Professor, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Associate Director, School of Sustainability

SHESC Themes: Biological, Social and Cultural Dimensions of Human Health; Societies and their Natural Environments

Field Specializations: Archaeology, Bioarchaeology, Ecology, Economic Anthropology, Exchange and Social Networks, Political Organization, Social Organization

Regional Focus: North America (Southwest)

Education

Ph.D., University of Michigan

Bio

Research:
Katherine A. Spielmann's research interests focus on prehistoric economies in smaller-scale societies, primarily in North America. She is especially interested in the ways in which economic intensification is fueled by increasing demands for food and goods in ritual, political and social contexts. One of her primary contributions to the discipline has been to demonstrate the variety of conditions under which small-scale societies with relatively non-complex political systems develop complex, specialized economies. She is also interested in the relationship between diet and health under different subsistence regimes.

Spielmann has completed 20 years of archaeological field research in the Salinas area of central New Mexico and embarked on a series of NSF-funded analyses of the wealth of data that was collected over those two decades. One of these analytical projects has focused on the nature and extent of economic specialization among aggregated Pueblo communities during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, with a particular focus on ceramics, and has demonstrated that each ceramic type (plain, white and glaze ware) was the product of a different scale of specialization and exchange.

An outgrowth of this research on craft specialization in the Southwest has been a new research project to investigate craft specialization in other smaller-scale societies. A comparative case study that Spielmann was recently engaged in through excavation and analysis of museum collections was that of the Hopewell of southern Ohio. Like Southwestern Pueblo populations, Hopewell peoples dramatically increased the intensity of craft production as demand for objects used in ritual performances grew. There are many contrasting aspects to Hopewell craft production, however, which are important in elucidating the Southwestern case study.

The second analytical project involving the Salinas materials concerns the impact of 17th-century Spanish colonization on Pueblo subsistence, diet and health. The Salinas data demonstrate stability in farming, a marked shift in hunting, variability in access to European domestic animals and a significant increase in labor on the part of the Pueblo population following missionization of the region. Ceramic data from the first analytical project have also allowed them to investigate resistance to Spanish missionization through changes in ceramic iconography.

Most recently Spielmann has returned to an interest she developed during her doctoral research concerning human-ecosystem interaction. Over the past two years she has organized a collaborative team of archaeology and ecology faculty and students that has initiated both a research and a teaching program focused on Perry Mesa, Agua Fria National Monument, north of the Phoenix Basin. There they are investigating the long-term ecological changes that resulted from a pulse of occupation by farmers in the A.D. 1200s and 1300s.

Research Projects:
Alliance and Landscape: Perry Mesa in the Fourteenth Century
AOC: Archaeological Data Integration for the Study of Long-Term Human and Social Dynamics
Long-Term Coupled Socioecological Change in the American Southwest and Northern Mexico

Publications

Spielmann, K. A. (2007), Mesoamerican ritual economy: Archaeological and ethnological perspectives. Boulder: University of Colorado Press.

Spielmann, K. A., Mobley-Tanaka, J. & Potter, J. (2006). Style and resistance in the seventeenth century Salinas province. American Antiquity, 71(4).

Spielmann, K. (2004). Communal feasting, ceramics, and exchange. In B. Mills (Ed.), Identity, feasting, and the archaeology of the greater Southwest (pp. 210-232). Boulder: University of Colorado Press.

Spielmann, K. A. (2004). Clusters revisited. In E. C. Adams & A. I. Duff (Eds.), The protohistoric pueblo world, A.D. 1275-1600 (pp. 137-143). Tucson: University of Arizona Press.