Sacred Southwestern Landscapes
Archaeologies of Religious Ecology

Aaron M. Wright (Edited by)

9781647691646

Hardback, published 18 October 2024

240 pages, 46 colour illustrations, 30 b&w illustrations
27.9 x 21.6 x 2.7 cm, 0.994 kg

“In Sacred Southwestern Landscapes archaeologists, historians, and their Indigenous collaborators examine how inhabitants of what today is the Mexican Northwest and U.S. Southwest have interacted with the landscape and the role that landscape played in religious practices.”—Jakob W. Sedig, Mogollon Communal Spaces and Places in the Greater American Southwest

In this volume, two dozen archaeologists and allied researchers explore the intersection of religion and landscape in the North American Southwest from ancient to recent times. Although these topics continue to gain currency in contemporary inquiry, Sacred Southwestern Landscapes is the first to study them on equal footing. The essays explore how people enmesh ecological conditions and threads of environmental information into religion, weaving strands of belief and spirituality through a topographic fabric that gives meaning to the material world.

Hailing from various academic and cultural backgrounds, contributors invoke a range of theoretical currents and methodological practices to examine how these relationships developed and evolved. Nearly all the places, people, and paradigms at play in contemporary southwestern scholarship find room among these pages, from the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts to the Colorado Plateau; from diverse cultures, including Ancestral Pueblo, Mogollon, Hohokam, Pataya, Trincheras, Navajo (DinÉ), and Nuevomexicano; and from theoretical frameworks drawing upon phenomenology, materiality, bundling, and semiotics. This collective engagement showcases how religious ecologies can be studied from multiple perspectives and through sundry lines of evidence, leaving readers with appreciation and reverence for the rich and robust sacredness in southwestern landscapes.

• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Southwestern Landscapes, Archaeology, and Religious Ecology: An Introduction to an Intersection by Aaron M. Wright
• Part I: The Southern Southwest
• Chapter 2: Bringing the Landscape Home: The Materiality of Placemaking and Pilgrimage in Jornada and Mimbres Mogollon Settlement by Myles R. Miller
• Chapter 3: Envisioning Natural and Built Environments as Sacred Landscapes in Ancient Casas Grandes, Mexico by Michael T. Searcy, Todd Pitezel, Steve Swanson, and Scott M. Ure
• Chapter 4: Horizon Events: A Semiosis of Hohokam Attachments to the Liminal and Distant by Aaron M. Wright and Henry D. Wallace
• Chapter 5: Sacred Places and Rock Art Sites in the Sonoran Desert: Defining Common Patterns by Julio Amador Bech
• Chapter 6: An Ecology of the Patayan-Yuman Dreamland by Aaron M. Wright, Lorey Cachora, and Nathalie Ø
  . Brusgaard
• Part II: The Northern Southwest
• Chapter 7: Making a Homeland: Navajo Landscapes and Power Moving Around by Polly Schaafsma and William B. Tsosie
• Chapter 8: Timber Importation as Pilgrimage to Chaco Canyon by Sean Field
• Chapter 9: Places of Reference: Metonymy in Pueblo Landscapes by Barry Price Steinbrecher, Maren P. Hopkins, Octavius Seowtewa, and Paul Tosa
• Chapter 10: Through Tewa Eyes? Exploring the Universality and Duality of Doings in Pueblo Cultural Landscapes by Samuel Duwe and Kurt F. Anschuetz
• Chapter 11: Negotiating Inscription and Experience in the Sacred Landscapes of Seventeenth-Century New Mexico by Mark T. Lycett and Phillip O. Leckman
• Chapter 12: Procession and Sacred Landscape among Hispanic Catholics in New Mexico by Sylvia RodrÍ
  guez
• Chapter 13: Land of Re-enchantment: The Archaeology of Esotericism in New Mexico by Darryl Wilkinson and Severin Fowles
• Part III: Commentary
• Chapter 14: The Ladder of Inference Reconceptualized as a MÖ
  bius Strip: Reflections on Southwestern Cultural Landscapes by Kurt F. Anschuetz
• Afterword: Archaeology, Religion, and Ecology by John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker
• Appendix A: Federally Recognized Religious Places Names for Landscape Features in the Southwest
• References
• List of Contributors
• Index