Making a Homeland and Navajo Cultural Landscapes

Summary

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 already defined by various Pueblo people who preceded them and were still spiritually engaged with topographic features to which they had long ago ascribed mythic/historical meanings and supernatural powers. The Navajo, heeding previous meanings, added new places of significance, thereby creating a cultural landscape of their own. Making rock art was part of this process. With a focus on the Navajo homeland, or Dinetah, we examine the ways in which rock art and the oral traditions and beliefs it promoted functioned to establish a Navajo identity between ca. AD 1670 and 1760.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22823