The University of Arizona Press
Transilient Acts and Resilient Villages
Pueblo Community Persistence in the Northern Rio Grande
Focusing on the Tiwa-speaking communities of Taos, Picuris, and Pot Creek Pueblos, Adler shows how social and ritual organization, architectural change, and sacred geographies were mobilized in response to disruption. He challenges conventional resilience theory, which emphasizes systemic stability, instead centering Indigenous agency, mobility, and sacred practice as key to understanding cultural endurance.
Grounded in decades of collaborative research with Pueblo communities, Transilient Acts and Resilient Villages is a vital contribution to southwestern archaeology. It offers a compelling model for how archaeology can respectfully engage with descendant communities and provides essential insights for scholars, students, and community members seeking to understand the complexities of cultural persistence in the face of change.
“Michael Adler uses archaeological and historical information to suggest the ways that Northern Rio Grande Pueblos, most notably Picuris Pueblo, have exhibited resilience and transilience throughout their deep history. Researchers familiar with Northern Rio Grande history will find this manuscript an important addition to their professional libraries, while the general reader will better understand the manner by which Picuris Pueblo has maintained its culture through the last thousand years.”—Joe E. Watkins, author of Indigenizing Japan: Ainu Past, Present, and Future
“Michael Adler has taken a unique opportunity to describe the precontact Puebloan history of the far Northern Rio Grande and to show it to us through a relevant and well-articulated anthropological lens. This volume exhibits both the author’s many years of archaeological research in the region and his deeply respectful relationships with members of the descendant Tiwa communities whose ancestors’ lives he studies. In so doing, Adler challenges long-held but sometimes thin notions of systemic resilience intended to maintain the status quo in favor of culturally intentional acts of transilience designed to protect the lives of those who move through inevitable disruptions and the lives of those who stay behind.”—Jeff Boyer, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service
“Employing archaeological and ethnographic approaches to Puebloan social organizational strategies across the American Southwest, Adler concludes that the dual organizational structure of Puebloan societies is key to understanding the histories of loss, transition, and accommodation during periods of transition. This structure, itself a transient act, provided culturally encoded societal actions to confront periods of reorganization and coalesce into another lifeway."—Choice Connect
