Event: Pizza Talk: "Conflict and Treachery in the Sacred Ridge Community, Southwest Colorado"

Speaker: James Potter, PaleoWest Archaeology, INC.

This presentation will discuss the formation, development, and dissolution of an early prehispanic community in Southwestern Colorado. At its height the Ridges Basin community, dating from A.D. 750-825, comprised approximately 75 households organized in pithouse clusters. Households in these clusters were diverse in their backgrounds and social identities, regularly exercised violence against one another, and were variably connected to other communities and the larger outside world. The result was a community that developed and changed rapidly, exhibited fluid boundaries and volatile social relations among households, and came to a quick and violent end. Various models will be explored to explain the final massacre at the Sacred Ridge site.