Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For many, the evocative and picturesque landscapes of the North American Southwest embody arcane pasts and materialize non-human agencies. Popular place names such as the Land of Enchantment, Valley of the Gods, and Camino del Diablo show this relationship is as true today as it was in past, when indigenous communities sculpted meaningful and sacred landscapes through recursive engagements in ritual practice at select places and in key contexts. Southwestern communities coupled dimensions of the built (e.g., kivas, shrines, petroglyphs, and cemeteries) and unbuilt environments (e.g., mountains, springs, caves, and groves) to craft, alter, and counter the sacred landscapes in which they dwelled. This is a schema or religious ecology, where landscapes and lives are reflexively intertwined through the materiality of religion. With landscape as both scale and context, the contributed papers in this symposium address religious ecology holistically and creatively, by deemphasizing site-specific study in favor of inter-place analyses of multiple situations and relations. As a convergence of case studies with regional, methodological, and theoretical nuance, this collaboration lays the groundwork for a macro-regional narrative of religious ecology that affords cross-cultural and trans-temporal comparisons at multiple scales within the North American Southwest.

Other Keywords
Landscape Archaeology • Ritual and Symbolism • Ethnography/Ethnoarchaeology • Survey • Pueblo • Ancestral Pueblo • Theory • Colonialism • Hohokam • Fremont

Geographic Keywords
United States of America (Country) • North America (Continent) • USA (Country) • New Mexico (State / Territory) • Oklahoma (State / Territory) • Arizona (State / Territory) • Texas (State / Territory) • Sonora (State / Territory) • Chihuahua (State / Territory) • Baja California (State / Territory)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-12 of 12)

  • Documents (12)
Documents
  • Bringing the Landscape Home: The Materiality of Placemaking and Pilgrimage in Jornada Mogollon Settlement (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Myles Miller.

    This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among prehispanic and historic societies of the American Southwest and Mesoamerica, mountains and caves had multivalent metaphorical and symbolic meanings relating to underworld, ancestors, water, and emergence. Mountains and caves are featured among origin and emergence myths and many contemporary Pueblo societies...

  • An Ecology of the Patayan-Yuman Dreamland (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Wright. Nathalie Brusgaard.

    This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The far-western Southwest presents a landscape of wide, once-perennial rivers cutting through a xeric terrain of lava plains and mountain peaks. For the Yuman-speaking tribes tethered to the waterways, this landscape is both physical and metaphysical, in that it is simultaneously the place where people, animals, and...

  • Envisioning Natural and Built Environments as Sacred Landscapes in Prehistoric Casas Grandes, Mexico (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Searcy. Todd Pitezel. Steve Swanson.

    This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We develop a hypothesized cosmography in an attempt to evaluate the sacred landscapes of the Casas Grandes cultural tradition of northern Mexico. This analysis includes attention to the relationships among archaeological features and aspects of natural geography in the Casas Grandes region. We draw on previous research...

  • Fremont Villages in Their Cultural Landscapes (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie Richards. James Allison. Lindsay Johansson.

    This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Physical and cultural landscapes are integral aspects of everyday life; however, traditionally Fremont archaeologists have focused on studying sites or even features as discrete units instead of attempting to understand them in the broader context of their natural and cultural landscapes. Many Native American groups...

  • Horizon Events: Hohokam Ritual Relations with the Distant and Phenomenal (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Henry Wallace. Aaron Wright.

    This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For well over a millennium, Hohokam communities in the southern Southwest dwelled in a terrain of perennial river valleys fringed by a horizon of jagged mountains. Villages and livelihoods were nestled on the valley floors near the rivers, leaving the uplands as an uninhabited periphery between the everyday experience...

  • Making a Homeland and Navajo Cultural Landscapes (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Polly Schaafsma. William Tsosie.

    This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In indigenous America fundamental consideration in addressing "the materiality of religion" is the land itself. In native thinking the land and the people comprise inseparable entities that interact and give definitions to each other. The Navajo, in their migrations into the Southwest, adapted to cultural landscapes...

  • Place as Reference: Metonymy in Pueblo Landscapes (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Barry Price Steinbrecher. Maren Hopkins.

    This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For contemporary Pueblo people in the American Southwest, land, history, and religion are inextricably entwined. Historical events and religious beliefs manifest on the land at different physical and conceptual scales. Over time, places come to represent larger landscapes or philosophical concepts, effectively becoming...

  • Procession and Sacred Landscape (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sylvia Rodríguez. Aaron Wright.

    This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The idea of a sacralized landscape is popularly associated with site-specific Native American religious beliefs and practices, but a landscape and its features can have religious meaning for other people as well. This paper examines the northern New Mexican folk-Catholic tradition of religious procession. Processions...

  • Sacred Places and Rock Art Sites in the Sonoran Desert: Defining Common Patterns (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Julio Amador.

    This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Based on landscape archaeology, achaeoastronomy, the analysis of rock art iconography, and ethnohistoric and ethnographic documents, this paper proposes to define the factors that determine the sacredness of rock art sites in the Sonoran Desert. Well characterized common patterns can be found in most of the rock art...

  • 'The Shape which all that which is Settled has is that of a Cross': Negotiating Inscription and Experience in the Sacred Landscapes of 17th Century New Mexico (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Lycett. Phillip Leckman.

    This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the emergent social geography of empire, Franciscan missions were agents of spatial production as well as colonial establishment. Their foundation, form, and operation instantiated claims to and about society, dominion, and the culmination of history. These claims were forged within an already extant, meaningful, and...

  • Through Tewa Eyes? Exploring the Diversity and Universality of Pueblo Sacred Landscapes (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Samuel Duwe. Kurt Anschuetz.

    This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pueblo worlds are remarkably similar, yet completely distinct. This paradox has challenged Southwestern anthropologists: how do Pueblo people, from Hopi to Taos, share similar worldviews and beliefs, but maintain unique histories of their paths of becoming? Elsie Clews Parsons and Edward Dozier characterized Pueblo...

  • Timber Pilgrimage: Timber Importation as Pilgrimage to Chaco Canyon (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Field.

    This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beginning with Neil Judd’s early speculations about timber importation, the Chaco road network has been the basis of diverse and often contrasting archaeological interpretations about the use of such unique landscape features. While a wide-array of interpretations have been suggested, recent least cost analyses reiterate...