The story of one of the longest-lived and most successful nomadic enclaves in North America provides a rare glimpse into the material expressions of Apache self-determination and survival. For nearly 200 years the Jicarilla Apache of New Mexico thrived in the interstices of Pueblo and Spanish settlements following their expulsion from the Plains. Critical to their success was their ability to extend key aspects of Plains-Pueblo exchange to Indian and mixed-blood communities on the fringes of colonial rule. More than other nomadic tribes, the Jicarilla played an enormous role in holding together the social fabric of New Mexican villages after the fall of the Spanish Empire.

This comprehensive study by Sunday Eiselt begins with the great Athapaskan migration out of Canada during prehis-toric times and ends with the forced settlement of the Jicarilla on the Dulce reservation in the 1880s. Eiselt combines archaeological and ethno­historical data in an examination of Jicarilla strategies for self-preservation. She reveals the ideological and political imperatives of “­belonging” that shaped their interactions with local communities and the state and that enabled them to avoid reservation life well into the 1880s. Throughout their long history, Jicarilla identity remained intact, distinctive, and discernable even as life on the reservation disrupted the intimate connections that once existed with their Hispanic and Pueblo neighbors.
 

Tewa Worlds tells a history of eight centuries of the Tewa people, set among their ancestral homeland in northern New Mexico. Bounded by four sacred peaks and bisected by the Rio Grande, this is where the Tewa, after centuries of living across a vast territory, reunited and forged a unique type of village life. It later became an epicenter of colonialism, for within its boundaries are both the ruins of the first Spanish colonial capital and the birthplace of the atomic bomb. Yet through this dramatic change the Tewa have endured and today maintain deep connections with their villages and a landscape imbued with memory and meaning.

Anthropologists have long trekked through Tewa country, but the literature remains deeply fractured among the present and the past, nuanced ethnographic description, and a growing body of archaeological research. Samuel Duwe bridges this divide by drawing from contemporary Pueblo philosophical and historical discourse to view the long arc of Tewa history as a continuous journey. The result is a unique history that gives weight to the deep past, colonial encounters, and modern challenges, with the understanding that the same concepts of continuity and change have guided the people in the past and present, and will continue to do so in the future.
 

Focusing on a decade of fieldwork in the northern portion of the Tewa world—the Rio Chama Valley—Duwe explores how incorporating Pueblo concepts of time and space in archaeological interpretation critically reframes ideas of origins, ethnogenesis, and abandonment. It also allows archaeologists to appreciate something that the Tewa have always known: that there are strong and deep ties that extend beyond modern reservation boundaries.