Minerals

This chapter discusses the procurement of clay, temper, and mineral pigments (including lead) used to make pottery, as well as tool stone, salt, and turquoise, by people in the Southwest. This chapter also discusses the distribution of these minerals and the analytical means used by archaeologists to source them. Some of these materials were available near residences, while others were located at greater distances, requiring trade relationships or sojourns to acquire. When resources were procured from considerable distances, their procurement was often enmeshed in ritual. The procurement and circulation of these resources are critical to models of social, political, and economic interaction in Southwest archaeology.

On History in Southwest Archaeology

As an introduction to the Handbook, this chapter examines the question of history in Southwest archaeology in two senses. First, it traces the intellectual history of research in the region: from the nineteenth-century inauguration of Southwest archaeology as an extension of American military conquest, to the museum-oriented expeditions of the turn of the century, to the scientific advances and the growth of culture resource management during the twentieth century, to the impacts of Indigenous critiques and the development of collaborative approaches most recently. Second, the chapter explores the shifting status of “history” as a central goal of archaeological practice. How have archaeologists constructed—or resisted—narratives to account for the contingent unfolding of Indigenous and colonial societies in the region? What bodies of method and theory have guided these efforts? In addressing these questions, the chapter marks and participates in a growing historical turn in Southwest archaeology.

Narrative Histories

Southwest archaeology is oddly ahistorical. Since the turn of the nineteenth century, the development of the field led away from history and toward process: first, the anthropological processes by which the ethnographic Pueblos evolved; and second (with New and Processual archaeology), the processes evident in the Southwest that could, shorn of historical background clutter, apply universally. For most of the twentieth century, attempts at narrative history were dismissed as “just-so stories.” It is now recognized that the Southwest in fact did have history—a narrative specific to the Southwest, with many events having little to do with ethnographic Pueblos. The derision of history as “just-so stories” seems hard to shake, while residual scientism imposes inappropriate and impossible standards of proof. This chapter reviews the checkered history of history in Southwest archaeology, and suggests some ways to understand the narrative history of the pre-Hispanic Southwest.

The Built Environment

The most intensively studied societies within Southwest archaeology—the Ancestral “Pueblos”—have been defined by their architecture. Stark village ruins of stone and adobe, some perched high in cliff settings, dot much of the region and are today its major tourist attractions. But as this chapter demonstrates, the architecture and built landscapes of the greater Southwest were vastly more diverse, ranging from the ephemeral wikiup-like structures of early hunter-gatherers, to the various pithouse forms and configurations of the Archaic and later periods, to the monumental trincheras, ball courts, and platform mounds of the southern Southwest, to the great kivas, great houses, and road systems of the Chacoan world. This chapter surveys that diversity and considers the way the built environment has been mobilized as evidence to make claims about social and political organization, religion practice, cosmology, mobility, and scale of collective labor projects within studies of ancient Southwest communities.

People

This chapter describes the scope of bioarchaeology in the American Southwest, the strengths and limitations of the research, and challenges presented by the cultural resource management work setting and concern with the preferences of descendant communities regarding the treatment and study of human remains. The bioarchaeological record of childhood, gendered social and economic roles, variation in diet and health, biological distance, and the contexts of interpersonal and lethal violence provide unique insights into daily life in the past, as well as the larger social and political processes that drive cultural and biological history in this region. The rejection of systematic and fine-grained analysis of mortuary features is a notable irony given the interest in identity construction, ethnicity, and migration in Southwest archaeology.

Oral Traditions

Never before have oral narratives been more important in Southwest archaeology than they are today. Spoken histories—variously known as oral traditions, oral histories, Native literature, and verbal arts—play key roles in fostering a dialogue between descendant communities and archaeologists, affording broader anthropological understandings of Native cultures and their heritage, and providing novel and more informed understandings of the past. Ultimately, oral traditions are a cultural act of memory, often enveloped in metaphor but grounded in real historic events, personalities, and processes. Oral tradition and archaeology are, at base, not irreconcilably different, but rather two complementary ways of thinking and talking about the past.

The Oxford Handbook of Southwest Archaeology

The Oxford Handbook of Southwest Archaeology collectively surveys the state of method, theory, and historical reconstruction in the archaeology of the American Southwest, a region that encompasses the Southwest United States and Northwest Mexico. Part I is comprised of an extended introductory chapter that traces the intellectual development of the discipline from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Archaeological research in the Southwest—like that in any other region—is fundamentally a historical undertaking, and yet there has never been an explicit consideration of Southwest historiography. Part I redresses this situation. Part II inaugurates a set of inquiries into the “shape of history,” exploring the conceptual frameworks guiding archaeological accounts of the past, the intersections between archaeological and descendant perspectives, and the varied culture histories in each major subregion of the Southwest. Part III then turns to consider the “stuff of history” through a series of chapters focused on the material culture, landscapes, and ecologies that serve as the evidentiary bases for historical reconstructions. Together, the contributions provide the most comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the discipline and its findings, they chart out the contemporary practice of archaeology in the region from diverse perspectives, and they advocate for a new attention to the craft of historical narration in archaeological scholarship.