In the Aftermath of Migration: Assessing the Social Consequences of Late 13th and 14th Century Population Movements into Southeastern Arizona

Abstract

This dissertation examines an instance of population movement from northeastern Arizona to the Safford and Aravaipa valleys of southeastern Arizona in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in order to understand the scale at which these migrations occurred, as well as the effect these migrations had on the expression of identity of both migrant and indigenous groups. Previous research indicated that at least one group of migrants from the Kayenta and Tusayan areas of northeastern Arizona arrived in the Safford Valley in the last decades of the thirteenth century. The research presented here found that several other parties of puebloan migrants arrived in both suprahousehold level and household level groups during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, first settling independently of local populations, and then intermingling with local populations at mixed settlements. Initially, as migrant and indigenous populations remained segregated from each other, their pre-migration identities were maintained, and each group remained distinct. However, as these populations began to live together at mixed settlements, they renegotiated their identities in order to deal with the day-to-day realities of living with groups of people with whom they had no previous experience. Through this process, migrant and indigenous groups formed a new identity that incorporated elements of the pre-migration identities of both groups. With these results, a model of the effects of migration on identity was created and refined to allow the social consequences of migration to be better understood.