This volume of proceedings from the fifteenth biennial Southwest Symposium makes the case for engaged archaeology, an approach that considers scientific data and traditional Indigenous knowledge alongside archaeological theories and methodologies.

Travis Stanton and Kathryn Brown’s A Forest of History: The Maya after the Emergence of Divine Kingship presents acollection of essays that critically engage with and build upon the lasting contributions A Forest of Kings made to Maya epigraphy, iconography, material culture, and history.

Maya Gods of War investigates the Classic period Maya gods who were associated with weapons of war and the flint and obsidian from which those weapons were made.
 

The Greater Chaco Landscape examines both the imminent threat posed by energy extraction and new ways of understanding Chaco Canyon⁠ and Chaco-era great houses and associated communities from southeast Utah to west-central New Mexico in the context of landscape archaeology.

In Chuj (Mayan) Narratives, Nicholas Hopkins analyzes six narratives that illustrate the breadth of the Chuj storytelling tradition, from ancient mythology to current events and from intimate tales of local affairs to borrowed stories, such as an adaptation of Oedipus Rex.

Why Those Who Shovel Are Silent is based on six years of in-depth ethnographic work with current and former site workers at two major Middle Eastern archaeological sites—Petra, Jordan, and Çatalhöyük, Turkey—combined with thorough archival research.

A poetry collection that challenges preconceived, androcentric ideas about biography, autobiography, and history fueled by the western myth of progress presented in Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis.”

The Egyptian Mummies and Coffins of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science provides replicable findings and consistent terminology for institutions performing holistic studies on extant museum collections of a range of material types and will add substantially to what we know about the effective conservation of Egyptian mummies and coffins.
 

Southeastern Mesoamerica highlights the diversity and dynamism of the Indigenous groups that inhabited and continue to inhabit the borders of Southeastern Mesoamerica, an area that includes parts of present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

Originally published in 1995, soon after Death Valley National Park became the fifty-third park in the US park system, The Explorer’s Guide to Death Valley National Park was the first complete guidebook available for this spectacular area.

Ancient Households on the North Coast of Peru provides insight into the organization of complex, urban, and state-level society in the region from a household perspective, using observations from diverse north coast households to generate new understandings of broader social processes in and beyond Andean prehistory.
 

Energy Impacts brings together important new research on site-level social, economic, and behavioral impacts from large-scale energy development.

Approaching sorcery as highly rational and rooted in significant social and cultural values, Sorcery in Mesoamerica examines and reconstructs the original indigenous logic behind it, analyzing manifestations from the Classic Maya to the ethnographic present.

The Poetics of Processing combines social theory and bioarchaeology to examine how the living manipulate the bodies of the dead for social purposes.

In Shamanism and Vulnerability on the North and South American Great Plains Kathleen Bolling Lowrey provides an innovative and expansive study of indigenous shamanism and the ways in which it has been misinterpreted and dismissed by white settlers, NGO workers, policymakers, government administrators, and historians and anthropologists.

In Night Burial, Kate Bolton Bonnici mourns her mother’s death from ovarian cancer by tracing the composition, decomposition, and recomposition of the maternal body in poetry.

The prose poetry in Kevin Phan’s first collection, Dears, Beloveds, offers a fine-grained meditation on grief—personal, familial, ecological, and political. Informed by the author’s engagement with Buddhism & mindfulness, the poems address looming absences: in our vanishing earth, the scraps of a haunting voicemail, or waiting at hospice with little to do.

The Geology, Ecology, and Human History of the San Luis Valley explores the rich landscapes and diverse social histories of the San Luis Valley, an impressive mountain valley spanning over 9,000 square miles that crosses the border of south-central Colorado and north-central New Mexico and includes many cultural traditions.

Olmec Lithic Economy at San Lorenzo examines the specialized craft production, manufacturing, adoption, and spread of obsidian cutting tools at San Lorenzo, Mexico, the first major Olmec center to develop in the southern Gulf Coast region of Mesoamerica.

 Providing a rare longitudinal look at the cultural basis of this grassroots insurgency, The Rain Gods’ Rebellion offers rare insight into the significance of oral history in forming Nahua collective memory and, by extension, culture.

Spirit Lands of the Eagle and Bear explores advances in the prehistory and early history of Numic hunter-gatherers in the Rocky Mountain West through the presentation and analysis of archaeological and historic research on the period from the earliest established presence in the Rockies and its borderlands more than a thousand years ago to the forced removal of Ute, Shoshone, and other tribes to reservations in the mid-nineteenth century.
 

Chronicles the modal patterns, diversity, and change of ancient mortuary practices from across the US Southwest and northwest Mexico over four thousand years of Prehispanic occupation.

This book presents Hudson’s Bay Company surveyor Peter Fidler’s journals, edited and extensively annotated by historian Barbara Belyea.

A nuanced exploration of the plurality, complexity, and adaptability of Precolumbian and colonial-era Mesoamerican cosmological models and the ways in which anthropologists and historians have used colonial and indigenous texts to understand these models in the past.

A readable, this-day-in-history approach to the key figures, developments, and forces that shaped Colorado from ancient times to the present.

The Minuses beckons attention to ecological and feminist issues, amplifying the endangerments predicating women’s lives and the natural world, laying bare the struggle and faith necessary to endure with integrity and spirit intact.
 

A historical interrogation of the use of fear as a tool to vilify and persecute groups and individuals from a global perspective, offering an unflinching look at racism, fearful framing, oppression, and marginalization across human history.

The first comparative and interdisciplinary volume on the archaeology of settlement abandonment, with contributions focusing on materiality, ideology, the environment, and social construction of space.