The
eastern Pueblo heartland, located in the northern Rio Grande country of
New Mexico, has fascinated archaeologists since the 1870s.
In Ancestral
Landscapes of the Pueblo World, James Snead uses an
exciting new approach— landscape archaeology—to
understand ancestral Pueblo communities and the way the people
consciously or unconsciously shaped the land around them. Snead
provides detailed insight into ancestral Puebloan cultures and
societies using an approach he calls “contextual
experience,” employing deep mapping and community-scale
analysis. This strategy goes far beyond the standard archaeological
approaches, using historical ethnography and contemporary Puebloan
perspectives to better understand how past and present Pueblo
worldviews and meanings are imbedded in the land.
Snead focuses on five communities in the Pueblo
heartland—Burnt Corn, T’obimpaenge, Tsikwaiye, Los
Aguajes, and Tsankawi—using the results of intensive
archaeological surveys to discuss the changes that occurred in these
communities between AD 1250 and 1500. He examines the history of each
area, comparing and contrasting them via the themes of
“provision,” “identity,” and
“movement,” before turning to questions regarding
social, political, and economic organization. This revolutionary study
thus makes an important contribution to landscape archaeology and
explains how the Precolumbian Pueblo landscape was formed.
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Ancestral Landscapes
of the Pueblo World
by James E. Snead
University of Arizona Press,
2008
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a copy
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