Dr. Richard Ahlstrom – Ladders, Axes, and a Tale of Two Pueblo Technologies

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Two-pole ladders and hafted stone axes first came into common use in the Central Pueblo area at the same time, the late sixth to seventh centuries, underwent only minor or localized redesign over the following millennium, and fell out of use across the Pueblo World, again at the same time, in the seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries. The two-pole lashed rung ladder was a Pueblo invention, whereas the hafted-stone axe was borrowed from elsewhere. The two-pole ladder—the central figure of this telling—has received scant attention from students of Pueblo material culture, perhaps because the few surviving examples entered the archaeological record one at a time and are now scattered among the collections of a dozen museums. Especially noteworthy is the ladder’s ingenious design, which employs supplemental rods and self-tightening lashings for attaching rungs to its plain or unnotched poles.  

That both the two-pole ladders and the axes continued in use for so long is a testament to how well they performed their appointed tasks. Both implements did, however, involve considerable effort to produce and maintain—substantially more than that required by the older tools and techniques that they replaced. Pueblo craftspeople took on that added effort on account of the ways in which the ladders and the axes contributed to the construction and use of pithouses that, for the first time, were routinely being built with roof-top as opposed to side-wall entries. The tools’ contemporaneous adoption was not, in other words, merely coincidental, but a function of the roles they played in broader developments in the Pueblo-built environment. Their contemporaneous obsolescence, a thousand years later, was also not a coincidence, as Pueblo users deemed the traditional artifacts inferior to the mortised-rung ladders and axes of iron and steel introduced to them by newly arrived Spaniards in the course of their conquest and establishment of a New Mexico colony. So, here again, developments in ladder and axe technology reflect broader patterns in Pueblo history.  

My talk will explore these and other topics in the history of Pueblo ladders and axes while touching as well on challenges and opportunities in studying these two relatively uncommon artifact types. 

Dr. Ahlstrom has been doing archaeology in the American Southwest for just over five decades, first as a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, then working on several mostly contract projects distributed widely across the region, and now as a retiree. Study locations important to the development of my archaeological identity include Las Vegas Valley in southern Nevada; Park Wash and Jackson Flat in southcentral Utah; Cedar Mesa in southeastern Utah; the Dolores Project area in southwestern Colorado; Walpi Pueblo, Black Mesa, and the Flagstaff area in northeastern Arizona; Perry Mesa in central Arizona; the Barry Goldwater Range in southwestern Arizona; and Faraway Ranch in southeastern Arizona. From my dissertation on, he has maintained an active research interest in the interpretation of tree-ring data from all manner of Pueblo-tradition contexts. This lecture for Arch and His is drawn from a manuscript on Pueblo ladders and axes recently submitted for publication.