What are the connections between past and present peoples in the U.S. Southwest and Northwest Mexico? How were the ancient societies that occupied this landscape interconnected? Contributors leverage diverse source materials rooted in classic ethnography, oral tradition, and historical documents to offer novel answers to these questions. Running throughout the discussions is a metanarrative that reflects the tensions between disciplines such as anthropology and history and the rapidly evolving dynamic between scholars and the Indigenous subjects of past and present research. With chapters written by scholars from the U.S. and Mexico, including Indigenous coauthors, Borderlands Histories offers diverse perspectives and illustrates the range of methods and interpretive approaches employed by some of the most respected and experienced names in the field of borderlands archaeology today.
This work is significant on several levels. First, while the region of interest is the U.S. Southwest – NW Mexico borderlands, the impact of these chapters is much wider, across time and space. Within the volume, the chapters illustrate the diversity of cultures, traditions, and material remains which connect broad types of data. The book should be of interest to archaeologists, historians, ethnohistorians, Native American studies scholars, ethnographers, and scholars in other related fields. It is a multidisciplinary work with broad implications.
John Douglass, vice president of research and standards, Statistical Research, Inc.
A timely contribution to a discussion of both diverse methods and application case studies. These essays feature both senior and emerging scholars who explore a variety of cases to illustrate the promise (and peril) of placing material culture analysis in conversation with the historical documentary record, and, less so, in contemporary discourse with the curated traditional knowledge of Indigenous descendants today.
James F. Brooks, Gable Distinguished Chair in History, University of Georgia Research Professor in History & Anthropology
About the Author
John Philip Carpenter is research professor at the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia—Centro INAH Hermosillo, Sonora. His research includes archaeology and enthnohistory projects in Arizona, California, Oregon, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah, as well as Chiapas, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Sonora, and Zacatecas, Mexico.
Matthew Pailes is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. He is currently collaborating with John Carpenter and Guadalupe Sánchez on long-term research in the Sierra Madre Occidental to compare material culture from multiple valleys to reconstruct the demographic and political history of the region.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Documentary Relations in Archaeological Interpretations
Matthew Pailes and John Carpenter
Section I: The Sierra Madre Occidental Region
2. Archaeology and Ethnohistory of the Northwestern Slope of the Sierra Madre Occidental
John Carpenter and Guadalupe Sánchez
3. What’s Really Important in the Ethnohistory of Sonora?
Matthew Pailes
Section II: The Sonoran Desert
4. The Wa:k O’odham and Their Akimel O’odham Heritage
Deni J. Seymour, Tony Burrell, and David Tenario
5. Multiethnic Dimensions of Agriculture in Hohokam Society
Suzanne K. Fish and Paul R. Fish
6. Unpacking the Layers of Native American History and Land Use in the Western Papaguería
Maren P. Hopkins
Section III: The Puebloan World
7. “The Dance of The Sprouting Corn”: Casas Grandes Maize Ceremonialism and the Transformation of the Puebloan World
Michael D. Mathiowetz
8. Proposed Historical Origins of the Tablita/Corn Dance Among the Rio Grande Pueblos
Polly Schaafsma
Section IV: Metanarratives on Research
9. Anthropologists, Archaeologists, Documents, and Native Voices: Pursuing History in the U.S. Southwest
Richard C. Lange and E. Charles Adams
10. Crossroads of Disciplines: Precipitating Causes, Latent Causal Conditions, and Other Considerations
Richard Flint
References
Index
