Aerial view of Pueblo Bonito Great House, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

After the United States Army took the region of New Mexico from the Republic of Mexico in the War of 1847, the citizens of New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. read in the illustrated weeklies of the remarkable ruins at Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon (see figs. 1, 2). The public imagination peopled these exotic buildings with conveniently vanished civilizations: the lost tribes of Israel, Phoenicians, and—a little more realistically—the “Chichimec” peoples who left their homes in the north and …

Those who sojourn in the Southwest with an eye for the landscape and an interest in American Indian art and culture will always remain profoundly affected by the sweep of the setting and the ancient communities with deeply rooted traditions. The region is dotted with a multitude of archaeological sites, from the Rio Grande in New Mexico to the plateau of northern Arizona and the eroded canyons and mountains of nearby Utah and Colorado, and southward over the Mogollon Rim into the desert basin …