This lively overview of the archaeology of northern New Mexico's Pajarito Plateau argues that Bandelier National Monument and the Pajarito Plateau became the Southwest's most densely populated and important upland ecological preserve when the great regional society centered on Chaco Canyon collapsed in the twelfth century. Some of Chaco's survivors moved southeast to the then thinly populated Pajarito Plateau, where they were able to survive by fundamentally refashioning their society. David E. Stuart, an anthropologist/archaeologist known for his stimulating overviews of prehistoric settlement and subsistence data, argues here that this re-creation of ancestral Puebloan society required a fundamental rebalancing of the Chacoan model. Where Chaco was based on growth, grandeur, and stratification, the socioeconomic structure of Bandelier was characterized by efficiency, moderation, and practicality. Although Stuart's focus is on the archaeology of Bandelier and the surrounding area, his attention to events that predate those sites by several centuries and at substantial distances from the modern monument is instructive. Beginning with Paleo-Indian hunter-gatherers and ending with the large villages and great craftsmen of the mid-sixteenth century, Stuart presents Bandelier as a society that, in crisis, relearned from its pre-Chacoan predecessors how to survive through creative efficiencies. Illustrated with previously unpublished maps supported by the most recent survey data, this book is indispensable for anyone interested in southwestern archaeology.

Tewa Worlds tells a history of eight centuries of the Tewa people, set among their ancestral homeland in northern New Mexico. Bounded by four sacred peaks and bisected by the Rio Grande, this is where the Tewa, after centuries of living across a vast territory, reunited and forged a unique type of village life. It later became an epicenter of colonialism, for within its boundaries are both the ruins of the first Spanish colonial capital and the birthplace of the atomic bomb. Yet through this dramatic change the Tewa have endured and today maintain deep connections with their villages and a landscape imbued with memory and meaning. Anthropologists have long trekked through Tewa country, but the literature remains deeply fractured among the present and the past, nuanced ethnographic description, and a growing body of archaeological research. Samuel Duwe bridges this divide by drawing from contemporary Pueblo philosophical and historical discourse to view the long arc of Tewa history as a continuous journey. The result is a unique history that gives weight to the deep past, colonial encounters, and modern challenges, with the understanding that the same concepts of continuity and change have guided the people in the past and present, and will continue to do so in the future. Focusing on a decade of fieldwork in the northern portion of the Tewa world—the Rio Chama Valley—Duwe explores how incorporating Pueblo concepts of time and space in archaeological interpretation critically reframes ideas of origins, ethnogenesis, and abandonment. It also allows archaeologists to appreciate something that the Tewa have always known: that there are strong and deep ties that extend beyond modern reservation boundaries.

Between the 1870s and 1950s collectors vigorously pursued the artifacts of Native American groups. Setting out to preserve what they thought was a vanishing culture, they amassed ethnographic and archaeological collections amounting to well over one million objects and founded museums throughout North America that were meant to educate the public about American Indian skills, practices, and beliefs. In Collecting Native America contributors examine the motivations, intentions, and actions of eleven collectors who devoted substantial parts of their lives and fortunes to acquiring American Indian objects and founding museums. They describe obsessive hobbyists such as George Heye, who, beginning with the purchase of a lice-ridden shirt, built a collection that—still unsurpassed in richness, diversity, and size—today forms the core of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. Sheldon Jackson, a Presbyterian missionary in Alaska, collected and displayed artifacts as a means of converting Native peoples to Christianity. Clara Endicott Sears used sometimes invented displays and ceremonies at her Indian Museum near Boston to emphasize Native American spirituality. The contributors chart the collectors' diverse attitudes towards Native peoples, showing how their limited contact with American Indian groups resulted in museums that revealed more about assumptions of the wider society than about the cultures being described.

The comprehensive book on Indian petroglyphs in the Southwest.

These essays summarize the results of new excavation and survey research at Bandelier National Monument, with special attention to determining why larger sites appear when and where they do, and how life in these later villages and towns differed from life in the earlier small hamlets that first dotted the Pajarito in the mid-1100s.

From the high plains of Canada to caves in the southeastern United States, images etched into and painted on stone by ancient Native Americans have aroused in observers the desire to understand their origins and meanings. Rock paintings and engravings can be found in nearly every state and province, and each region has its own distinctive story of discovery and evolving investigation of the rock art record. Rock art in the twenty-first century enjoys a large and growing popularity fueled by scholarly research and public interest alike. This book explores the history of rock art research in North America and is the only volume in the past twenty-five years to provide coverage of the subject on a continental scale. Written by contributors active in rock art research, it examines sites that provide a cross-section of regions and topics and complements existing books on rock art by offering new information, insights, and approaches to research. The first part of the volume explores different regional approaches to the study of rock art, including a set of varied responses to a single site as well as an overview of broader regional research investigations. It tells how Writing-on-Stone in southern Alberta, Canada, reflects changing thought about rock art from the 1870s to today; it describes the role of avocational archaeologists in the Mississippi Valley, where rock art styles differ on each side of the river; it explores discoveries in southwestern mountains and southeastern caves; and it integrates the investigation of cupules along Georgia’s Yellow River into a full study of a site and its context. The book also compares the differences between rock art research in the United States and France: from the outset, rock art was of only marginal interest to most U.S. archaeologists, while French prehistorians considered cave art an integral part of archaeological research. The book’s second part is concerned with working with the images today and includes coverage of gender interests, government sponsorship, the role of amateurs in research, and chronometric studies. Much has changed in our understanding of rock art since Cotton Mather first wrote in 1714 of a strange inscription on a Massachusetts boulder, and the cutting-edge contributions in this volume tell us much about both the ancient place of these enduring images and their modern meanings. Discovering North American Rock Art distills today’s most authoritative knowledge of the field and is an essential volume for both specialists and hobbyists.

This study focuses on the cultural-historical environment of the 88,900-acre (35,560-ha) Valles Caldera National Preserve (VCNP) over the past four centuries of Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. governance. It includes a review and synthesis of available published and unpublished historical, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic literature about the human occupation of the area now contained within the VCNP. Documents include historical maps, texts, letters, diaries, business records, photographs, land and mineral patents, and court testimony.‍?‍?This study presents a cultural-historical framework of VCNP land use that will be useful to land managers and researchers in assessing the historical ecology of the property. It provides VCNP administrators and agents the cultural-historical background needed to develop management plans that acknowledge traditional associations with the Preserve, and offers managers additional background for structuring and acting on consultations with affiliated communities.