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Climate change is today’s news, but it isn’t a new phenomenon. Centuries-long cycles of heating and cooling are well documented for Europe and the North Atlantic. These variations in climate, including the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), AD 900 to 1300, and the early centuries of the Little Ice Age (LIA), AD 1300 to 1600, had a substantial impact on the cultural history of Europe. In this pathfinding volume, William C. Foster marshals extensive evidence that the heating and cooling of the MWP and LIA also occurred in North America and significantly affected the cultural history of Native peoples of the American Southwest, Southern Plains, and Southeast.

Correlating climate change data with studies of archaeological sites across the Southwest, Southern Plains, and Southeast, Foster presents the first comprehensive overview of how Native American societies responded to climate variations over seven centuries. He describes how, as in Europe, the MWP ushered in a cultural renaissance, during which population levels surged and Native peoples substantially intensified agriculture, constructed monumental architecture, and produced sophisticated works of art. Foster follows the rise of three dominant cultural centers—Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, Cahokia on the middle Mississippi River, and Casas Grandes in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico—that reached population levels comparable to those of London and Paris. Then he shows how the LIA reversed the gains of the MWP as population levels and agricultural production sharply declined; Chaco Canyon, Cahokia, and Casas Grandes collapsed; and dozens of smaller villages also collapsed or became fortresses.

Thomas F. McGann Memorial Prize, Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies, 2004
Southwest Book Award, Border Regional Library Association, 2003

In their efforts to impose colonial rule on Nueva Vizcaya from the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, Spaniards established missions among the principal Indian groups of present-day eastern Sinaloa, northern Durango, and southern Chihuahua, Mexico—the Xiximes, Acaxees, Conchos, Tepehuanes, and Tarahumaras. Yet, when the colonial era ended two centuries later, only the Tepehuanes and Tarahumaras remained as distinct peoples, the other groups having disappeared or blended into the emerging mestizo culture of the northern frontier. Why were these two indigenous peoples able to maintain their group identity under conditions of conquest, while the others could not?

In this book, Susan Deeds constructs authoritative ethnohistories of the Xiximes, Acaxees, Conchos, Tepehuanes, and Tarahumaras to explain why only two of the five groups successfully resisted Spanish conquest and colonization. Drawing on extensive research in colonial-era archives, Deeds provides a multifaceted analysis of each group's past from the time the Spaniards first attempted to settle them in missions up to the middle of the eighteenth century, when secular pressures had wrought momentous changes. Her masterful explanations of how ethnic identities, subsistence patterns, cultural beliefs, and gender relations were forged and changed over time on Mexico's northern frontier offer important new ways of understanding the struggle between resistance and adaptation in which Mexico's indigenous peoples are still engaged, five centuries after the "Spanish Conquest."

Reframing Paquimé: Community Formation in Northwest Chihuahua is a groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Casas Grandes region by scholars Michael E. Whalen and Paul E. Minnis. This final installment in their comprehensive study challenges the dominant view of Paquimé as a hierarchical society founded by outsiders, presenting instead a compelling case for a largely locally organized society with Mesoamerican and Puebloan characteristics. Drawing on twenty-five years of extensive survey and excavation data, the authors offer a fresh perspective that reframes our understanding of this remarkable archaeological site.

Whalen and Minnis bring forth significant new data that illuminates the cultural and ecological history of Paquimé and its neighboring communities. The book features more than fifty new radiocarbon dates, hundreds of analyzed archaeobotanical and faunal samples, plus tens of thousands of other artifacts. The data reveal a network of settlements characterized by corporate and ritual-based authority, challenging traditional models of the center’s rise, collapse, and subsequent regional abandonment and arguing that aspects of the Paquimé culture continued to exist up to the Spanish Colonial period.

Reframing Paquimé is poised to become an essential reference for archaeologists interested in Northwest Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. By addressing the complex dynamics of community formation and dissolution, Whalen and Minnis provide invaluable insights that will ignite scholarly debate and inspire future research. This meticulously researched volume, authored by leading experts with decades of fieldwork experience, is a vital addition to any collection on the archaeology and ethnobotany of ancient North American societies.

In the late sixteenth century, Spanish explorers described encounters with North American people they called "Jumanos." Although widespread contact with Jumanos is evident in accounts of exploration and colonization in New Mexico, Texas, and adjacent regions, their scattered distribution and scant documentation have led to long-standing disagreements: was "Jumano" simply a generic name loosely applied to a number of tribes, or were they an authentic, vanished people?

In the first full-length study of the Jumanos, anthropologist Nancy Hickerson proposes that they were indeed a distinctive tribe, their wide travel pattern linked over well-established itineraries. Drawing on extensive primary sources, Hickerson also explores their crucial role as traders in a network extending from the Rio Grande to the Caddoan tribes' confederacies of East Texas and Oklahoma.

Hickerson further concludes that the Jumanos eventually became agents for the Spanish colonies, drafted as mercenary fighters and intelligence-gatherers. Her findings reinterpret the cultural history of the South Plains region, bridging numerous gaps in the area's comprehensive history and in the chronicle of these elusive people.