Winds from the North: Tewa Origins and Historical Anthropology

An engaging and inspiring inquiry into the way that conceptual metaphors shape cultural behavior and their material correlates. A must for archaeologists interested in the cognitive and accessible and valuable for all who are interested in the people of the American Southwest

Excellent scholarship and research. Well-organized and well written. If more DNA analysis can be added in the future, I would enjoy an updated edition or a whole other text. This is a mind I really admire and hope my husband and I meet at Crow Canyon.

The Tewa-speaking pueblos near Santa Fe have always claimed ancestry from the ancient peoples the Apache called "Anasazi" - those ancient ones who vanished rather abruptly from Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon around 800 years ago. It's taken careful work by Dr. Scott Ortman to sort through the web of conflicting anthropological theories, disjunctive material artifacts and complex linguistic, cultural and genetic clues to find a scientific validation for what the indigenous Tewa people have been telling us all along about their ethnogenesis, i.e. where they came from.In his lecture at the Telluride Historical Museum this spring, Ortman laid out his case quite elegantly. And his prize-winning new book (derived from his Ph. D. thesis) assembles all the intricate details -- Winds from the North: Tewa Origins and Historical Anthropology (Univ. of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 2012)For years anthropologists were mystified because, although there was a sudden population increase in the Rio Grande region right around the time Mesa Verde and Chaco were depopulated, none of the cultural artifacts from Mesa Verde culture (pottery styles, architectural styles, etc.) ever appeared in the Rio Grande region.Ortman painstakingly delves into the concepts of inheritance and ethnicity, synthesizing methods and data from the four subgroups of anthropology -- ethnography, linguistics, archaeology and physical anthropology. He untangles the presuppositions of previous scholars and brilliantly weaves a landmark story of migration and social transformation, and in the process rewrites our understanding of the history of the Four Corners region of the Southwest.In the end, it's the mythic tales of the Tewa that prove the central clues to solving one of the long-standing mysteries of Southwestern studies. Get a copy of the book. It's not cheap, nor light reading. But Ortman is one of those new breed of scientists who write clearly and convincingly, so that both lay readers and specialists can follow his crafted arguments and startling hypotheses.Winds from the North is sure to become a Southwestern classic.