What are the connections between past and present peoples in the U.S. Southwest and Northwest Mexico? How were the ancient societies that occupied this landscape interconnected? Contributors leverage diverse source materials rooted in classic ethnography, oral tradition, and historical documents to offer novel answers to these questions. Running throughout the discussions is a metanarrative that reflects the tensions between disciplines such as anthropology and history and the rapidly evolving dynamic between scholars and the Indigenous subjects of past and present research. With chapters written by scholars from the U.S. and Mexico, including Indigenous coauthors, Borderlands Histories offers diverse perspectives and illustrates the range of methods and interpretive approaches employed by some of the most respected and experienced names in the field of borderlands archaeology today.
John Philip Carpenter is research professor at the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia--Centro INAH Hermosillo, Sonora. His research includes archaeology and enthnohistory projects in Arizona, California, Oregon, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah, as well as Chiapas, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Sonora, and Zacatecas, Mexico. Matthew Pailes is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. He is currently collaborating with John Carpenter and Guadalupe Sanchez on long-term research in the Sierra Madre Occidental to compare material culture from multiple valleys to reconstruct the demographic and political history of the region.
"A timely contribution to a discussion of both diverse methods and application case studies. These essays feature both senior and emerging scholars who explore a variety of cases to illustrate the promise (and peril) of placing material culture analysis in conversation with the historical documentary record, and, less so, in contemporary discourse with the curated traditional knowledge of Indigenous descendants today." --James F. Brooks, Gable Distinguished Chair in History, University of Georgia Research Professor in History & Anthropology "This work is significant on several levels. First, while the region of interest is the U.S. Southwest - NW Mexico borderlands, the impact of these chapters is much wider, across time and space. Within the volume, the chapters illustrate the diversity of cultures, traditions, and material remains which connect broad types of data. The book should be of interest to archaeologists, historians, ethnohistorians, Native American studies scholars, ethnographers, and scholars in other related fields. It is a multidisciplinary work with broad implications." --John Douglass, vice president of research and standards, Statistical Research, Inc.
