Dr. Samantha Fladd (University of Colorado Boulder, Museum of Natural History)

While often overlooked as “trash,” the materials that accumulate in archaeological sites can signify intentional decisions demarcating relationships within a community and ties to architectural settings. In particular, the ways in which architectural spaces were prepared, altered, and decommissioned or closed through the placement of materials (objects and sediment) can reveal important cultural traditions and enduring relationships within and beyond the structures themselves. In this lecture, I discuss how reorienting our view of “trash” can reveal important aspects of identity in the archaeological record of the Ancestral Puebloan culture. I utilize examples from several sites spanning centuries of occupation to highlight the ways in which material deposition can alternately be used to express continuity or signal social change in large aggregated pueblos.