Pueblo Peoples on the Pajarito Plateau: Archaeology and Efficiency - David E. Stuart
Stuart, an anthropologist/archaeologist known for his stimulating overviews of prehistoric settlement and subsistence data, argues here that this re-creation of ancestral Puebloan society required a fundamental rebalancing of the Chacoan model. Beginning with Paleo-Indian hunter-gatherers and ending with the large villages and great craftsmen of the mid-sixteenth century, Stuart presents Bandelier as a society that, in crisis, relearned from its pre-Chacoan predecessors how to survive through creative efficiencies. Some of Chaco's survivors moved southeast to the then thinly populated Pajarito Plateau, where they were able to survive by fundamentally refashioning their society.Although Stuart's focus is on the archaeology of Bandelier and the surrounding area, his attention to events that predate those sites by several centuries and at substantial distances from the modern monument is instructive.