The Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project: A Multivocal Analysis of the San Juan Basin as a Cultural Landscape

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "The Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project: A Multivocal Analysis of the San Juan Basin as a Cultural Landscape," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The San Juan Basin in northern New Mexico sits in the rain shadow of the Chuska Mountains and comprises a rich cultural landscape. The Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project consists of 350 miles of water pipeline in the San Juan Basin that will convey water from the San Juan River to the Navajo Nation, the Jicarilla Apache Nation, and the city of Gallup. As beneficial as this project will undoubtedly be to local communities, hundreds of cultural resources have the potential to be affected by the construction of this project. This session focuses on the strategies employed by Bureau of Reclamation engineers, Native American tribes, archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists to creatively minimize adverse effects to this rich cultural landscape and recover important data and information in the process. These strategies go well beyond simply excavating archaeological features within the construction right-of-way and tallying the recovered artifacts. The papers in this session provide examples of the multivocal approach employed on this project and the various ways tribes, engineers, and researchers worked together to preserve and understand the history of this important landscape.