Naasgo: Moving Forward – Diné Archaeology in the Twenty-First Century

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgements

Ahéhee’ to former Kiva editor Debra Martin for her initial interest in the issue and to the current editors Tom Rocek and Alison Rautman for helping get said issue over the finish line. Thanks too to all the other 2019 SAA session participants: Timothy Wilcox, Alicia Becenti, Davina Two Bears, Rechanda Lee, Jeremy Begay, Shane Wero, Rena Martin, William Tsosie, Jr., and Ronald Towner. It has been a pleasure working with all of you and the conversations leading up to and following the conference have been an exciting sign of things to come.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Ánaasází is a Navajo term for the ancestral populations of the greater Four Corners region and is inclusive of Paleoindian, Archaic, and other past peoples. For an in-depth discussion of the term’s Diné bizaad roots, see Walters and Rogers (2001) and Warburton and Begay (2005). It is differentiated here from two English-language archaeological terms which specifically refer to the most well-known archaeological culture in the northern Southwest: Anasazi and Ancestral Pueblo(an). The latter term, although currently in vogue, is particularly problematic as its usage inadvertently connotes an exclusionary one-to-one link between modern Pueblo tribal communities and ancestral Southwestern peoples that hampers critical evaluations of the numerous and highly diverse Indigenous communities that lived throughout the region in earlier periods.

2 This oversight is not a uniquely Navajo experience. Similar arguments can be made regarding Southwestern archaeology’s comparative lack of engagement with the material culture and traditional knowledge of groups like the Apache, Ute, Pai, Comanche, and others, while further afield the K’iche’ Maya scholar Avexnim Cojti Ren (2006) has voiced similar concerns about Maya archaeology in Central America.

3 In this regard, Walter Taylor’s mid-century warning/call to action is particularly apt: "There is no automatic, axiomatic assurance that the forms, types, and classes established today by the archaeologist are coextensive with any separable entities that existed in the minds or life ways of a bygone people. At best, the declaration of any such correspondence is a matter for explicit hypothesis and testing, not implicit assumption. It constitutes one of the archaeologist's greatest problems, not one of his self-evident truths" (Taylor 1983 [1948]:123).

4 The work of the other SAA session participants is briefly summarized here as they represent significant contributions to the current Diné archaeology movement being discussed here. In particular, the Dinétah region remains the center of early Navajo-focused research, including the projects of Timothy Wilcox (2019) and Alicia Becenti (2019). Their respective studies highlight the potential of collections-based research to better understand the impacts of Spanish colonialism on early Diné communities. Wilcox’s study of Gobernador Polychrome production and design features links this distinctly Navajo pottery style to the spread of a pan-Indigenous anti-colonial movement in the Southwest in the mid-1600s, while Becenti’s zooarchaeological study highlights the continuance of older Diné butchery practices even as metal tools become more prevalent during the early 1700s. Both projects draw heavily on personal experiences and ethnographic accounts to develop their arguments, a point that was further developed by the session discussants William B. Tsosie, Jr. and Richard M. Begay, who stressed researchers’ need to be more familiar with Diné bizaad, as it was through that particular linguistic and cultural framework that Diné ancestors interacted with the world.