Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology

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.