Being Sheepminded: An Ethnoarchaeological Study of Navajo Pastoralism and its Historical Trajectory

This event is brought to you by the Hisatsinom Chapter of the Colorado Archaeological Society, the Four Corners Lecture Series, and the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. The speaker this week is Wade Campbell.
The Early Navajo Pastoral Landscape Project is a program that seeks to better understand the impacts of incipient pastoralism on the social organization and settlement patterns of early Diné (Navajo) communities in the American Southwest circa AD 1700. Recent work including an ethnoarchaeological study of contemporary Diné herding practices and a systematic study of Gobernador Phase (AD 1626-1776) Navajo sites in Dinétah, the traditional Navajo homeland in northwestern New Mexico, provide new data with which to begin to evaluate early Navajo herding practices. This talk will provide a review of the project’s findings alongside a discussion of how this research can help to shed light on the dynamic history of Navajo pastoralism over the past four centuries.