Archaeological Evidence of the 1848 Newby Campaign Against the Navajos

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project: A Multivocal Analysis of the San Juan Basin as a Cultural Landscape" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 1848, towards the end of the Mexican War, Colonel Edward Newby, Commander of the Ninth Military Department of New Mexico, responded to Navajo raids on New Mexican settlements by leading a military campaign against the Navajos, which imposed the second treaty between the United States and the Navajos. Unlike most military campaigns of the era, Newby’s Expedition did not include a topographical engineer, and Newby did not prepare a report on the campaign, so most of what is known about it is what was reported in newspapers, and the actual route of the expedition has long been conjectural. Ethnographers working on the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project consulted with a local Navajo woman who directed them to cavalry inscriptions that proved to be the nine-day campsite of the expedition. Archaeological documentation of the site provides new insights about the Newby Expedition and will lead to preservation of Newby’s campsite.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project: A Multivocal Analysis of the San Juan Basin as a Cultural Landscape   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25608