New Perspectives on the American Southwest: Historical Archaeology of the 1800s and 1900s

In 2016, after accepting a Lecturer position in the Anthropology Department at Northern Arizona University, I was asked to teach our junior-level Southwestern Archaeology course. I quickly reviewed Stephen Plog’s (2008) foundational Ancient Peoples of the American Southwest to brush up on all things prehistoric. As a historical archaeologist, I also added a few weeks at the end of the semester to tackle the Southwest’s historic period. I assigned Plog’s two brief chapters on historic eras (2008:181–198) and set out to find archaeology articles to incorporate into the class. It was then, though, that I hit a wall. While I was able to find plenty of articles on the Spanish colonial period, articles on the more recent Southwestern centuries were few and far between. I scoured American Antiquity, Historical Archaeology, and, of course, Kiva, yet work exploring the 1800s and 1900s eluded me. I chalked it up to being a recent import to Arizona and the Southwest, and perhaps I simply did not know the proper search terms to find such articles.

Over the next three years, however, in numerous conversations with professors, graduate students, historic preservationists, CRM archaeologists, and federal and state government archaeologists from throughout Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and Colorado, I discovered that this struggle to find publications on historical archaeology was a recurrent theme in the archaeology of the Southwest; such articles rarely existed. While there are historical archaeologists and projects in the Southwest, they are most commonly found in government reports or site forms filed away at SHPOs, inaccessible to most archaeologists, the public, or stakeholders like indigenous peoples or descendant populations (Ayres 1991). Since I come from the University of Nevada-Reno, one-time home to Don Hardesty and host to a long-standing program dedicated to the historical period of the Great Basin, I became determined to address the apparent dearth of published historical archaeology in the Southwest.

An obvious place to begin is to examine what constitutes the historic Southwest, as the geographic boundaries are vaguely defined. The prehistoric Southwest has well-established delineations—commonly defined as Arizona, New Mexico, southern Nevada, Utah and Colorado, and south-east California in the United States, and northern Sonora and Chihuahua in Mexico (Plog 2008:13). The historical Southwest lacks such concrete and agreed-upon boundaries. Meinig’s 1971 definition of the Southwest considered environmental, historical, political, geographic, and social elements. As he notes, “The term “Southwest” is of course an ethnocentric one: what is south and west to the Anglo-American was long the north of the Hispano-American” (Meinig 1971:3). Ultimately, he defines the Southwest as Arizona, New Mexico, and the El Paso district of Texas (7).

Another way to define the historic Southwest is to examine its place as part of the larger, historic American West, since the Southwest shares traits with the other states west of the 98th meridian (as defined by Dixon 2014:181). Hardesty (1991) noted the Western commonalities of aridity, repeating boom–bust cycles, the ongoing process of conquest, urbanism, and the continuing dependence on the federal government as shared attributes of western states. Building on Hardesty, Dixon (2014) noted the importance of colonial and post-colonial processes, landscape transformations due to environmental factors and extractive industries, and migration in differentiating the American West from the East. All of Dixon’s and Hardesty’s qualifications of the West apply to Southwest in a general sense, but what makes the Southwest a distinct region of the larger whole is often assumed rather than explained. Dixon (2014:181), for example, includes other regions, including the Plains, Great Basin, and Pacific Coast, in her review of the West, but does not explain any defining characteristics of these areas. She does note the geographical area of the “desert Southwest” as made up of the “Sonoran, Mojave and Chihuahua Deserts” (Dixon 2014:981). I wonder, though, how well this definition of the Southwest fits with the mountainous areas of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and northern Arizona that are included in the prehistoric boundaries of the region (I am currently writing this in Flagstaff with one-and-a-half feet of snow on the ground).

Perhaps then, following Hardesty’s and Dixon’s approach to defining the West, the historic Southwest is better defined through cultural and political components rather than geographic ones. The growth of borderlands research (see Hämäläinen and Truett 2011) has complicated geographic approaches to defining the “American” West due to the shifting interplay of economics, politics, and culture along and across the US-Mexico border. While only focusing on Arizona and Sonora, Truett (2004) emphasizes the idea of the frontier in shaping America’s idea of the Southwest. He discusses the unique role of “colonial geographies” in Spanish missionization attempts, the marginalization of Native American, Hispanic, and Mexican populations as colonial and racial/ethnic outsiders, and the (re)creation of borderlands through events like the Mexican-American War and the Gadsden Purchase. Such attributes may apply to other regions (California comes to mind), but considering both cultural and environmental elements is important to exploring how the historic Southwest overlaps with, but is also distinct from, the prehistoric Southwest, as well as other historically-defined archaeological regions.

For the general purposes of this volume, the historic Southwest includes Arizona, New Mexico, western Texas, southern Utah, southern Colorado, southern Nevada, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, while also recognizing that these borders changed over time. The ever-shifting political boundaries, for example, necessitate a renegotiation of the relationship of place and nation regarding Mexico, the Republic of Texas, and reservation lands in the American Southwest. Such a definition allows archaeologists to understand topics and themes relevant to research projects that concern the historical eras of the Southwest.

In many ways, American archaeology began in the Southwest. Dendrochronology, developed in arid regions with Ponderosa Pine, is still the most accurate way to date archaeological sites and features. The Pecos classification set the bar for applying seriation to address changes over time at sites. And efforts to include Native American perspectives and indigenous archaeologists in collaborative and indigenous archaeology have gained traction in the Southwest in ways no other region can match (e.g. Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2006). Indeed, archaeological work in the Southwest has been around long enough that we can now conduct historical archaeology of archaeology, as Chip Wills (2019) addressed in his 2019 Society for American Archaeology conference paper on the 1890s to 1910s Wetherill Trading Post at Chaco Canyon.

Yet, despite these innovations, archaeology in the Southwest has fallen behind in researching historic periods. To explore how well the Southwest includes (or does not include) historical archaeology, I reviewed every article in every issue of all 85 volumes of Kiva and recorded each that addressed historic periods. Of the 1,221 total articles published between 1936 and 2019 (not including obituaries, book reviews, or corrections), only 177, or 14.5 percent, discussed events, people, or archaeology between the 1500s and the 1900s. The percentage varied across the decades. While the 1930s (17.9%), 1940s (16.1%), 1950s (26.9%), and 1960s (24.3%), saw a sizeable number of historically-inclined articles, many of these leaned towards history rather than archaeology, with discussions of dates of events, analyses of historical documents, or ethnographic outlines of the histories of Native American groups after contact. Still, the first article in Kiva to include the term “Historic Archaeology” in its title appeared in 1962 (Fontana et al. 1962). This research at Johnny Ward’s Ranch has long been considered one of the most detailed treatments of historic sites at the time (Ayres 1991:19). There was a decline in the number of historical articles published during the period of New Archaeology, even as the number of articles in each volume increased: the 1970s (12.9%), the 1980s (14.6%), and the 1990s (9.3%). These articles, though, are all largely archaeological, rather than historical. The 2000s (12.2%) and 2010s (12.1%) still displayed a low number of historical archaeology articles compared to prehistoric archaeology articles, but the new millennium did include the first two issues to focus solely on historical archaeology. Winter 2005 had a variety of historical articles, while 2019’s Volume 85, Issue 2 was thematically focused on the archaeology of historical missions.

Another interesting pattern revealed by my review of Kiva volumes is perhaps connected to the fact that the historic period of the Southwest is simultaneously old and young. The Spanish colonial period began in the 1500s and has been long-addressed in Southwestern archaeology. Of the 177 historical articles published in Kiva, 88, or 49.7 percent focused on the 16th through 18th centuries of Spanish colonialism. Ayres (1991) also noted the same focus on Spanish sites in Arizona and New Mexico historical archaeology. Little seems to have changed since the 1990s. The 1800s and 1900s, on the other hand, receive far less attention, meaning much of the Southwest’s history as American history is not investigated archaeologically. While the United States acquired much of the Southwest in the 1840s and 1850s, statehood was not granted to much of this territory until the late 1800s and early 1900s (Colorado in 1876, Utah in 1896, and Arizona and New Mexico in 1912). The 1800s made up almost 26 percent of all historical articles while only 7.3 percent of articles addressed the 1900s¹. This volume begins to fill in that gap and focuses on the 1800s and 1900s.

The purpose of this introduction, though, is not to speculate why this knowledge gap exists, but to highlight the problem as a way of starting new conversations about the role of archaeology in investigating the whole of the American past. Neighboring western states like California, Nevada, and Montana have strong emphases in historical archaeology at several levels, including academic research, government work, and public and student engagement, and explore questions of industry, identity, immigration/migration, and culture contact. The Southwest can look to these regions as a foundation for asking questions about historical archaeology while also recognizing the cultural and historical background of the Southwest that make it a unique part of the American West. Events that have been important to historians, such as the admission of Southwestern states into the Union, the growth of new industries such as logging, railroads, and sheep-herding, and continued colonial actions like the Long Walk or Yavapai Wars remain understudied or unaddressed by archaeologists. Stakeholders like African Americans and Hispanic Americans are rarely, if ever, incorporated into interpretation and mitigation, and interpretations of the historic period, even those of early colonial periods, often neglect indigenous perspectives. As Liebmann and Preucel (2007: 196) note in their discussion of research on the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, “Far less attention has been paid to the changes that occurred in the Pueblo world between 1680 and 1696 or the enduring effects of these years on the formation of modern Pueblo cultures and communities” than work on the Revolt itself and the return of the Spanish.

Another issue is that the long period of research conducted in the Southwest has created an implicit body of knowledge concerning the relationship between prehistoric archaeological materials and their meanings. Archaeologists know how Ancestral Puebloan peoples constructed their homes, where the Hohokam built irrigation canals, and that Mimbres ceramics differed from other Southwestern pottery traditions. Accordingly, they have studied what Ancestral Puebloan homes say about sedentism and social structure, what Hohokam canals reveal about subsistence and changing political roles, and what kill holes suggest about Mimbres’ relationships to material culture and, in some cases, burial practices. There are, of course, unanswered questions and new sites to examine, but those ideas have entered the realm of archaeological knowledge and no longer need to be made explicit with every new prehistoric project. No such baseline has been established for historic sites in the Southwest; no implicit knowledge has been made explicit. As a result, historic sites are often treated like prehistoric sites. Glass, ceramics, tin cans, and building foundations are counted, described, photographed, assigned a date, and logged into a site report form the same way pot sherds, lithic flakes, and bone tools are recorded at prehistoric sites. Questions of identity, labor, and historical context go unexplored or are not examined beyond archival identification of site residents.

That is the purpose of this volume: to make explicit the implicit. To address the historical sites, artifacts, and features that have been relegated to the archaeological realm of date and describe. To create a foundation for future work that is interpretative rather than merely descriptive. This volume began as a joint venture when Erin Hegberg (a Ph.D. candidate at the University of New Mexico), Stephen Joey LaValley (an archaeologist at Logan Simpson), and I organized “Historical Archaeologies of the American Southwest, 1800 to Today,” a symposium for the 2019 Society for American Archaeology conference in Albuquerque (Dale et al. 2019), and spoke with Trish Markert (a Ph.D. candidate at Binghamton University), who chaired a general session on Southwest historical archaeology at the same conference (Markert 2019). Together, our sessions included archaeologists at CRM firms, universities, museums, and government agencies from throughout New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Texas, and the US-Mexico borderlands, all of whom were invested in spreading their knowledge to others.

In contrast to the traditional volume with a few longer articles, we compiled a vignette-style volume, one that could address more topics, albeit in shorter detail. The articles herein provide ways to identify, interpret, theorize, and evaluate Southwestern historic sites. For some of the articles in this volume, this means exploring the diversity of the Southwest. Markert contemplates the role of migration in the creation of the Southwest, Hangan recognizes the important place of African Americans in history, and Hegberg addresses the same for Hispanic Americans. Other authors investigate the role of industry, as Hangan and Jaquay do in their piece on the dynamics of sheep-herding, Swope and Gregory focus on in their piece on mining, Treichler examines in his work on the aviation industry, and Edwards considers in his evaluation of Route 66 properties. Finally, our authors tie Southwestern trends to larger historical events, or “eventscapes” as described by Kamp-Whittaker. Howe tackles the making of the U.S.-Mexico border, Przystupa confronts Indian Boarding Schools, Kamp-Whittaker contextualizes Japanese internment camps, and Thiel examines the changing political landscape of the Southwest through Tucson burials.

In 1991, James Ayres lamented the dearth of historical archaeology in the Southwest. He noted that contract companies and federal agencies rarely hired archaeologists knowledgeable in historical archaeology or ignored historic sites. Compounding that issue, Ayres observed that institutions of higher learning rarely taught historical archaeology or integrated historical archaeology into their programs. Overall, Ayres recognized that “a sorry state of affairs exists in how historic sites are treated,” but that “positive steps are underway” (22). Yet, thirty years later, the problems identified by Ayres persist. Our goal for this volume is to facilitate a continuation of the conversation that Ayres initiated and that we picked up last year. We hope that others will address the myriad topics and themes that we did not have the time or space to include here, and provide an avenue for archaeologists, students, and the public to recognize the rich diversity of questions that have yet to be asked about the 1800s and 1900s in the American Southwest.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The remaining articles included those dedicated to general history that spanned multiple centuries (8.5%) and articles that focused on questions along the prehistoric/historic divide (8.5%).