Local or Distant?: Items of Personal Adornment and Great House Identity in the Central Mesa Verde Region

Using a large assemblage of objects of personal adornment, we explore the internal variation in identity in one Ancestral Puebloan community of great houses – the Lakeview Community in southwestern Colorado. Ornaments vary in distance to source of the materials used and in the colors selected and worn. This community, like others in the region, is often discussed in relationship to Chaco Canyon. Within each great house, we see patterns that are similar to ornament use in distant Chaco Canyon, such as large proportions of nonlocal ornaments at Wallace and use of ornaments as votive architectural deposits at Ida Jean. Conversely, we also see some patterns at each site that are similar to those used by local neighbors in the region. Overall, the residents of the Lakeview Community use ornaments in complex ways to reflect a variety of facets of their identity with both local and distant elements.