Severin Fowles Assistant Professor

Assistant Professor

Telephone: (212)-854-0092       Email: sfowles@barnard.edu

As an anthropological archaeologist I have dual interests in (1) the deep histories of human societies and (2) the materiality of social life. My research is based in northern New Mexico where I have undertaken excavations, regional survey and archival research to better understand the social transformations involved in the evolution of large village communities during last millennium, particularly those transformations related to ritual practice and religious organization. The Pueblo peoples in this region are well known ethnographically for their elaborate priesthoods, and I have sought to understand how and why these priesthoods were constructed and contested over time.

My interests continue to revolve around the role of ritual practice in the development of Pueblo societies, but my most recent research and writing has shifted from the study of theocratic organization toward broader questions related to taboo, iconography, the archaeological study of immateriality, and the relationship between landscape and cosmology. Regarding the latter, I am currently initiating a multi-year archaeological survey of the Rio Grande gorge, a dramatic fissure in the earth that has long exerted a strong influence on local thought and movement in northern New Mexico. This survey has been designed to examine the deep historical engagement with the gorge from its earliest Archaic occupation some seven millennia ago, through to its contemporary significance as a place of seclusion, spiritualism and increasingly, suicide.

I teach Origins of Human Society (Fall 2006, Fall 2007), Anthropological Theory I (Fall 2006, 2007), Thing Theory (Spring 2007), Native North America (Spring 2008), and Culture, Animal and Other (Spring 2008).

Selection Publications

Articles:

In prep: "The Making of Made People: Evolution of a Pueblo Hierocracy." School of American Research Press, Santa Fe.

In press: "Steps toward and archaeology of taboo." In Religion in the Material World, edited by Lars Fogelin. Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

In press. "Clay, conflict and village aggregation: compositional analyses of pre-Classic pottery in the Taos district, NM." American Antiquity.

2005: "Our father (our mother): gender ideology, praxis, and marginalization in Pueblo religion." In Engaged Anthropology, edited by Michelle Hegmon and B. Sunday Eiselt. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

2005: "Historical contingency and the prehistoric foundations of Eastern Pueblo moiety organization." Journal of Anthropological Research 61(1).

2004: "Tewa versus Tiwa: settlement patterns and social history in the northern Rio Grande, AD 1275-1540." In The Protohistoric Pueblo World, AD 1275-1600, edited by E. Charles Adams and Andrew Duff, pp. 17-25. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

2002: "Inequality and egalitarian rebellion: a tribal dialectic in Tonga history." In The Archaeology of Tribal Societies, edited by William Parkinson, pp. 74-96. International Monographs in Prehistory, Ann Arbor.

2002: "From social type to social process: placing 'tribe' in a historical framework." In The Archaeology of Tribal Societies, edited by William Parkinson, pp. 13-33. International Monographs in Prehistory, Ann Arbor.

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