Anasazi America
David E. Stuart incorporates extensive new research findings through groundbreaking archaeology to explore the rise and fall of the Chaco Anasazi and how it parallels patterns throughout modern societies in this new edition. Adding new research findings on caloric flows in prehistoric times and investigating the evolutionary dynamics induced by these forces as well as exploring the consequences of an increasingly detached central Chacoan decision-making structure, Stuart argues that Chaco's failure was a failure to adapt to the consequences of rapid growth--including problems with the misuse of farmland, malnutrition, loss of community, and inability to deal with climatic catastrophe.
Ancient Peoples of the American Southwest
Most people are familiar with the famous pre-Columbian civilizations of the Aztecs and Maya of Mexico, but few realize just how advanced were contemporary cultures in the American Southwest. Here lie some of the most remarkable monuments of America's prehistoric past, such as Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde.
Ten thousand years ago, humans first colonized this seemingly inhospitable landscape with its scorching hot deserts and upland areas that drop below freezing even during the early summer months. The initial hunter-gatherer bands gradually adapted to become sedentary village groups. The high point of Southwestern civilization was reached with the emergence of cultures known as Anasazi, Hohokam, and Mogollon in the first millennium AD.
Interweaving the latest archaeological evidence with early first-person accounts, Stephen Plog explains the rise and mysterious fall of Southwestern cultures. For this revised edition, he discusses new research and its implications for our understanding of the prehistoric Southwest. As he concludes, the Southwest is still home to vibrant Native American communities who carry on many of the old traditions.
Ancient Ruins and Rock Art of the Southwest
This fourth edition of David Grant Noble's indispensable guide to archaeological ruins of the American Southwest includes updated text and newly opened archaeological sites. Filled with photos of ruins, petroglyphs, and artifacts, as well as maps, this is a guide every traveler needs when exploring the Southwest.
Ancient Southwest
Take a trip to the Ancient Southwest. McNamee guides you on a memorable tour through 50 national and state parks, monuments and other sites in the modern American Southwest. Simultaneously, he leads you far back in time, to the eras when the earliest human beings lived in what is now Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. These ancient people left intriguing clues behind them: pueblos, tools, pottery, jewelry, baskets, petroglyphs, pictographs, corncobs, ropes, tree rings, kivas, and weavings. From such evidence, archaeologists can reconstruct sophisticated cultures with advanced knowledge of astronomy, architecture, agriculture, and art. In more than 100 spectacular photographs, Larry Lindahl captures the essence of these remarkable locations, including Mesa Verde National Park, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Navajo National Monument, Chaco Culture National Historic Park, Canyonlands National Park, and many more.
Children in Prehistoric Puebloan Southwest
Is there evidence of children in the archaeological record? Some would answer no, that "subadults" can only be distinguished when there is osteological confirmation. Others might suggest that the reason children don't exist in prehistory is because no one has looked for them, much as no one had looked for women in the same context until recently.
Focusing on the Southwest, contributors to this volume attempt to find some of those children, or at least show how they might be found. They address two issues: what was the cultural construction of childhood? What were childrens' lives like?
Determining how cultures with written records have constructed childhood in the past is hard enough, but the difficulty is magnified in the case of ancient Puebloan societies. The contributors here offer approaches from careful analysis of artifacts and skeletal remains to ethnographic evidence in rock art. Topics include ceramics and evidence of child manufacture and painting, cradleboards, evidence of child labor, and osteological evidence of health conditions.
Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde
In 1891, Swedish scientist Gustaf Nordenskiold studied, explored, and photographed many of Mesa Verde’s cliff dwellings. Considered by many to be the first true archeologist at Mesa Verde, his book, The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde, was the first extensive record of its cliff dwellings. This edition is richly illustrated with Nordenskiold's own drawings and photographs which have been digitally remastered.
"The summer and autumn of 1891 I passed through Colorado, engaged upon investigations of the remarkable cliff dwellings scattered in the canons of an extensive plateau, the Mesa Verde, in the southwest of the state. The present work is the result of those researches. It contains a description of the ruins, an account of the excavations carried out there and of the objects discovered." - G. Nordenskiold, Preface
Cliff Dwellings Speak
The Cliff Dwellings Speak empowers Southwestern travelers to decipher remnants from the past. It covers cliff dwellings from Colorado and Utah in the North, in Arizona and New Mexico and even into Northern Mexico.
This is not your typical guidebook. It does not disclose site locations nor name the ancient ruins. Instead, it guides the explorer around a site in Sherlock Holmes fashion, providing clear tools for understanding cliff dwellings. It is an introduction to Southwestern archaeology and the culture of the current Pueblo people, descendants of the cliff dwellers.
History of the Ancient Southwest
Stephen H. Lekson weaves together the parallel narratives of a political history of the pre-Hispanic American Southwest and a critical intellectual history of southwestern archaeology. Writing in an engaging, literate, and humorous style, Lekson casts the ancient Southwest as the revolving scene of dramatic events played out by elites and commoners, locals and foreigners, imitators and innovators. The strikingly communal, democratic, and settled nature of historic Pueblo peoples is seen as a deliberate cultural reaction to a far darker past when kings ruled. Likewise, the author reacts to archaeology's preoccupation with being scientific and explaining cultural processes at the expense of understanding history.
House of Rain
The greatest "unsolved mystery" of the American Southwest is the fate of the Anasazi. Was it drought? Pestilence? War? Forced migration, mass murder or suicide? Conflicting theories have abounded for years, capturing the North American imagination for eons.
Join Craig Childs as he draws on the latest scholarly research, as well as a lifetime of exploration in the forbidden landscapes of the American Southwest, to shed new light on this compelling mystery.
Living and Leaving
The Mesa Verde migrations in the thirteenth century were an integral part of a transformative period that forever changed the course of Pueblo history. For more than seven hundred years, Pueblo people lived in the Northern San Juan region of the U.S. Southwest. Yet by the end of the 1200s, tens of thousands of Pueblo people had left the region. Understanding how it happened and where they went are enduring questions central to Southwestern archaeology.
Author Donna M. Glowacki shows how "living and leaving" were experienced across the region and what role differing stressors and enablers had in causing emigration. The author's analysis explains how different histories and contingencies--which were shaped by deeply rooted eastern and western identities, a broad-reaching Aztec-Chaco ideology, and the McElmo Intensification--converged, prompting everyone to leave the region. This book will be of interest to southwestern specialists and anyone interested in societal collapse, transformation, and resilience.
Living the Ancient Southwest
How did Southwestern peoples make a living in the vast arid reaches of the Great Basin? When and why did violence erupt in the Mesa Verde region? Who were the Fremont people? How do some Hopis view Chaco Canyon? These are just a few of the topics addressed in Living the Ancient Southwest.
In this illustrated anthology, readers will discover chapters written over the past several decades by anthropologist-writers. They speak about the beauty and originality of Mimbres pottery, the rock paintings in Canyon de Chelly, the history of the Wupatki Navajos, O'odham songs describing ancient trails to the Pacific Coast, and other subjects relating to the deep indigenous history and culture of the American Southwest.
Lost World of the Old Ones
In this thrilling story of intellectual and archaeological discovery, David Roberts recounts his last twenty years of far-flung exploits in search of spectacular prehistoric ruins and rock art panels known to very few modern travelers. His adventures range across Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado, and illuminate the mysteries of the Ancestral Puebloans and their contemporary neighbors the Mogollon and Fremont, as well as of the more recent Navajo and Comanche.
Mesa Verde World
Mesa Verde, with its stunning landscapes and cliff dwellings, evokes all the romance of American archaeology. It has intrigued researchers and visitors for more than a century. But "Mesa Verde" represents more than cliff dwellings--its peoples created a culture that thrived for a thousand years in Southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah. Archaeologists have discovered dozens of long-buried hamlets and villages spread for miles across the Great Sage Plain west and north of Mesa Verde. Only lately have these sites begun to reveal their secrets.
In recent decades, archaeologists have been working intensively in the Mesa Verde region to build the story of its ancestral Pueblo inhabitants. The Mesa Verde World showcases new findings about the region's prehistory, environment, and archaeological history, from newly discovered reservoir systems on Mesa Verde to astronomical alignments at Yellow Jacket Pueblo. Key topics include farming, settlement, sacred landscapes, cosmology and astronomy, rock art, warfare, migration, and contemporary Pueblo perspectives.
Puebloan Ruins Southwest
Puebloan Ruins of the Southwest offers a complete picture of Puebloan culture from its prehistoric beginnings through twenty-five hundred years of growth and change, ending with the modern-day Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Arizona.
Aerial and ground photographs, over 325 in color, and sixty settlement plans provide an armchair trip to ruins that are open to the public and that may be visited or viewed from nearby. Included, too, are the living pueblos from Taos in north central New Mexico along the Rio Grande Valley to Isleta, and westward through Acoma and Zuni to the Hopi pueblos in Arizona.
In addition to the architecture of the ruins, Puebloan Ruins of the Southwest gives a detailed overview of the Pueblo Indians' lifestyles including their spiritual practices, food, clothing, shelter, physical appearance, tools, government, water management, trade, ceramics, and migrations.
Seeking The Center Place
The continuing work of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center has focused on community life in the northern Southwest during the Great Pueblo period (AD 1150- 1300). Researchers have been able to demonstrate that during the last Puebloan occupation of the area the majority of the population lived in dispersed communities and large villages of the Great Sage Plain, rather than at nearby Mesa Verde. The work at Sand Canyon Pueblo and more than sixty other large contemporary pueblos has examined reasons for population aggregation and why this strategy was ultimately forsaken in favor of a migration south of the San Juan River, leaving the area depopulated by 1290.
Contributors to this volume, many of whom are distinguished southwestern researchers, draw from a common database derived from extensive investigations at the 530-room Sand Canyon Pueblo, intensive test excavations at thirteen small sites and four large villages, a twenty-five square kilometer full-coverage survey, and an inventory of all known villages in the region. Topics include the context within which people moved into villages, how they dealt with climatic changes and increasing social conflict, and how they became increasingly isolated from the rest of the Southwest.
Seeking the Center Place is the most detailed view we have ever had of the last Pueblo communities in the Mesa Verde region and will provide a better understanding of the factors that precipitated the migration of thousands of people.
Study of Southwestern Archaeology
In this volume Steve Lekson argues that, for over a century, southwestern archaeology got the history of the ancient Southwest wrong. Instead, he advocates an entirely new approach--one that separates archaeological thought in the Southwest from its anthropological home and moves to more historical ways of thinking.
Focusing on the enigmatic monumental center at Chaco Canyon, the book provides a historical analysis of how Southwest archaeology confined itself, how it can break out of those confines, and how it can proceed into the future. Lekson suggests that much of what we believe about the ancient Southwest should be radically revised. Looking past old preconceptions brings a different Chaco Canyon into view: more than an eleventh-century Pueblo ritual center, Chaco was a political capital with nobles and commoners, a regional economy, and deep connections to Mesoamerica. By getting the history right, a very different science of the ancient Southwest becomes possible and archaeology can be reinvented as a very different discipline.
https: //uofupress.lib.utah.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2019/04/Lekson-Notes.pdf