San Juan Basin Archaeological Society meeting and presentation
7:00pm / Fort Lewis Collage Lyceum
The San Juan Basin Archaeological Society invites the public to a presentation in the Lyceum at the Center of Southwest Studies and on Zoom on Wednesday, February 12th at 7:00 pm. At 6:30 we will have social time. Then after a brief business meeting, we will have a presentation by Dr. Michael Mathiowetz who is currently is a research assistant at the Getty Research Institute. Dr. Mathiowetz will discuss "The Keepers of Tradition: Clown Societies in the Casas Grandes and Puebloan Worlds". For log-in information go to SJBAS.ORG
Clowns are distinctive participants in public ritualism in the Puebloan world. Often characterized as irreverent buffoons who are models for proper and improper social, moral, and ethical behavior, clowns are quite complex beings with integral roles in governance, katsina ritualism, medicine societies, and the agricultural cycle. This presentation examines archaeological and ethnological data from the U.S. Southwest and northwest Mexico along with iconographic analyses to identify clowning traditions among the Casas Grandes culture in Chihuahua, Mexico. Clown societies in the Casas Grandes region appear to be absent during the Viejo period (AD 700-1200) but appear during the Medio period (AD 1200-1450) as an aspect of solar and agricultural ritualism that may predate the development of Puebloan clown societies during the Pueblo IV period. The identification of clowns as an aspect of "Sun Youth" ritualism sheds light on Casas Grandes governance, hierarchy, cosmology, and cultural disjunction and highlights Indigenous oral histories that connect various Puebloan tribal groups to Paquimé.
Biographical Statement: Michael D. Mathiowetz earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology at UC Riverside in 2011 and currently is a research assistant at the Getty Research Institute. His research focuses on questions of cultural change, the dynamic social networks that connected societies in Mesoamerica, west Mexico, and the U.S. Southwest/Mexican Northwest, and the legacies of these interactions among descendant communities. He has conducted fieldwork in the Aztatlán and Casas Grandes regions of west and northwest Mexico and museum and archival research on legacy collections for over two decades. He has published through British Archaeological Reports, Dumbarton Oaks, El Colegio de Michoacán, Harvard University Press/C.H. Beck, University of Arizona Press, University of Utah Press, Journal of the Southwest, Journal of Archaeological Research, Kiva, and others. He co-edited Flower Worlds: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest (with Andrew D. Turner, 2021) and Reassessing the Aztatlán World: Ethnogenesis and Cultural Continuity in Northwest Mesoamerica (with John M. D. Pohl, 2024).