For thirty years, the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School at Grasshopper—a 500-room Mogollon pueblo located on what is today the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona—probed the past, taught scholars of international repute, and generated controversy. This book offers an extraordinary window into a changing American archaeology and three different research programs as they confronted the same pueblo ruin. Like the enigmatic Mogollon culture it sought to explore and earlier University of Arizona field schools in the Forestdale Valley and at Point of Pines, Grasshopper research engendered decades of controversy that still lingers in the pages of professional journals. Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittlesey, players in the controversy who are intimately familiar with the field school that ended in 1992, offer a historical account of this major archaeological project and the intellectual debates it fostered. Thirty Years Into Yesterday charts the development of the Grasshopper program under three directors and through three periods dominated by distinct archaeological paradigms: culture history, processual archaeology, and behavioral archaeology. It examines the contributions made each season, the concepts and methods each paradigm used, and the successes and failures of each. The book transcends interests of southwestern archaeologists in demonstrating how the three archaeological paradigms reinterpreted Grasshopper, illustrating larger shifts in American archaeology as a whole. Such an opportunity will not come again, as funding constraints, ethical concerns, and other issues no doubt will preclude repeating the Grasshopper experience in our lifetimes. Ultimately, Thirty Years Into Yesterday continues the telling of the Grasshopper story that was begun in the authors’ previous books. In telling the story of the archaeologists who recovered the material residue of past Mogollon lives and the place of the Western Apache people in their interpretations, Thirty Years Into Yesterday brings the story full circle to a stunning conclusion.

WAS AN IMMATURE BOY WITH NO FUTURE WHEN ENLISTED MADE THE UNITED STATES ARMY HOME CHOSEN MARTIAL ARTS INSTRUCTOR FOR SPECIAL FORCES PARTICIPATED IN BLACK OPS MISSIONS RETIRED AS A TOP KICK CIA CAME CALLING DEVISED CAMPAIGNS AT LANGLEY AND NAVAL WAR COLLEGE TAUGHT MILITARY STRATEGY AT WEST POINT LEFT POST TO COMFORT SPOUSE WITH CANCER AND DEATH NEPHEWS SENT ME ON A FALL TRAIN TRIP THEN THE STRANGEST THING HAPPENED I FOUND A MEDALLION, AND NOW I CONTROLLED THE MAGIC IN THEE OLDE WORLD

When Emil Haury defined the ancient Mogollon in the 1930s as a culture distinct from their Ancestral Pueblo and Hohokam neighbors, he triggered a major intellectual controversy in the history of southwestern archaeology, centering on whether the Mogollon were truly a different culture or merely a “backwoods variant” of a better-known people. In this book, archaeologists Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittlesey tell the story of the remarkable individuals who discovered the Mogollon culture, fought to validate it, and eventually resolved the controversy. Reid and Whittlesey present the arguments and actions surrounding the Mogollon discovery, definition, and debate. Drawing on extensive interviews conducted with Haury before his death in 1992, they explore facets of the debate that scholars pursued at various times and places and how ultimately the New Archaeology shifted attention from the research questions of cultural affiliation and antiquity that had been at the heart of the controversy. In gathering the facts and anecdotes surrounding the debate, Reid and Whittlesey offer a compelling picture of an academician who was committed to understanding the unwritten past, who believed wholeheartedly in the techniques of scientific archaeology, and who used his influence to assist scholarship rather than to advance his own career. Prehistory, Personality, and Place depicts a real archaeologist practicing real archaeology, one that fashioned from potsherds and pit houses a true understanding of prehistoric peoples. But more than the chronicle of a controversy, it is a book about places and personalities: the role of place in shaping archaeologists’ intellect and personalities, as well as the unusual intersections of people and places that produced resolutions of some intractable problems in Southwest history.

Archaeological heritage conservation is all too often highly conflicted. Economic interests are often at the forefront of management decision-making with heritage values given lesser, if any, consideration, but when heritage places are managed with international principles in mind the sites stand out as evidencing superior outcomes.

Pushing Boundaries in Southwestern Archaeology draws together the proceedings from the sixteenth biennial Southwest Symposium. In exploring the conference theme, contributors consider topics ranging from the resuscitation of archaeomagnetic dating to the issue of Athapaskan origins, from collections-based studies of social identity, foodways, and obsidian trade to the origins of a rock art tradition and the challenges of a deeply buried archaeological record. The first of the volume’s four sections examines the status, history, and prospects of Bears Ears National Monument, the broader regulatory and political boundaries that complicate the nature and integrity of the archaeological record, and the cultural contexts and legal stakes of archaeological inquiry. The second section focuses on chronological “big data” in the context of pre-Columbian history and the potential and limits of what can be empirically derived from chronometric analysis of the past. The chapters in the third section advocate for advancing collections-based research, focusing on the vast and often untapped research potential of archives, previously excavated museum collections, and legacy data. The final section examines the permeable boundaries involved in Plains-Pueblo interactions, obvious in the archaeological record but long in need of analysis, interpretation, and explanation. Contributors: James R. Allison, Erin Baxter, Benjamin A. Bellorado, Katelyn J. Bishop, Eric Blinman, J. Royce Cox, J. Andrew Darling, Kaitlyn E. Davis, William H. Doelle, B. Sunday Eiselt, Leigh Anne Ellison, Josh Ewing, Samantha G. Fladd, Gary M. Feinman, Jeffrey R. Ferguson, Severin Fowles, Willie Grayeyes, Matthew Guebard, Saul L. Hedquist, Greg Hodgins, Lucas Hoedl, John W. Ives, Nicholas Kessler, Terry Knight, Michael W. Lindeman, Hannah V. Mattson, Myles R. Miller, Lindsay Montgomery, Stephen E. Nash, Sarah Oas, Jill Onken, Scott G. Ortman, Danielle J. Riebe, John Ruple, Will G. Russell, Octavius Seowtewa, Deni J. Seymour, James M. Vint, Adam S. Watson

The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once described a village as “deserted” when all the adult males had vanished. While his statement is from the first half of the twentieth century, it nonetheless illustrates an oversight that has persisted during most of the intervening decades. Now Southwestern archaeologists have begun to delve into the task of “engendering” their sites. Using a “close to the ground” approach, the contributors to this book seek to engender the prehistoric Southwest by examining evidence at the household level. Focusing on gendered activities in household contexts throughout the southwestern United States, this book represents groundbreaking work in this area. The contributors view households as a crucial link to past activities and behavior, and by engendering these households, we can gain a better understanding of their role in prehistoric society. Gender-structured household activities, in turn, can offer insight into broader-scale social and economic factors. The chapters offer a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to engendering households and examine topics such as the division of labor, gender relations, household ritual, ceramic and ground stone production and exchange, and migration. Engendering Households in the Prehistoric Southwest ultimately addresses broader issues of interest to many archaeologists today, including households and their various forms, identity and social boundary formation, technological style, and human agency. Focusing on gendered activities in household contexts throughout the southwestern United States, this book represents groundbreaking work in this area. The contributors view households as a crucial link to past activities and behavior, and by engendering these households, we can gain a better understanding of their role in prehistoric society. Gender-structured household activities, in turn, can offer insight into broader-scale social and economic factors.