Often overshadowed by the Ancestral Pueblo centers at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde, the Middle San Juan is one of the most dynamic territories in the pre-Hispanic Southwest, interacting with Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde as well as the surrounding regions. This ancient Puebloan heartland was instrumental in tying together Chaco and Mesa Verde cultures to create a distinctive blend of old and new, local and nonlocal. The contributors to this book attribute the development of Salmon and Aztec to migration and colonization by people from Chaco Canyon. Rather than fighting for control over the territory, Chaco migrants and local leaders worked together to build the great houses of Aztec and Salmon while maintaining their identities and connections with their individual homelands. As a result of this collaboration, the Middle San Juan can be seen as one of the ancient Puebloan heartlands that made important contributions to contemporary Puebloan society.

A timely synopsis of the archaeology of the Middle San Juan region bringing recent work at Salmon Ruins into the context of thirty-five years of research there.

"Extraordinary . . . A transformative experience for the reader." —Lucy Sante "A large-hearted, wide-angled book . . . I couldn't put it down." —Ian Frazier A personal exploration of the American West and the work of one of America’s greatest photographers. Timothy O’Sullivan is America’s most famous war photographer. You know his work even if you don’t know his name: A Harvest of Death, taken at Gettysburg, is an icon of the Civil War. He was also among the first photographers to elevate what was then a trade to the status of fine art. The images of the American West he made after the war, while traveling with the surveys led by Clarence King and George Wheeler, display a prescient awareness of what photography would become; years later, Ansel Adams would declare his work “surrealistic and disturbing.” At the same time, we know very little about O’Sullivan himself. Nor do we know—really know—much more about the landscapes he captured. Robert Sullivan’s Double Exposure sets off in pursuit of these two enigmas. This book documents the author’s own road trip across the West in search of the places, many long forgotten or paved over, that O’Sullivan pictured. It also stages a reckoning with how the changes wrought on the land were already under way in the 1860s and '70s, and how these changes were a continuation of the Civil War by other means. Sullivan, known for his probing investigations of place in the pages of The New Yorker and books like Rats and My American Revolution, has produced a work that, like O’Sullivan’s magisterial photos of geysers and hot springs, exposes a fissure in the American landscape itself.

"The multiple, vivid colors of scarlet macaws and their ability to mimic human speech are key reasons they were and are significant to the Native peoples of the southwestern U.S. and northwest New Mexico. Although the birds' natural habitat is the tropical forests of Mexico and Central America, they were present at multiple archaeological sites in the region. Leading experts in southwestern archaeology explore the reasons why"--

Drawing on scholarly research and archaeological evidence, the author examines the accomplishments of the Anasazi people of the American Southwest and speculates on why the culture vanished by the 13th century.

It is one of the great mysteries in the archaeology of the Americas: the depopulation of the northern Southwest in the late thirteenth-century AD. Considering the numbers of people affected, the distances moved, the permanence of the departures, the severity of the surrounding conditions, and the human suffering and culture change that accompanied them, the abrupt conclusion to the farming way of life in this region is one of the greatest disruptions in recorded history. Much new paleoenvironmental data, and a great deal of archaeological survey and excavation, permit the fifteen scientists represented here much greater precision in determining the timing of the depopulation, the number of people affected, and the ways in which northern Pueblo peoples coped—and failed to cope—with the rapidly changing environmental and demographic conditions they encountered throughout the 1200s. In addition, some of the scientists in this volume use models to provide insights into the processes behind the patterns they find, helping to narrow the range of plausible explanations. What emerges from these investigations is a highly pertinent story of conflict and disruption as a result of climate change, environmental degradation, social rigidity, and conflict. Taken as a whole, these contributions recognize this era as having witnessed a competition between differing social and economic organizations, in which selective migration was considerably hastened by severe climatic, environmental, and social upheaval. Moreover, the chapters show that it is at least as true that emigration led to the collapse of the northern Southwest as it is that collapse led to emigration.

This major synthesis of work explores new evidence gathered at Basketmaker III sites on the Colorado Plateau in search of further understanding of Anasazi development. Since the 1960s, large-scale cultural resource management projects have revealed the former presence of Anasazi within the entire northern Southwest. These discoveries have resulted in a greatly expanded view of the BMIII period (A.D. 550-750) which immediately proceeds the Pueblo phase. Particularly noteworthy are finding of Basketmaker remains under those of later periods and in sites with open settings, as opposed to the more classic Basketmaker cave and rock shelter sites. Foundations of Anasazi Culture explores this new evidence in search of further understanding of Anasazi development. Several chapters address the BMII-BMIII transition, including the initial production and use of pottery, greater reliance on agriculture, and the construction of increasingly elaborate structures. Other chapters move beyond the transitional period to discuss key elements of the Anasazi lifestyle, including the use of gray-,red-, and white-ware ceramics, pit structures, storage cists, surface rooms, full dependence on agriculture, and varying degrees of social specialization and differentiation. A number of contributions address one or more of these issues as they occur at specific sites. Other contributors consider the material culture of the period in terms of common elements in architecture, ceramics, lithic technology, and decorative media. This work on BMIII sites on the Colorado Plateau will be useful to anyone with an interest in the earliest days of Anasazi civilization.