The University of Arizona Press
January 2, 2025
This month, we’re highlighting a few of our open access books on our Open Arizona platform. These books are available to read for free!
In its earliest iteration funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, titles published in Open Arizona explored the histories and experiences of Indigenous and Latino groups in the southwestern United States, foundational areas of the Press’s long publishing history. In June 2022, thanks to a grant from the NEH, the Press was able to expand offerings in Open Arizona by adding twenty backlist titles in archaeology to the platform. These titles expand our understandings of the ancient Southwest and demonstrate the University of Arizona Press’s long-standing excellence in the field of archaeology. In Spring 2023, the Press published its first simultaneous print and open-access frontlist title.
In Ancestral Landscapes of the Pueblo World, James Snead uses an exciting new approach—landscape archaeology—to understand ancestral Pueblo communities and the way the people consciously or unconsciously shaped the land around them. Snead provides detailed insight into ancestral Puebloan cultures and societies using an approach he calls “contextual experience,” employing deep mapping and community-scale analysis. This strategy goes far beyond the standard archaeological approaches, using historical ethnography and contemporary Puebloan perspectives to better understand how past and present Pueblo worldviews and meanings are embedded in the land. Read and excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.
Flying into the Albuquerque International Airport on a clear day—which is almost any day in New Mexico—a traveler sees the landscape 25,000 feet below as a vast pattern of monumental landforms. The jet approaches from the east, paralleling the route of Interstate 40, and the southern Great Plains give way to the southernmost outcrops of the Rocky Mountains. From this height the basic facts of the land stand out literally in relief. The Pecos and Canadian Rivers sketch narrow, fertile valleys through flat, dry terrain interrupted by mesas and hills. The historic settlement of the region has clearly been influenced by topography and environment. Riverside towns such as Fort Sumner and Santa Rosa, with their associated farmland, are visible on either side of the airplane. The economic structures of modern society also stand out, from the circular imprints of irrigated fields drawing water from subsurface aquifers to the web of highways, roads, and tracks that carry people and goods around the state.
Social elements can be discerned in this tableau, too. The compact grids of small towns contrast with scattered dots that signal the occasional isolated ranch complex. Nearer Albuquerque there are neatly delineated ‘‘ranchettes,’’ a few developments with curvilinear plans, and then comes the strict geometry of the city itself. Each layout reflects a different conception of domestic space. It is also possible to see how this built landscape has changed over time. In the southern distance the course of the nineteenth-century railroad parallels the jet’s path. An occasional shrunken village along the tracks contrasts mutely with the more prosperous communities linked by the interstate highway.
This aerial panorama conveys a great deal of information about modern society in the American Southwest. Yet looking out the airplane window, I find myself searching for a different landscape, one far more interesting to me than abstract patterns of economy and ecology. Looking north to the rugged country of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, I can often pick out places of personal significance—peaks I have climbed, side roads I have driven, and especially the valley of the Rio Sapello, where my family has owned land since the 1880s.
Thinking about the Sapello Valley brings to mind the history of the property, the names and lineages of the neighbors, and many more specific recollections, such as the sweet-sharp flavor of apples from the old trees around the pond. All these experiences are bound up in the physicality of the place, and those who know it well can remember and describe it even if they have been away for decades. To me that landscape is more immediate and perhaps more important than the larger-scale historical and geographic record passing beneath the jet’s wings. As the plane descends, I crane my neck and hope that the storm clouds building over the mountains will not block the view and thwart this colloquy between memory and place.
