The story of Los Alamos and the Pajarito Plateau begins with explosive eruptions. An ancient volcano in northern New Mexico created the mountainous region known as the Jemez, and with time, erosion sculpted narrow mesas and canyons. The first residents were Native Americans. One of their many pueblos was called Tsirege, or the "bird place," from which the name Pajarito originates, meaning "little bird" in Spanish. Homesteaders arrived in the 1880s, but the area was sparsely settled. In 1917, former Rough Rider Ashley Pond started the exclusive Los Alamos Ranch School in the isolated setting, but in 1942 the US government took an interest in that isolation. They abruptly closed the school, and Los Alamos became a secret military post. There, under J. Robert Oppenheimer's leadership, the atomic bomb was created. Postwar housing shortages, Cold War threats, and disastrous fires have challenged Los Alamos, yet it has endured as a place of unique history and natural beauty.

This lively overview of the archaeology of northern New Mexico's Pajarito Plateau argues that Bandelier National Monument and the Pajarito Plateau became the Southwest's most densely populated and important upland ecological preserve when the great regional society centered on Chaco Canyon collapsed in the twelfth century. Some of Chaco's survivors moved southeast to the then thinly populated Pajarito Plateau, where they were able to survive by fundamentally refashioning their society. David E. Stuart, an anthropologist/archaeologist known for his stimulating overviews of prehistoric settlement and subsistence data, argues here that this re-creation of ancestral Puebloan society required a fundamental rebalancing of the Chacoan model. Where Chaco was based on growth, grandeur, and stratification, the socioeconomic structure of Bandelier was characterized by efficiency, moderation, and practicality. Although Stuart's focus is on the archaeology of Bandelier and the surrounding area, his attention to events that predate those sites by several centuries and at substantial distances from the modern monument is instructive. Beginning with Paleo-Indian hunter-gatherers and ending with the large villages and great craftsmen of the mid-sixteenth century, Stuart presents Bandelier as a society that, in crisis, relearned from its pre-Chacoan predecessors how to survive through creative efficiencies. Illustrated with previously unpublished maps supported by the most recent survey data, this book is indispensable for anyone interested in southwestern archaeology.

The story of Los Alamos and the Pajarito Plateau begins with explosive eruptions. An ancient volcano in northern New Mexico created the mountainous region known as the Jemez, and with time, erosion sculpted narrow mesas and canyons. The first residents were Native Americans. One of their many pueblos was called Tsirege, or the "bird place," from which the name Pajarito originates, meaning "little bird" in Spanish. Homesteaders arrived in the 1880s, but the area was sparsely settled. In 1917, former Rough Rider Ashley Pond started the exclusive Los Alamos Ranch School in the isolated setting, but in 1942 the US government took an interest in that isolation. They abruptly closed the school, and Los Alamos became a secret military post. There, under J. Robert Oppenheimer's leadership, the atomic bomb was created. Postwar housing shortages, Cold War threats, and disastrous fires have challenged Los Alamos, yet it has endured as a place of unique history and natural beauty.

These essays summarize the results of new excavation and survey research at Bandelier National Monument, with special attention to determining why larger sites appear when and where they do, and how life in these later villages and towns differed from life in the earlier small hamlets that first dotted the Pajarito in the mid-1100s.