Changing Landscapes, Changing People in North-western New Mexico

This chapter reflects on the political framework of the concept of landscape and focuses on landscape ontologies as landscape politics in the Chacoan interventions in north-western New Mexico. Throgmorton argues that the idea of landscape in today's archaeological and heritage practices is key to understanding the complex and multi-layered contexts for its study across time. For example, traditional Indigenous homelands overlap with resources of economic value and are entangled in an array of national and regional land statuses. Throgmorton's chapter presents a key point that landscapes of the past were as political as those of the present, and he presents this argument by using the case study of how the Pueblo inhabitants of what is now north-western New Mexico engaged in political action through the restructuring of cultural landscapes during the late 11th and early 12th centuries AD.