Conceptualizing Landscapes in the San Pedro Valley of Arizona: American Indian Interpretations of Reeve Ruin and Davis Ruin

Summary

At various times in the past, the San Pedro Valley of southeastern Arizona was home to the ancestors of four contemporary American Indian tribes: Tohono O'odham, Hopi, Zuni, and Western Apache. Collaborative ethnohistoric research with these four tribes was conducted to explore multiple tribal histories drawing on concepts of cultural landscapes as memory. Members of each tribe use archaeological sites in the San Pedro Valley as monuments to substantiate their unique community history and worldview. A model of cultural landscapes encompassing variables of absolute, relative, and representational time and space was developed to enable us to better understand the interpretations of the past revealed by tribal research participants. American Indian concepts of landscape and history are brought into further focus through considerations of the ways in which archaeologists have appropriated ancestral sites for scientific inquiry. Differing conceptualizations of cultural landscapes in the San Pedro Valley are illustrated using the Reeve Ruin and Davis Ruin, occupied in the fourteenth century, as examples.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Salt River Project Digital Library

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Contact(s): Daniel Garcia

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