Publication Date

Spring 2021

Abstract

This study examines the social role of gambling in the prehispanic U.S. Southwest. Many of the games recorded by ethnographers in the Southwest involved gambling, and game pieces resembling these examples have been found in archaeological sites. Settlement strategies in the Ancestral Puebloan Southwest changed through time, with periods of increasing aggregation and inter-cultural contact, two conditions that required mechanisms to facilitate successful interactions among multiple kin groups and between multiple culture groups.

Two Models explore the possibility that gambling served an integrative role in large, aggregated pueblos, and in pueblos located on the eastern frontier of the Pueblo region. The Models are based on the assumption that integrative strategies will be more prevalent in locations where these strategies are in greater need. The presence of gaming implements, including bone dice, worked sherds, and hollow bone tubes, is taken as evidence of gambling in the past, and the relative frequency and stylistic diversity of these game pieces were compared between large and small sites, and between frontier and non-frontier sites in the Ancestral Pueblo region.

The comparisons did suggest that gambling was more prevalent in the large and frontier sites. However, greater diversity was found at some small and non-frontier sites, suggesting that the role of gambling in society may be multi-faceted and complex. Game pieces were found at all of the sites, and it is clear that gambling was an important feature of society in the U.S. Southwest past. This study has investigated one aspect of that complexity.

Keywords

Gambling, Social Integration, Gaming Implements, Ancestral Puebloan, Chaco Canyon, Mimbres, Pecos Pueblo, Salinas Pueblos

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Anthropology

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Anthropology

First Committee Member (Chair)

Patricia L. Crown

Second Committee Member

Wirt Wills

Third Committee Member

Keith M. Prufer

Fourth Committee Member

Thomas Rocek

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