SAR Press is starting a new blog series comprised of interviews with diverse scholars who have recently published or are in the midst of publishing their first book and who can offer guidance and encouragement to colleagues who are just starting to think about publishing. We hope that these interviews make a small contribution to supporting junior scholars as they begin the publishing process.
The books in this list address Indigenous identity from different perspectives and in different ways: Native artists discuss the tensions between art and life; Native anthropologists and historians describe changing forms of identity via stereotyping, genetic science, ecology, and decolonization; and Native writers in various genres tell the stories of their people surviving and thriving, past and present.
In 1970 former SAR president Douglas Schwartz began test excavations at the fourteenth-century Pueblo site of Arroyo Hondo, located approximately five miles south of Santa Fe. Earlier this year, SAR made the decision to transfer its only archaeological collection to the Center for New Mexico Archaeology, the state repository for such collections, where it will be able to receive more specialized care.
Drawing on over fifty years of research and data, the book argues that two factors—cultural collapse and systematic social and economic exclusion—explain the recent religious transformation of Maya Guatemala and the style and emotional intensity through which that transformation is expressed.
In a conversation with SAR’s director of communications and public programs, Ruth Van Dyke describes how the Ancestral Puebloan builders in Chaco Canyon tried to create a “sense of place that emphasized Chaco as the center. Chaco was the fulcrum, and you can see this on the landscape.”
In November 1981, anthropologists and tribal representatives gathered on the Pascua Pueblo Yaqui Reservation in southern Arizona for the 89th International Symposium, hosted by the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Although this obscure conference may have been relegated to a footnote in the history of anthropology and the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, Nicholas Barron, SAR’s 2020 William Y. and Nettie K. Adams summer scholar, argues that its story helps us to better understand consequential, ongoing political processes and Indigenous histories.
With the nation’s social and political turmoil as well as an ongoing pandemic, 2020 revealed how now more than ever the perspectives of social science scholars and Native American artists matter. In today’s post, we reflect on the last year and invite you to join us for online programs in the new year.
To celebrate the publication of SAR Press’s most recent Advanced Seminar volume, Archaeologies of Empire (2020), we have brought together editors of this book and our previously published Imperial Formations (2007) to discuss new insights and intersections in their work.
Join us on November 18 at 2 p.m. (MST) to hear Sullivan discuss “Amplifying Gentrification: Contestations of Sound and Space in Brooklyn, New York.” He is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University and will be speaking as part of our fall Scholar Colloquia series. This online event is free and open to the public.
Join us on November 4 at 2 p.m. (MST) to hear Warner-Smith discuss “Working Hands, Indebted Bodies: The Bioarchaeology of Labor and Inequality in an Era of Progress.” She is PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Syracuse University and will be speaking as part of our fall Scholar Colloquia series. This online event is free and open to the public.