EDITORIAL NOTE: BEYOND CANONICAL SITES (AND REGIONS)

Approximately once in every volume year, Kiva comes out with a special issue emphasizing topical subjects of importance to our readers. With Kiva Volume 78(4), I am thus pleased to present a set of papers about the archaeology of the Eastern Mesa Verde region, assembled by guest editor Benjamin A. Bellorado. The concept originated in a session at the 74th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in 2009, and the four papers included herein are a distillation and expansion of papers presented at that event.

Bellorado notes in his introductory paper that the Eastern Mesa Verde region has received less attention than regions to the south—Chaco—and west—Central Mesa Verde. His concern that such bias has blurred our perception of the broader history of the northern Southwest is timely. One of the theoretical concepts I have been turning around in my head lately is the influence of a “research canon” in archaeology, introduced in a recent paper by Rosemary Joyce. She argues that canonical status can be assigned to “those objects and sites that are understood to have great explanatory significance” (2012:2). The process is one of exclusion, however, creating circumstances in which other, potentially useful, artifacts/places are deemed of less value and thus ignored.

These are circumstances familiar to many of us working in the Southwest. In the region with which I am most familiar, the northern Rio Grande, biases in regional coverage that pertain to history and opportunity have almost certainly skewed archaeological perspectives on Ancestral Pueblo history. We are entranced by the mesa country of the Pajarito Plateau—and have been working up there since the days of Adolph Bandelier—but know very little about the large pueblos of the central Tewa Basin, contemporary with and probably more populous than their upland counterparts. Bandelier is canonical: Sahkeowinge (LA 18) (Snead et al. 2004:27) is not. The construction of categories such as these tells us something about ourselves but also shapes our perceptions of the southwestern past in ways that we rarely contemplate.

By drawing our attention to the Eastern Mesa Verde region, the authors in this volume not only provide significant new archaeological information but also make the case for expanding our frames of reference. Bellorado has been tireless in pulling together these papers, and those of us at Kiva are grateful for his labors and for those of the authors.

This issue is also the second in what we hope is a long collaboration with Maney Publishing. Based in the UK, Maney is one of the top international publishers of academic journals. This is an alliance of great promise for the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society and for Kiva. New publication technology and new publishing synergies are potentially transformative, particularly since Maney is responsible for several other regional archaeological journals in the US. Working with a new team based in London is also a reminder of the global reach of our words, even if they are written high in the Sangre de Cristos or on a saguaro-studded slope outside Tucson.

REFERENCES CITED

• Joyce, Rosemary 2012 Businessmen, Naturalists, and Priests: The Material Past Before Professional Archaeology. Paper presented at the 77th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Memphis.
   Google Scholar
• Snead, James E., Winifred Creamer, and Tineke Van Zandt 2004 ‘Ruins of our Forefathers’: Large Sites and Site Clusters in the Northern Rio Grande. In The Pueblo IV Period in the American Southwest, edited by Charles Adams, and Andrew Duff, pp. 26–34. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
   Google Scholar

The article “Hobbling and Torture as Performative Violence: An Example from the Prehistoric Southwest,” by Anna J. Osterholz, published in Kiva 78(2), pp. 123–143, contained errors that the author and editor would like to correct.

Line 6 on page 127 should read: “Both Fewkes and Whiteley fail to take colonialism into account of this massacre; they also fail to see that modern Hopi have used the Awatovi story as a morality tale, and this may color the overall interpretation of the material remains”

Line 21 on page 134 should read: “The story of Awatovi has been used as a morality tale among modern Hopi groups, and so stories of violence still resonate and provide a basis for proper social behavior amongst these groups (Whiteley 1988; Walker 1998).”

And the following was omitted from the references: