A synthesis of Anasazi archaeology
The Prehistoric Pueblo
World, A.D. 1150-1350
Edited by Michael A. Adler
From the mid-twelfth to the mid-fourteenth century, the world of
the ancestral Pueblo people (Anasazi) was in transition,
undergoing changes in settlement patterns and community
organization that resulted in what scholars now call the Pueblo
III
period. This book synthesizes the archaeology of the ancestral
Pueblo world during the Pueblo III period, examining twelve
regions that embrace nearly the entire range of major topographic
features, ecological zones, and prehistoric Puebloan settlement
patterns found in the northern Southwest.
Drawn from the 1990 Crow Canyon Archaeological Center conference
"Pueblo Cultures in Transition," the book serves as
both
a data resource and a summary of ideas about prehistoric changes
in Puebloan settlement and in regional interaction across
nearly 150,000 square miles of the Southwest. The volume provides
a compilation of settlement data for over 800 large sites
occupied between A.D. 1100-1400 in the Southwest. These data
provide new perspectives on the geographic scale of culture
change in the Southwest during this period.
Twelve chapters analyze the archaeological record for specific
districts and provide a detailed picture of settlement size and
distribution, community architecture, and population trends
during the period. Additional chapters cover warfare and carrying
capacity and provide overviews of change in the region.
Throughout the chapters, the contributors address the unifying
issues of
the role of large sites in relation to smaller ones, changes in
settlement patterns from the Pueblo II to Pueblo III periods,
changes in community organization, and population dynamics.
Although other books have considered various regions or the
entire prehistoric area, this is the first to provide such a
wealth of
information on the Pueblo III period and such detailed
district-by-district syntheses. By dealing with issues of
population
aggregation and the archaeology of large settlements, it offers
readers a much-needed synthesis of one of the most crucial
periods of culture change in the Southwest.
Michael A. Adler is an assistant professor of anthropology at
Southern Methodist University and the director of archaeology
field programs at
SMU's Fort Burgwin Research Center near Taos, New Mexico.
February
278 pp, 95 line drawings
81/2 x 11
LC 95-32452
ISBN 0-8165-2048-8 $24.95s paper
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