THE SOUTHERN ATHABASKANS: SEVEN CENTURIES OF INNOVATION FROM OKLAHOMA TO ARIZONA
What archaeologists refer to as the Southern Athapaskan cultural tradition spread across the American Southwest during the second millennium CE as a dispersed network of social formations in creative dialogue, first, with the rise of large Ancestral Pueblo centers and, later, with the arrival of Spanish and American colonists. The tradition is often defined in linguistic terms, though both the timing and significance of the arrival of the Athapaskan language in the region is debated. Others foreground the tradition’s structural position with a wider Southwest political economy-as one half of a strategic, mutualistic, and at times competitive relationship between aggregated farming villages and the more mobile groups of hunters that encircled them. In this presentation, he argues that image production-particularly in the well-preserved medium of rock art-is emerging as a key line of evidence, poised to significantly refine our understanding of the Southern Athapaskan tradition as a fast-changing regional phenomenon. His argument centers rock art evidence from the Rio Grande Valley but aims to also characterize wider patterns across the Pueblo region and Southern Plains.