An Anthropological Examination of the Pueblos of the Southwest: This 4-page paper discusses whether or not the pueblo tribes are a subset of Native Americans. There is a bibliography.
The pueblo peoples of the American Southwest have long been of interest to anthropologists because of their unique religions, farming lifestyle, architecture, and art forms. Some of the pueblo groups are the Zuni, the Hopi, the Navajo, Santa Clara, Acoma, and San Ildefonso. There are as many as nineteen different pueblo groups in New Mexico alone. The word pueblo comes from the Spanish language, meaning village or dwelling, an indication that the pueblo groups created a particular type of adobe living structure out of the soil available in the area. The pueblos show relationships to the older civilizations of Mesoamerica, such Anazi, the prehistoric culture of Arid America (Hatcher 1999:287). Examples of pueblo pottery have been found in the Chaco Canyon area of New Mexico, dating back as far as 1050 to 1200 A.D. (Seven Families 1974:108).
The problem is whether or not the pueblo culture would be considered a subculture in the southwest. Anthropologist Wolford defines subculture as a "distinctive set of standards and behavior patterns by which a group within a larger society operates" and he defines culture as the "ideals, values, and beliefs shared by members of a society, that they use to interpret experience and general behavior" (Wolford 2004: 2). All cultures have ways in which they define themselves, and Hatcher says that "visual art forms have potential for being particularly useful for this study because they are tangible" (Hatcher 1999: 288). For that reason, the pueblo arts, especially the pottery, are the focus of this discussion, with the aim of determining whether the arts, as expressed through the pueblo pottery. are sufficiently distinctive that the pueblos could be called a subculture within the southwest. Information fo...