In 2004 the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) opened to the general public. This book, in the broadest sense, is about how that museum became what it is today. For many Native individuals, the NMAI, a prominent and permanent symbol of Native presence in America, in the shadow of the Capitol and at the center of federal power, is a triumph. At the grand opening, the museum's main message was "We are still here." This message was most directly displayed in Our Lives: Contemporary Life and Identities, one of the NMAI's inaugural exhibitions and the main focus of this book....

A Pueblo Social History explores the intersection of archaeology, ethnohistory, and ethnology. Ware argues that all of the key Pueblo social, ceremonial, and political institutions--and their relative importance across the Pueblo world--can only be explained in terms of indigenous social history stretching back nearly two millennia. He shows that the principal community organizations of the Pueblos emerged for the first time nearly thirteen hundred years ago, and that the interaction of these organizations would forge most of the unique social practices and institutions described in the...

How should archaeologists and other social scientists tackle the big and little questions about change in socionatural systems? Although fieldwork is certainly the place to start, it alone is not enough to answer troublesome "how" or "why" questions. To make sense of what they find in the field, archaeologists build models-possible explanations for the data. This book is about new developments in applying dynamic models for understanding relatively small-scale human systems and the environments they inhabit and alter. Beginning with a complex systems approach, the authors develop a...