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Games People Played: The Social Role Of Gambling In The Prehispanic U.S. Southwest, Marilyn B. Riggs

Anthropology ETDs

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. …