The Continuous Path: Pueblo Movement and the Archaeology of Becoming by Samuel Duwe and Robert W. Preucel (review)

the continuous path: Pueblo Movement and the Archaeology of Becoming marks a significant turning point in the scholarship of Indigenous peoples by archaeologists. Since its inception, North American archaeology has been viewed by many Indigenous peoples as a largely extractive and exploitative appropriation of their histories, sacred landscapes, objects, and myriad other forms of intangible heritage. Duwe and Preucel's collection of essays situates Pueblo (and to a lesser extent Apache) culture history at the center of the movement to shift archaeological scholarship and reimagines what it means to work with contemporary Indigenous peoples through meaningful, practical, and engaging forms of dialogue. Spanning the entire region of the American Southwest, the eleven chapters are unlike anything scholars of Native America are likely to have read. In this book personhood, community, and cosmology are viewed through an Indigenous lens.

In this volume, movement serves as the metaphor and vehicle for redefining how archaeologists and Indigenous peoples imagine and represent change, migration, and homeland in the complex landscape of the Pueblo world. Written in collaboration with Pueblo and Apache cultural resource stewards and practitioners, the essays represent landscape and narrative as the living canvas of Pueblo cosmology and social change. A central fallacy of archaeological research lies in the definition of the site itself. Each "site" by virtue of its "abandonment" (a term heavily freighted) can be interpreted as the location of some kind of technological, environmental, or social failure. These essays demonstrate that movement throughout a landscape signifies the opposite phenomenon, one of success—a consciously constructed and creative implementation of a cosmology that embodies change as a central theme. In this sense, movement, as identified by Tewa scholar Tessie Naranjo, represents the fulfillment of the imperatives required for life to continue. While many archaeological narratives draw straight lines between village and migration in a continuous trajectory of environmental change, cultural adaptation, and the conceptually freighted signifier of "abandonment," these essays embrace nah poeh meng, "the continuous path" that unifies the frames of emergence, contemporary time, and being and becoming as described by Pueblo authors (18).

Working against archaeoconcepts of migration and mobility (which have at times been used by archaeologists to destabilize and fracture Indigenous narratives of connection to landscape and ancestral villages), these collaborative chapters challenge the implications of historical rupture and cultural discontinuity. Of equal importance in this project is the idea that the terms of collaboration are not merely a means of more efficiently extracting information considered sensitive or sacred to Pueblo people. Throughout much of the twentieth century, Pueblo culture has been depicted as a kind of sacred cipher where the true motives of behavior and the meanings of objects and ritual are either revealed through economic and environmental modeling, conflict theory, technological adaptation, and game theory or dismissed as esoteric metaphor. As many of the Pueblo scholars emphasize, knowledge is not a commodity to be acquired in an open-access marketplace. Rather, the terms and conditions by which information is shared with the public require a knowledge and respect for community and the role of the individual within the community. Explanation and meaning are carefully negotiated to promote cross-cultural understanding, not to enhance the status of researchers. Conscious recognition of this boundary has become a central component within collaborative studies and provides a much-needed framework within which Indigenous representation can be reimagined.

Of particular interest among Indigenous scholars are notions of being and becoming, liminality and personhood for both individual and community. The authors demonstrate how movement within a lifetime is a way of being that culminates in a concept of "middle place," a state of being manifested at the community level as a means of fulfilling prophecies related to origin narratives (79, 254). The continuous path acknowledges that dialogues among Indigenous peoples and the scholars who seek to represent them are contingent. For these collaborations to be meaningful they must...