Living with the Dead

At Arroyo Hondo, villagers literally lived with the dead. Like other Ancestral Puebloan settlements, the dead were interspersed within village spaces rather than interred in cemetery areas separated from the living. Placing the dead among the living may have expressed the unity of life in fourteenth century Tewa cosmology. However, these spatial relationships also raise questions about how the dead were entangled in on-going relationships with the living. In Tewa cosmology, life is defined by transitions and transformations that distinguish life stages from an individual’s presence or being-in-the-world. Drawing on ethnographic homologies, I discuss how the treatment of bodies situated once living individuals as beings and as persons. I suggest that death transformed the now lifeless corpse into a vibrant object that maintained relationships with the living as xayeh.