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8 Continuity and Discontinuity in Southwestern Religions Stephen H. Lekson The southwest is a poster child for continuity. The new Mexico tourism department touts the depth of the state’s history and prehistory, urging vacationers to stay a few days longer to take it all in. The Pueblo of Acoma claims to be the oldest continuously occupied village in the country (and so does oraibi, over at Hopi). Pueblos, in particular, are marketed as timeless and eternal, never-changing. of course, Pueblos that lost lands to colonial governments would challenge that claim,but the timelessness marketed in santa Fe and sedona refers not to land lines and legalities, but to cosmological verities. it pleases us to think that southwestern native American ideologies and worldviews are and were, in effect, permanent. And there is some truth to that: southwestern religions and ideologies have deep roots. For archaeology—and particularly for archaeology’s contributions to our understanding of southwestern religions—continuity has been the default assumption. From the very earliest days of southwestern archaeology, we have assumed rather teleologically that the goal of the ancient peoples was to turn into Pueblos,as those were known in turn-of-the-last-century ethnologies .The back-story beginning of modern Pueblos began with the first great southwesternist, Adolph Bandelier. The pioneering swiss saw a steady, cumulative ,boring progression from rough,rude beginnings to modern Pueblo life: “The picture which can be dimly traced into this past is a very modest and unpretending one. no great cataclysms of nature, no waves of destruction on a large scale, either natural or human, appear to have interrupted the slow and tedious development of the people before the spaniards came” (Bandelier 1892:592). We would not put it that way today of course. We know there were a few bumps on the road. The great drought of 1275 to 1300, for example, 202 stephen H. Lekson qualifies as a mild cataclysm. But a century after Bandelier and his “slow and tedious development,” we still favor versions of the past that turn ancient people into modern Pueblos as quietly and efficiently as possible. slow and tedious, perhaps, but along a fairly straight line leading from a huntergatherer Archaic to the modern Pueblos—serene,spiritual,communal,eternal .That’s the version you see in museum exhibits,hear at Mesa verde campfire talks, read in santa Fe coffee-table books. slow and tedious development was codified in the master narrative of Pueblo archaeology, the Pecos Classification, with its sequence of Basketmaker ii and iii followed by Pueblo i, ii, iii, iv, and v.The Pecos Classification was first proposed in 1927 (Fowler 2000:315–318) and is still in use. it defined developmental stages or horizons and not spans of actual time, incrementally adding the elements necessary to modern Pueblo life: corn first, then pottery, then pueblos, then kivas, then kachinas, and so forth until all the pieces were in place for Hopi, or Acoma, or san Juan.That’s not history; it’s ontogeny. A few archaeologists, even at the time, thought there was more to the story than a steady plodding march to Pueblodom. Frank roberts proposed a modification of the Pecos stages, with a rise-and-fall plot (roberts 1935): Basketmaker (Basketmaker ii) Modified Basketmaker (Basketmaker iii) developmental Pueblo (Pueblo i and Pueblo ii) great Pueblo (Pueblo iii) regressive Pueblo (Pueblo iv) Historic Pueblo (Pueblo v) The first acts of roberts’s story were set in the Four Corners—the san Juan Hypothesis, which suggested Mesa verde was the original hearth of Pueblo history.The denouement took place in the rio grande pueblos, at Zuni and Hopi. roberts thought Pueblo history peaked in the Four Corners—Great Pueblo!—and then skidded into the rio grande and the western pueblos: the Regressive Pueblo period. “great” and “regressive” clearly signaled the cultural peak at Mesa verde, followed by a cultural decline in the later, protohistoric era. That offended archaeologists working in later time periods, especially in the rio grande. in part that was merely turf and amour propre: nobody wants to be told his or her research area was a dark age or a periphery. But even more, “regressive” was deliberately counter to the steady, slow, and tedious development master narrative. The master narrative prevailed: the term regressive was hissed off the stage,and today it simply isn’t said in polite archaeological discourse.“steady on”pretty much sums it up. [18.191.186.72] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...

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