg were removed from his grave and manipulated out public view in the cloistered space of Room 12-18-39. His skull was smashed on the floor, red ochre was rubbed on some bones, and other parts of his body were deposited in a separate pile. Smashing his skull mirrors the lethal head trauma exhibited by the victims in Kiva G, Roomblock 16, and Roomblock 18.

Dismembering this man’s body was a necessary moral response to situated evil. Though the details of this act differ from ethnographic narratives, dismemberment and burning were post-mortem acts directed against witches. In this instance, an act of vehemence act took place months if not years after this man’s death because his body was perceived to harbor an evil dangerous to the community. This was an act of vengeance to reassert the boundary between the living and the dead. This was a targeted violent act, however it differs in scope and intensity from the corpse fragmentation and extreme body processing documented at other archaeological sites (e.g. Ogilvie & Hilton, 2000; Martin & Akins, 2001; Martin et al., 2001; Martin & Osterholtz, 2020; Kuckelman, 2020).

The patterns of skeletal trauma and body dismemberment at Arroyo Hondo mark these as vehement events intended to restore the community’s cosmological balance. Violence was not directed at these victim’s as individuals, but were acts focused on situational evil that targeted bodies perceived to contain malevolent forces. These violent acts were matters of being-within-the-world attuned to the worldly circumstances of the villagers entangled with cosmological conditions of their community. These bodies were deposited in cloistered spaces that situated them in relationship to the village’s cosmological structure. These ritual acts also reinforced notions that enemies or evil were integral to Ancestral Puebloan identity and the production of social order.

Vehemence enacted against these victims also suggests that their corpses were not transformed into xayeh at death. Fragments of human bone scattered throughout Arroyo Hondo indicate that bodies were sacred objects that once embodied a human spirit and were in a continual state of becoming. Scattered remains were part of the process that returned the body to dust at this village. However, bodies suspected of harboring witches or chuge ing were non-persons whose spirits could never return to the underworld. Since these corpses embodied no sacred connections, they posed on-going dangers to the community. Enspacing these bodies in rooms and entrapping the corpses with stones were necessary measures to assert a boundary between the living and the dangerous spirits these bodies once harbored. Manipulating and redepositing a decomposed corpse was also a necessary act to attenuate the persistent material danger it posed to the community. This corpse had to be dismembered and rendered uninhabitable to drive the witch’s spirit from the village. Having once embodied a spirit that could not return to the underworld, these corpses could never be transformed or animated as xayeh. Vehement acts sometimes required measures necessary to protect the village such as asserting cosmological boundaries by physically sequestering dangerous beings in enclosed spaces.

8.8 Life After Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary

Characterizing individuals as “partible” in Tewa cosmology, as discussed in Chap. 5, partitions an individual’s being between an earthly existence and a spiritual underworld. This partibility also informs how embodied vehement acts emerged as situated and enspaced experiences, that is how they reflect being-within-the-world. The actions of individuals such as shamans may have been perceived as dangerous ruptures since they had knowledge of and access to different intelligibilities or understandings of the world. Once perceived as threats to the social order, these individuals suddenly become vulnerable to vehement acts, including violent bodily harm. Decision events were moments when violence was directed against those who emerged as non-being beings or witches responsible for rupturing community boundaries.

Being-with-the-world verses being-within-the-world thus reflect how violence was differently situated. For those individuals whose presence marked them as being-with-the-world, violence was situated as intersubjective acts directed against them as “others”. In these instances, bodily injuries were acts of dominance and subjugation deemed appropriate precisely because the being of such individuals positioned them outside of social norms. In contrast, violence as being-within-the-world enacted and reinforced social norms directed against socially disruptive internal forces. As assertions of morality, violence was not perceived as intersubjective acts against individuals but as actions directed against disruptive influences such as spirits or other non-beings. Being-within-the-world defined both the configuration and norms of one’s world as well as the kinds of socially sanctioned measures deemed necessary to protect it. In these instances, violent acts and bodily harm were the products of emergent cosmological beliefs situated and enspaced relative to a broad array of intra-group social actions, things, spaces, and historical contingencies.

Vehemence for Ancestral Puebloans was integral to everyday life since the emergence of disruptive influences was a constant threat. Distinguishing among these violent acts has implications for characterizing the viability of village life at Ancestral Puebloan settlements. Vehemence and violent acts directed outward toward others as enemies, such as strangers, captives, or individuals outside of a group’s social realms serve to reinforce social boundaries. The repeated injures experienced by the captive women described by Martin (2016; Martin et al., 2010) reflect sanctioned violence that was acceptable everyday behavior direct against individuals who were perceived as outsiders.

Instances of massacres reflect the disruptive excesses of violence directed against “others” that not only resulted in the deaths of many villagers but also traumatized survivors. At villages that experienced extreme violence, survivors may well have found it impossible to return to everyday life and abandoned their homes in the immediate aftermath. The historic settlement of Awat’ovi (Malotki, 1993: 275–295; Whiteley, 2008) is an instance where vehement internal strife factionalized the village. Former neighbors emerged as enemies who were now defined by their otherness. The materiality of the village itself mediated and embodied the transgressions of outsiders that not only led to the violent deaths of one group at Polacca Wash (Brooks, 2016: 393), but the ultimate abandonment of the Awat’ovi. Othering of rival factions created enemies where lethal violence was not just as socially acceptable but necessary and justified. Vehemence as intersubjective acts treats the otherness of individuals as being-with-the-world and acts targets outsiders or enemies as individuals. Even instances of extreme body processing (e.g. Ogilvie & Hinton, 2000; Martin & Osterholtz, 2020) may reflect extreme brutality intent on expunging others and violently asserting authority and social dominance (also see Perez, 2012).

On the other hand, vehemence enacted as being-within-the-world involved perpetrators, victims, and observers whose lives were co-constituted and remained persistently entangled through the community’s cosmological relationships. At Arroyo Hondo, villagers confronted a series vehement decision events that threatened social cohesion. The archaeological evidence indicates the violent deaths at this village were discrete vehement events that occurred at different times. Villagers not only confronted repeated events that resulted in the violent deaths of residents, but each time the village’s survivors then faced a return to everyday life. Das (2007: 95–100) and Trnka (2008: 13–14) refer to this as a “descent into the ordinary” where ordinary activities “allow life to knit itself back together into some viable rhythm” (Cavell in Das, 2007: xiii; also see Nordstrom, 2004). Ethnographers (e.g. Das, 2007; Trnka, 2008; Jackson, 2005) describe rumors, gossip, and the performance of traditional stories as mnemonics deployed to deal with issues of intentionality and volition in order to reorient social norms. These coping mechanisms often justify and contextualize the vehement intensity of recent violent events. However, Lambeck writes that the “stickiness” of witchcraft accusations complicates on-going social relations,

Sorcery expresses what I want to call, after Sartre, the stickiness of social relations and, once announced, sorcery itself exacerbates that stickiness. It is sticky in the sense that it attaches people to one another in unwanted ways, allowing them neither autonomy nor positive mutual being. And each attempt to pull away, to drop the stickiness from one’s fingers or one’s mind, seems only to disperse it elsewhere. Sorcery is, in a sense, itself that stickiness. (2021: 237).

Social coping mechanisms as well as the stickiness of witchcraft accusations are evident in ethnographic narratives of Puebloan groups and suggest that homologous social dynamics were present in past ancestral groups. Patterns of bodily harm and the spaces in which violence was enacted help distinguish different kinds of vehement acts instantiated through events. These materialities disentangle the vehemence directed at individuals perceived as others from vehemence enacted to reinforcement moral or social norms. Injuries reflect other instances that situated individuals as being-within-the-world.

8.9 Injuries and Vehement Acts

The injuries exhibited by several other Arroyo Hondo’s villagers serve to illustrate how emergent vehemence was situated cosmologically. Three adults survived serious injuries – a middle-aged woman with a hip dislocation,¹⁷ a middle-aged man with a healed throat injury,¹⁸ and a middle-aged man¹⁹ with the tip of an obsidian projectile point embedded in his pelvis. In Chap. 6, I characterize these injuries as individuating events and suggest that the suddenness and resulting functional debilities of these events transformed the life histories and social identities of these individuals. At least two of these injuries resulted from vehement acts – the throat injury to Individual 7 and the arrow wound to Individual 8. Each of these men survived assaults that resulted in serious but not fatal injuries.

The hip dislocation experienced by Individual 6 was a long-term debilitating injury entangled with this woman’s distinctive treatment at death. However, the circumstances of her injury are uncertain. Hip dislocations are serious injuries that require substantial force to displace the head of femur from its tightly encapsulated pelvic joint. Such injuries are typically associated with falling from a substantial height. However, it is conceivable that severe abuse or a fall caused by a perpetrator also could account for this woman’s hip dislocation. At La Plata, for example, one woman who was a subjugated captive exhibited a hip dislocation in addition to multiple sub-lethal cranial fractures and other injuries (Martin et al., 2010). While it is possible that Individual 6’s hip dislocation may have resulted from an act of vehemence, the absence of other skeletal injuries suggests her hip dislocation was an accidental injury.

On the other hand, Individual 7 was injured during an assault. A fractured hyoid and the associated secondary ossification of the thyroid cartilage is an uncommon injury that results from direct blunt force to the neck. Neck injuries serious enough to fracture the hyoid typically result from altercations or contact sports such as football, hockey, or kickboxing where an individual is struck directly in the throat by another person. Blows to the throat are debilitating injuries that usually cause short-term problems with breathing, swallowing, and speaking. However, individuals who experience fractured hyoids typically recover quickly. Like Individual 6, this man exhibited no other skeletal injuries, and his fully healed hyoid fractures indicate that this neck injury did not result in his death.

The materiality of Individual 7’s interment suggests his of state of being was homologous with ethnographic narratives that describe Patowa. Though its’ unclear why this man was assaulted, surviving his throat injury was entangled with his state of being-within-the-world. Its’ possible Individual 7’s injury resituated his life where he emerged as a distinctly different person, that is vehemence individuated him. In this instance, violence did not constitute a rupture to the social order but was an emergent moment of becoming for Individual 7. His survival may have prompted his initiation as Patowa where the assault became a cosmological transformation. On the other hand, the assault may have served to reinforce his state of being. If he was Patowa prior to his injury, his recovery would have reinforced his different worldly intelligibility. Notions of individuation and being-within-the-world thus entangle this man’s violent assault with the cosmological order.

Individual 8 was subjected to a different form of violence since he was assaulted from behind by an arrow tipped with an obsidian point, a rare raw material at Arroyo Hondo. When the arrow was removed from his body, its tip broke off and remained embedded in his pelvis. This middle-aged man likely recovered quickly from this injury since there was no inflammatory bone response around the embedded obsidian fragment. Only a slight bony callus formed around this arrow tip. In addition, no broken obsidian point fragments or wooden arrow shaft pieces were recovered from his grave pit, so the rest of the arrow had been completely removed from his body prior to his death. Though painful for a short time, his injury was not debilitating.

At death, this man was buried in an actively used area along Plaza G’s eastern wall among a cluster of young children. The sequence of plastered plaza surfaces places his death sometime after the bodies were deposited in Kiva G, but before the construction of Kiva 12-14-6. His tightly flexed body was wrapped in a hide blanket and a clear obsidian projectile was placed in the grave next to his body. Since few pieces of obsidian were recovered from Arroyo Hondo, the association of two obsidian points with a single individual was very unusual. The contrast of the black obsidian embedded in his body with the clear obsidian point placed with him at death is also unusual and references a black/white duality.

Vehemence directed at Individual 8 may reflect a transformation of his being. When the arrow was removed from his body, it would have been apparent that the tip of the obsidian point had broken off. Others would have been aware that this man now literally embodied and was permanently animated by an obsidian arrow. Ethnographically, Parsons notes that “both ashes and arrowpoint are used in separating a person from a dangerous influence” (1939: 107), adding that arrows were used ritually as defensive measures against witches. The violence directed at Individual 8 enacted a cosmological boundary that individuated him. When this man emerged as the subject of witch accusations, the black obsidian arrow situated this assault as a vehement act directed at a body suspected of harboring a non-being or witch’s spirit.

Individual 8 survived his injury and his pelvis healed. The lack of other skeletal trauma suggests he suffered no other debilitating sub-lethal injuries. As a decision event, this assault was an act to determine if this man embodied a witch and thus posed a danger to the community. The bit of obsidian that remained embedded in his body may have absolved him of such suspicions. If arrowpoints – particularly obsidian points – separated an individual from dangerous influences then the embedded obsidian arrow’s tip was a becoming, an affordance that transformed this man’s being. The material elements of his grave suggest he did not become Patowa. Instead, the embedded obsidian tip was an unusual state of becoming, a cosmological entanglement that separated his body from evil influences. It is plausible this becoming rendered Individual 8’s body impermeable and became perpetually protected from harboring a witch’s spirit. This violent act assured others he was not a witch, and that he did not embody a disruptive threat to the community.

At death, Individual 8 was the only villager bundled with a clear obsidian arrow that further animated and reinforced his body’s cosmological separation from dangerous influences. Despite this unusual state of being, he was treated just like other She t’a at death. His body was wrapped in a hide blanket and interred among children in Plaza G. Burying him among children may have extended his embodied protections to the vulnerable unripe bodies interred around him. Though he retained a presence as She t’a, the embodied affordances of an obsidian arrow set him apart from others and absolved him from suspicions. In this instance, vehemence enacted as a violent event served to protect the village; it also was a violent act that saved this man’s life.

8.9.1 Atypical Disposal of Bodies

For Arroyo Hondo’s villagers, the skeletal trauma exhibited by the adults and children disposed of in atypical contexts were vehement acts carried out against individuals likely perceived to be non-beings or witches. Yet the performative events that resulted in their deaths may were not necessarily acts of violence. Rather, decision events emerged as vehement responses to perceived cosmological ruptures.

Villagers were entangled in pernicious struggles that threaten them and their families. The layered circumstances of disease, illness, crop failure, starvation, and drought were serious challenges to daily life at Arroyo Hondo Pueblo. The prevalence of metabolic skeletal pathologies suggests every villager was similarly situated by and embedded in a common marginalized existence that collectively defined their being-within-the-world. Vehement acts at this village may have been responses to moments when severe illness that caused the deaths of many infants were perceived as heightened threats that endangered everyday life.

Once the conditions of everyday life were perceived as ruptures to the social order, accusations were likely leveled against those thought to be the cause. To rid the village of evil influences, someone needed to be held responsible for the village’s illnesses and the deaths of infants. At some point, a decision event erupted. Individuals thought to be witches were targeted. Their identities were ruptured as they came to be perceived as dangerous non-beings. Proscribed actions were directed against young and old alike; clubbings and beatings were necessary measures required to render the bodies of the accused uninhabitable by witch spirits. Three young children may have become targeted due to their kindred affiliations, or perhaps because they had not fallen serious ill and were thought to embody evil influences.

For Ancestral Puebloan groups, not all expressions of vehemence were acts of subjugation or warfare, nor were they necessarily even perceived as violence. Vehement acts were brutal yet socially sanctioned responses to evils that threatened social and cosmological orderliness. The decision events that emerged at Arroyo Hondo may well have been efforts to restore daily life and revitalize the prospects of a better imaged future. Directed at the pernicious conditions that threatened daily life, vehemence was entangled with a cosmologically structured state of being-within-the-world (Das, 2018). Rather than disrupt life, these decision events were purposeful actions that helped to promote social cohesion.

8.10 The Situated Spaces of Vehement Acts

In the American Southwest, historical contingencies shaped how the material conditions of spaces scaffolded events, including vehement acts. The disposal of witches often occurred in village spaces that were structured through Puebloan cosmology (e.g. Malville, 1989; Swedlund, 1966; Luebben & Nickels, 1982; Fewkes, 1893, 1898; Turner & Morris, 1970). Ethnographic narratives mention plazas as a public space where witch trials and the disposal of witches occurred, but these events also took place in cloistered spaces such as kivas and churches as well as the victim’s own house (Darling, 1999: 741). Parsons (1940: 54–55) notes that a Taos folktale identified kivas and caves as ceremonial locations where battles with witches took place.

In fourteenth century Northern Rio Grande communities, the dead were not routinely interred in kivas. However, human remains have occasionally been discovered on the floor of kiva structures, such as the 30 individuals found in a burned kiva at Te’ewi (Wendorf, 1953: 46). Shattered human bone noted in a kiva at Yellow Jacket Pueblo indicates these spaces were sometimes associated with violent events, and even the extreme processing of bodies (Swedlund, 1966). The abandonment, sealing, or burning of kivas suggests these structures were considered appropriate spaces to deal with witches (e.g. at Delores, Wilshusen, 1986, 1988; at Adler & Dick, 1999: 205).

During the fourteenth century, spaces where violence occurred also shaped the impact these events had the residents of Ancestral Puebloan villages. At Arroyo Hondo, the violent performative drama carried out in Kiva G was situated by this building’s space and the physical barriers created by its’ architecture. If clubbing the adults deposited in Kiva G was intended to be a community spectacle, some of these actions would have likely taken place in an outdoor space to assure they could be publicly witnessed. Alternatively, containing the assault within a cloistered ritual space may have been necessary.

The configuration of village buildings at Arroyo Hondo created spaces with different degrees of public access. For example, Kiva J was a large semi-subterranean structure on southwestern edge of the village. Set apart from residential roomblocks, this kiva’s location, large size, and lack of typical kiva features suggests it served as a community facility or roundhouse (Ortiz, personal communication, 1973). This structure was not contained in a defined plaza space but was positioned between the large open space of Plaza H and the expansive upland plateau to the south (Fig. 1.4, Creamer, 1993: 5). Built during the second growth phase in Arroyo Hondo’s history, this structure and the open space of Plaza H were readily accessible public spaces for a variety of functions such as seasonal village dances.

In contrast, the ritual space of Kiva G was contained within the small, enclosed footprint of Plaza G (Creamer, 1993: 88–95). Like other enclosed plazas at Arroyo Hondo, physical access to Plaza G was confined to a single west-facing gateway. This narrow passage severely restricted both physical access to this plaza as well as views into this area by passersby. Limiting public access to Plaza G also would have created an additional separation and layer of privacy for kindreds that resided in the surrounding roomblocks. Its’ likely only those families who lived in the surrounding residential buildings had ready access to this plaza space. In addition, Kiva G itself was a private space. The structure’s thick adobe walls and dirt roof would shield any actions that took place inside and dampened sounds inside the structure from being witnessed by those outside.

Shapiro (2005: 119) writes that plazas were spaces where social hierarchies could assert their control and authority. Contrary to assumptions that enclosed plazas were primarily defenses against external threats, the presence of both enclosed and open plazas at Arroyo Hondo indicate that plazas were socially regulated spaces. Even access to the roofs of roomblocks that surrounded plazas was likely controlled since these spaces offered vantage points to observed activities within the plaza.

The violence directed against the victims deposited in Kiva G were ritual acts that could not be readily witnessed by most villagers. The entire confrontation may have taken place inside Kiva G’s cloistered sacred space where the five victims were assaulted by a group of individuals. However, multiple perpetrators attacking 5 victims inside Kiva G’s small, confined floor area would not have been an easy task. The physical constraints of the kiva’s small interior space and the disposition of the bodies near this building’s roof entry suggest these victims were initially assaulted outside before their bodies were deposited inside the Kiva. In addition, rock slabs were not found on floors of other kivas at Arroyo Hondo. The large slabs associated with these bodies were likely brought into Kiva G as part of the assault. Given their location near the fire pit and roof ladder, it appears the dead or dying victims were thrown into Kiva G through the roof entry, and the rock slabs thrown or placed on their bodies as a final act. These bodies were then abandoned on the floor of the Kiva.

The vehement acts directed at the individuals enspaced in Kiva G may not necessarily have been intended as an open public spectacle. However, its’ possible some villagers witnessed the initial assault, and perhaps even saw the bodies then being deposited in the kiva. The killing of witches was likely the purview of sanctioned ritual specialists responsible for carrying out such acts. If this event also served to reintegrate life within this settlement, it may be that information and rumors shared about the deaths of these individuals mattered more than the need for villagers to witness their deaths.

Whether this structure was purposefully collapsed on top of the victims as part of the ritual drama or whether the Kiva collapsed later is also unclear. These victims were not crushed to death when the kiva collapsed; they each died from being clubbed and stoned. However, the Kiva itself also was a material representation of the Middle Place or center of the Puebloan cosmos. Sealing the bodies of suspected witches with slabs inside this Kiva would trap them in a liminal space between the underworld and an earthly existence. Since witches reside outside of the orderliness of the Puebloan cosmos, containing these bodies in the kiva’s spiritually bounded space would have protected others from their influences. Kiva G situated and enspaced these actions of this violent decision event as “being-within-the-world” where the materiality of these structures scaffolded powerful connections to the underworld.

Subsequent events in Plaza G were entrained when Kiva G collapsed. Salvaging building materials from this collapsed structure may have disturbed and disarticulated the remains of one victim. Trash was then deposited in depression of the collapsed Kiva, and the body of a woman was subsequently interred there. Once Kiva G was filled with trash, the entire plaza was resurfaced with plaster several times. Though the bodies of witches were enspaced in Kiva G, Plaza G remained in use.

Plaza G’s space was later reconfigured by the construction of Kiva 12-14-6. This Kiva post-dates the plastered plaza surfaces that sealed off Kiva G. For some reason, construction of a new semi-subterranean building in Plaza G was not considered appropriate or feasible. Kiva 12-14-6 was built at ground level and was structurally incorporated into the adobe buildings that defined the northeast corner of Plaza G. This Kiva’s shape was formed by a curved wall that abutted the straight walls of Roomblock 14 and intruded into the plaza, creating its distinctive D-shape. Despite its unusual footprint, this new kiva was comparable in size to the original Kiva G. Though the D-shaped Kiva mirrored the orientation and kiva features of the original kiva structure, Kiva 12–14-6’s structure may have taken on new ritual significance.

Other beings were also enspaced in Plaza G. Two macaws formally interred in Plaza G also post-date the plaza’s plastered surfaces. One macaw was buried along the eastern margins of Plaza G near the curved wall of the D-Shaped Kiva. The other macaw was interred at the center point of Plaza G’s south wall. These two birds were the only intact macaw interments recovered from the village, though one isolated macaw bone was recovered from a midden deposit in Plaza C (Lang & Harris, 1984: 115). Ortiz (1969: 18–25) notes that the center point along a plaza’s south wall marks the earth navel’s sacred location as a passage to the underworld. This location also ritually enspaces the true center of the village and of each plaza. Arroyo Hondo stands out as the most northern Ancestral Puebloan village where macaws have been documented (Crown, 2016a, b). These birds mark Plaza G as a ritual space likely associated with this ritual sodality.

This plaza’s performative drama extends beyond depositing of the victims in Kiva G. A series of situated enchained decision events appear to have re-shaped Plaza G’s subsequent use. Triggered by a violent decision event, Kiva G literally embodied the victims of violence. After the structural collapse of Kiva G, a number of other activities marked this plaza’s material and spatial transformation. The kiva’s pit was filled with trash, the plaza’s surface was re-plastered several times with multiple layers of adobe, a new D-shaped kiva was built, a man who embodied obsidian was interred, and the bodies of two macaws interred. These macaws may have renewed a sodality’s authority over this plaza space or may marked a different sodality’s assertion of ritual control over Plaza G. Its’ also possible that kindred members who controlled this space were themselves transformed by ridding the village of witches. To re-constitute and sanction the renewed use of this plaza space, these subsequent activities may have been accessible to and necessarily witnessed by other villagers. Though Plaza G was remade by these subsequent events, the individuals enspaced in Kiva G nonetheless situated later vehement acts at Arroyo Hondo.

8.10.1 Rooms

The arrangement of living spaces at Arroyo Hondo reflect different kinds of boundaries between public and private spaces. The rows of rooms that formed the perimeter of plazas were generally more accessible than rooms located deeper within a roomblock. Some interior rooms were accessible only through doorways that created passways between adjoined adjacent spaces. These inter-connected sets of rooms constituted apartments that provided secluded private spaces for individual families or extended kindreds. Shapiro notes that at Arroyo Hondo,

…a combination of controlled-access, open plazas and spatially segregated roomblocks enabled resident kin-based groups to spatially delineate a familiar environment yet still be part of the larger settlement. (2005: 115).

Vehemence enacted in these rooms would not have been public spectacles but were actions that occurred in secluded private residential spaces. The violence that took place in these spaces directly intruded into the daily lives of kindred members.

Room 12-16-37 formed part of the southern wall of Plaza C. Readily accessible from the plaza, the location of this room would have made the female victims deposited on the floor vulnerable to assaults. Each woman died from severe blunt force trauma to the head. Though both women exhibited lethal cranial fractures, they did not exhibit skeletal damage to other parts of their bodies. This suggests that lethal cranial trauma was sufficient, and clubbing of their bodies to inflict further damage to their bodies was not necessary. The two other women and two young children on the floor of a nearby room uncovered by Nelson likely met the same fate. Given these rooms were part of the same residential complex, it is plausible that all six of these individuals were assaulted in their residents at the same time.

The bodies of the three young children found in a trash filled room located in Roomblock 18 were deposited under different circumstances. Room 12-18-15 also was a single-story structure, built when only a few rooms were added to this roomblock toward the end of the village’s initial occupation (see Fig. 3.7, Component I, Stage 4 growth; Creamer, 1993: 144). Located in southwest corner of Plaza G, a cluster of 6 rooms reconfigured the plaza’s southwest corner and narrowed the plaza’s entryway. This room was also one of the few rooms dating to the first occupation of the village that had been burned (Creamer, 1993: 14). The fire-reddened floor and walls indicate this room had burned completely. The space was subsequently cleared of wall fall and roof debris, and eventually filled with trash.

At first glance, it appears that these children were simply interred in midden deposited in this space. However, the location of Room 12-18-15 at the entry of Plaza G, its destruction by fire, and the subsequent clearing of this space were actions that enspaced the bodies of these children in particular ways. Though this room had long since been abandoned, this area may have retained important cosmological affordances as a room that once constituted an enclosed space. This space may have had animated in ways that could appropriately contain and entrap the bodies of these children who were suspected to be witches. Depositing their bodies in this location also may have been situated their deaths relative to the individuals deposited in Kiva G.

The disposal of these children’s bodies in Room 12-18-15 may also be situated by the disarticulated adult remains that were left on the floor of another room nearby. Room 12-18-39 was a two-story interior room connected by doorways to several other adjacent rooms (Shapiro, 2005: 72). This room’s lower story contained the body of a 5–6 month-old infant interred in the southeast corner. This infant’s burial was not disturbed when the disarticulated remains of an adult male were deposited in the second story room above.

The fragmented and disarticulated remains of an adult male were left on the floor of this second story while the room was still in use. This was a second story living space with a hearth and an array of other objects that included a deer mandible, four projectile points, a mica flake, a bone awl, 2 shell beads, 2 ceramic scraping spoons, shaped slabs, manos, and miscellaneous sherd and lithic fragments. In addition, two manos and two anvil stones associated with the second story floor of this room exhibited red ochre stains. A stalactite fragment as well as several manos, anvil stones, other stones and a bone awl sharpener that also exhibited stained with red-ochre stains were also found in the rubble fill of this room. The pattern of dry-bone damage to this adult male’s skull indicates his remains had been disinterred when his body was largely decomposed. His skull had been smashed on the floor of this room and portions of his right lower leg and right arm were left on the floor as a separate clusters of bones. Damage to his radius indicates his right hand had been broken off from the rest of his arm just above the wrist. Red ochre had been rubbed directly on the mandible and right radius bone fragments. Its plausible that many of the objects found in this second story room, such as the red-ochre stained manos and anvil stones, were associated with this decision event. Its also possible that the ochre-stained manos and anvil stones were used to prepare the red pigment that had been rubbed on these skeletal remains. 

Disinterring the skull, right hand, and right leg of this male was a vehement act direct against this man’s body well after his death. Removing selected portions of the body from this man’s grave, then shattering his skull against the floor of a room were acts of dismemberment. Red ochre rubbed directly on his mandible and wrist indicate these remains had been further marked and manipulated. Depositing these disinterred remains on the floor of a room suggests it was necessary to contain them in an enclosed space to invoke cosmological separations. This was not a public act since this interior space would have screened anyone from seeing or hearing what took place.

8.11 Articulating Vehemence at Arroyo Hondo Pueblo

Notions of decision events, vehemence, and personhood reconfigure violent acts at Arroyo Hondo in several ways. Reimagining instances of bodily trauma as decision events highlights the transformative qualities of violent acts and connects these actions to the broader issues of daily life in this village. Violent acts are positioned and enchained relative to the circumstances and conditions that led to them. These concepts also situate the conditions villagers faced in the aftermath of these events. Violence as vehemence also situates how acts other than assaults reflect the kinds and intensities of aggressive responses to disruptive influences. Vehemence and personhood also situate the instantiation of violence relative to Tewa cosmology.

Several threads emerge from the patterns of bodily trauma and manipulation of human remains at Arroyo Hondo. First, the degrees and kinds of vehemence enacted were cosmological boundary-making actions directed at bodies as containers of evil that posed threats. These were not intersubjective acts of violence, but measures that targeted bodies inhabited by “non-beings” to protect the village from evil. Nine adults and five children at Arroyo Hondo died as the result of these kinds of vehement traumatic violent assaults. Similar patterns of bodily harm exhibited by these individuals indicate these assaults were proscribed actions carried out in the same specific way – incapacitating the victim when necessary, then violently clubbing their bodies, and delivering severe lethal blows to their heads.

However, not all vehement acts were directed at living individuals. Violence was also enacted against the body of a man act by disinterring his remains, dismembering and manipulating his hand and foot, then smashing his skull. Fragmenting his skull by smashing it against the floor of a room resonates with the lethal blows delivered to living victims to drive out evil influences. Removing his right hand and foot may also resonate with the need to “incapacitate” his body. Rubbing red ochre on his wrist and jaw invoked some ritual power and animating quality of this color. No other disinterred remains or other scattered isolated bones at Arroyo Hondo had been manipulated in this fashion.

The violent acts directed at these adults and children as well as the violence enacted against a skeletonized corpse were intended as deadly acts of vehemence. These vehement events enacted boundaries that separated everyday life from the evil influences of the underworld. Shooting a man with an obsidian arrow was another vehement act but also an act of cosmological boundary-making. This assault was directed at ridding the village of the evil spirit residing in man’s body. Vehemence enacted in this instance was entangled with his recovery from this assault. Years later, the interment of his body in a typical grave suggest he was still recognized as Tewa. At Arroyo Hondo, violent acts that instantiated cosmological boundaries against evil didn’t necessarily require a lethal outcome.

When bodies are conceptualized as containers of evil, several threads emerge from the acts of violent observed at Arroyo Hondo. First, individuals were considered dangerous because they each perceived to embody a witch’s spirit, or perhaps because they merely had a familial relationship with other victims. For example, the notion of serial age collectives discussed in Chap. 6 situates the three young children deposited in Room 12-18-15. In Fahlander’s scheme of developmental trajectories, these children were innocent beings – increasingly mobile individuals who exhibited a new-found agency. Since their presence in world as not yet Tewa made them particularly vulnerable to evil influences, they may have been targeted by virtue of their shared collective bodily state. The stickiness of familial witch accusations may have raised additional concerns that these children embodied dangerous spirits. Fatal blows to the crowns of their heads, breaking of anterior teeth, and clubbing of their torsos were violent – perhaps even obligatory – actions that targeted these youngsters to protect other villagers. These were necessary yet fatal measures meant to render the bodies of these children no longer usable by witches.

Second, violent acts instantiated at Arroyo Hondo were not primarily public spectacles. The assaults on the individuals deposited in Kiva G may have been initiated in a public area but ended in this kiva’s secluded ritual space. These assaults asserted ritual boundaries to protect the village. It may not have been necessary for residents to bear witness to these acts in public spaces. If these ritual actions were sanctioned acts that did not constitute violence, observers may have been discouraged or prohibited. It may have even been considered dangerous for villagers to witness such acts. Other violent events took place in the privacy of cloistered residential spaces, such as the ritualized deaths of the individuals in Roomblock 16. These acts were purposeful, violent intrusions into a kindred’s residential spaces. It’s even conceivable these vehement ritual performances were sanctioned or even performed by kindred members who resided in and controlled these spaces.

The violence enacted in the residential rooms of Roomblock 12-18 emerged later in the village’s occupation. These lethal acts also were carried out in enclosed village spaces. Since Roomblock 12-18 formed the southwest corner of Plaza G, it is possible these subsequent vehement decision events were spatially enchained actions entangled with the earlier deposition of bodies in Kiva G. Even when rooms were abandoned or no longer roofed structures such as Room 12-18-15, the affordances of built space may still have cosmologically “contained” these bodies. The soundscape of these spaces and the time of day these events took place also may have been significant.

Ritualized acts of violence at Arroyo Hondo were centered in specific kin-based spaces of the pueblo. The deaths of these individuals were not random events, but acts directed at the bodies of specific individuals who were deemed to be non-beings. In addition, the disposal of these bodies in Kiva G enspaced them in a liminal cosmological space scaffolded by this structure’s architecture. Rendering this sacred space unusable may have directed other forms of vehemence at the sodalities who controlled this kiva. On the other hand, its’ possible the kindred group controlling Kiva G may have sanctioned these acts, and perhaps found it essential that they perform these acts themselves in their own sacred cosmological space.

Even the bodies of the 3 young children deposited in Room 12-18-15 were enspaced in a structure. Though was an abandoned room filled with trash, the burning and then clearing of this structure before it was filled with trash set this space apart both from other Component I rooms and from other midden areas. The use of this abandoned room as well as the violent act of depositing a man’s disinterred remains in another nearby room hints at the importance of enspacing the bodies of non-beings in formal cosmologically structured built space. Interiors spaces at Arroyo Hondo shaped vehemence acts as a boundary-making process. These actions were not public spectacles per se but actions defined by the villages cosmological configuration.

Third, transformative decision events were enchained acts of vehemence. At Arroyo Hondo, specific circumstances and conditions preceded and shaped the emergence of each violent act. In the aftermath of a violent event, life carried on for surviving villagers. For example, Plaza G continued in use after the bodies were deposited in Kiva G and the structure subsequently collapsed. The Kiva’s depression was eventually filled with trash and the plaza was replastered with several new surfaces. The on-going need for a sacred kiva space in Plaza G prompted the construction of the ground level D-shaped in the northeast corner of this plaza. This structure may have been built by kindreds who still resided in the surrounding roomblocks to serve the needs of their sodalities. On the other hand, the interment of macaws in Plaza G may have marked a shift in the ritual identity of sodalities affiliated with this space. Over time, social mechanisms such as gossip and storytelling likely served to knit the village back together after this violent event. Yet damaged social relations may have persisted through the “stickiness” of witchcraft accusations. These subsequent activities reconfigured Plaza G and served to reintegrate life, only to be punctuated by later emergent acts of violence.

Finally, vehemence acts at Arroyo Hondo encompassed actions other than lethal assaults. Non-lethal injuries and the manipulation of the dead were other forms of vehemence, some of which were animated by cosmologically powerful objects (such as obsidian). Since kindreds residing at Arroyo Hondo likely spoke different languages, these violent acts may have served to forge and reinforce codes of morality among disparate extended families with different arenas of ritual knowledge and understandings of the world. Vehemence may have been one means of instantiating how individuals were differentiated as being-with verses being-within-the-world that promoted social cohesion and ultimately facilitated the emergence of Tewa cosmology during the fourteenth century.

8.11.1 Community Violence and Being-Within-The World

Not all violent acts at villages like Arroyo Hondo carried the same meaning. Community violence reflected moments when community tipping points were crossed, and obligatory ritualized responses were enacted. Situational evil and sticky accusations persistently raised suspicions. As perceived threats to the well-being of the community breached thresholds, vehemence shaped the necessary acts that emerged to protect the village. Perpetrators involved in these salient events were not people but embodied deities who possessed the specialized knowledge and authority to carry out ritualized violent actions. These were neither public spectacles nor acts directed against persons. Rather, these were sanctioned acts directed against embodied dangerous spirits – liminal non-persons that had to be confronted. Decision events at Arroyo Hondo were nuanced contextualized moments of situational evil when vehemence was enacted as violence. These acts were embedded in and afforded meaning by a cosmology that shaped everyday life.

Perez (2012) suggests that violence and the processing of bodies in Ancestral Puebloan groups were explicit political acts that emphasized the dismemberment, subjugation, and annihilation of the victims. Enactments of extreme body processing at Sacred Ridge and Pollaca Wash are examples of places that were abandoned in the face of violence intent on expunging all aspects of social orderliness. In these instances, extreme violent acts reflect intersubjective distinctions of “being-with-the-world”. Dismembering, scraping, cutting, burning, and commingling human body parts with similarly dismembered dogs were directed at individuals perceived as “others” and enemies to annihilate their humanity symbolically and literally.

By contrast, acts of vehemence at Arroyo Hondo were informed by the dualities that constructed persons within the Puebloan worldview Ortiz (1972). These violent events were not acts of social domination or warfare. Clubbing and lethal blows to the head directed at the living, and dismembering bodies directed at the dead were purposeful, sanctioned and necessarily violent measures enacted to restore cosmological orderliness. Situated by the notion of being-within-the-world, these vehement acts were shaped by and understood through fluid notions of personhood. These were boundary-making assertions carried out by ritual specialists responsible for detecting and dealing with the situational evil influences of dangerous spirits. During the fourteenth century at Arroyo Hondo Pueblo, vehement ritualized responses to misfortune promoted social cohesion by maintaining a fundamental balance between good and evil in Tewa cosmology.