Episode 16

Welcome to Cliff Palace: Ancestral Puebloans

This week we round out this month's coverage of indigenous Latin America with a look at the Ancestral Puebloans of the American Southwest. We couldn't fit 10,000 years of human experience and complexity into a single episode, so instead we highlight some architectural and engineering achievements, petroglyphs, and some of the mythological beings represented in them. Plus, the origins of the word "adobe" and a lengthy consideration of why the cultural appropriation of Kokopelli looms so large in our memory of the 1990s.

To learn more, check out:

Aztec Ruins National Monument--New Mexico NPS Historical Handbook No. 36, 1962 (Project Gutenberg)

The Chaco Road System - Southwestern America's Ancient Roads (ThoughtCo)

Native Languages of the Americas: Pueblo Legends and Stories (Native-Languages.org)

Hopi Petroglyph Sites (CyArk)

How Kokopelli, the Flute-Playing God, Conquered Pop Culture (Artsy)

Books:

Pueblo Gods and Myths

Kokopelli, Casanova of the Cliff Dwellers

Chaco Handbook: An Encyclopedic Guide

Chaco Canyon: Archaeologists Explore the Lives of an Ancient Society

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The Dirt Podcast
Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.