On Wednesday, November 18 at 4:30 pm Dr. Hannah Mattson will present her talk The Jewelry of Pueblo Bonito: Insights into the Production, Use, and Meaning of Personal Ornaments at Chaco Canyon  via Zoom, hosted by the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology . 

Register in advance here

Abstract:

Chaco Canyon is extraordinary in many respects, one of which is the dense concentration of jewelry found in archaeological contexts dating between the 9^th and early 12^th centuries A.D. The largest and most prominent pueblo in the canyon is Pueblo Bonito, a 650-room structure with elite burial chambers and material imported from across the Southwestern U.S. and Mesoamerica. Excavations conducted at Pueblo Bonito between 1896 and 1927 resulted in the collection of over 100,000 items of personal adornment fashioned from turquoise, marine shell, jet, and local stone. Dr. Hannah Mattson has studied Pueblo Bonito’s ancient jewelry assemblage for over a decade through several interrelated research projects. In this lecture, Dr. Mattson discusses her research, including how these objects were produced and what their past social meanings may have been.

Hannah Mattson is a Southwestern archaeologist and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in the archaeology of Chaco Canyon and the larger Ancestral Pueblo region, personal adornment and social identity, ceramic technology, and public archaeology. She has authored numerous articles and book chapters on items of adornment from the northern Southwest and is currently editing a volume titled “Personal Adornment and the Construction of Identity: a Global Archaeological Perspective” that will be published in 2021.