I. Introduction and Intellectual Rationale
      The Community College Humanities Association (CCHA) has received funding for an NEH Summer Institute for twenty-four faculty participants from community and four-year colleges, with up to three spaces reserved for graduate students in humanities, to be held from June 17 through July 23, 2012, on the topic “Mesoamerica and the Southwest: A New History for an Ancient Land,” whose subtitle we gratefully borrow from Institute scholar Stephen Lekson’s essay “Landscape and Polity/ the Interplay of Land, History and Power in the Ancient Southwest” (in Road to Aztlan, 2001). This five-week Institute, held on-site in locations in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, will enable faculty participants to explore the rapidly accumulating new collaborative scholarship which has been featured at a series of major recent conferences devoted to exploring the interconnections of Mesoamerican and Ancient Southwestern archaeological, anthropological and art historical studies, and whose results are now appearing in a spate of new publications and museum exhibits.

Mesoamerican studies, focusing on such Pre-Columbian phenomena as the ancient metropolis of Teotihuacán, and such richly documented cultures as the Olmec, the Maya, the Zapotec and Mixtec, the Toltec and the Aztec, has been an established field of study for two centuries, with an ever-burgeoning corpus of interdisciplinary scholarship reflecting a multitude of methodological approaches. Ancient Southwestern studies has enjoyed a similarly venerable depth of research, encompassing study of Archaic Indian life-ways and of the major Pre-Columbian civilizations of Arizona and New Mexico: the Hohokam, the Mogollon/Mimbres and the Anasazi or Ancestral Puebloan, along with ethnographic study of their modern descendants, the Pima, the O'odham, the Hopi, the Zuni and Western and Rio Grande Pueblos and their Navajo and Apache neighbors. But, rather amazingly, until recently, and for reasons outlined below, these two important disciplines -- Mesoamerican studies and Ancient Southwestern studies -- despite their obvious proximity and cultural parallels, have been pursued largely in isolation from each other, with very little cross-fertilization. Now, however, a renewed perception of cultural contiguity has sparked new interest in more collaborative and cross-border work between scholars in different academic fields and departments and from different countries.

What makes this new collaborative scholarship of the past ten or fifteen years so exciting is that is has begun to open up a whole new history of Ancient North America, and beyond that, this Pre-Columbian indigenous history has implications for a fuller, more authentic understanding of a region of the present United States whose European or contact-era colonial history begins a decade earlier than Plymouth Rock. The results of the unprecedented current collaborations of Mexican, U.S. and Native American scholars provides the intellectual grounding for this Institute, itself built upon the foundation of our earlier NEH Summer Institute on Mesoamerica and the Southwest in 2004, when this new work was just beginning.

One effective summation of the early stages of the new scholarship in this field was provided a decade ago by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's 2001 exhibition and catalog, The Road to Aztlan/ Art from a Mythic Homeland, which serves as one of our Institute texts. As the curators of the exhibit explained, “In terms of museum practices, the exhibition breaks new ground in looking at the southwestern United States and northern Mexico not as two culturally distinct regions, but as a heterogeneous yet unified cultural area in which deep-rooted regional traditions are linked by common belief systems” (Fields and Zamudio-Taylor, 75). More recently, Carroll Riley, a life-long scholar of the region, entitles his recent book on the interconnections of Pre-Columbian Mexico and the Pre-Columbian Southwest Becoming Aztlan: Mesoamerican Influence in the Greater Southwest, AD 1200-1500 (Univ. of Utah, 2005). Riley's opening sentence puts the case succinctly: "It is time to put the ancient Southwest back into the larger world" (1), by which he means the archaeological and culture history of the whole of Pre-Columbian North America.

As the contributors to the Road to Aztlan Catalog have laid it out for us, the shared pre-Columbian cultural heritage of Mesoamerica and the Southwest includes such fundamental macroeconomic and cultural factors as: maize and cotton cultivation; similar town-planning and design of ceremonial centers, including pyramid or platform mounds, plazas, ball courts, sweat houses and observatories; long-distance trade items such as turquoise, copper, marine shells, and macaw feathers; and such common iconographic motifs as color-coded cardinal direction symbolism (in codices and sand paintings), culture-bearing hero twins, feline and eagle warriors, plumed and horned serpents, and goggle-eyed rain deities. Institute scholar Karl Taube sums up in his Catalog essay that “it has become increasingly apparent that ancient Mesoamerica and the American Southwest were by no means isolated entities but were in direct and sustained contact for millennia. There is abundant material evidence of ancient contact between the two areas, but perhaps more striking is the degree of similarity in religious beliefs and practices” (Road to Aztlan, 102).

Institute scholars Karl Taube, John Pohl, Kent Reilly and Kelley Hays-Gilpin, along with Polly Schaafsma and J. J. Brody, with whom we worked in our earlier Meso/Southwest project, have each explored pertinent iconographic motifs in rock art and mural and pottery painting in both Mesoamerican and Southwestern cultural contexts, suggesting, for instance, the kinship of representations of the Mesoamerican feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl with the Hopi Paalölöqangw or the Zuni Pautewa. Similarly, the costumed ritual impersonators (ixiptlas) of the Aztec rain god Tlaloc, as described and illustrated in 16th century Mexican sources, have been viewed by rock art specialist Polly Schaafsma and Institute scholars Taube, Reilly and Hays-Gilpin as the prototypes of the Hopi and Zuni kachina rain-bringing spirits. Taube has even suggested a comparison between the round temples of Ehecatl, the Mesoamerican wind-deity, and the round kivas of the Southwestern Pueblos, as comparable architectural representations of the place of emergence.
Economic trade and ritual exchange between the peoples of Mesoamerica and the Southwest led to ongoing processes of cultural brokering, self-conscious sharing and adoption of cultural material and ceremonial systems. In the Southwest, for example, the Hopi traced their cultural identity to the “ancient ones,” whom the Navajo called the Anasazi (“ancestors of enemies”); the Navajo, in turn, adopted Zuni traditions of sand painting -- while the Zuni adopted Navajo dance traditions. Meanwhile, the Aztecs, we know, modeled their cultural identity on their predecessors the Toltecs and Teotihuacanos, as can be seen in instances of archaizing architecture and sculpture at the Aztec Templo Mayor in Mexico City, as well as in their tradition of migration out of Chicomoztoc, a cave of origins in the mythic land of Aztlán to the north. The Aztec narrative of origin out of Aztlán -- a topic of Institute scholar John Pohl's seminars -- was well known to the Spaniards of the contact era (we can still see the sixteenth-century documentation in such manuscripts as the Boturini Codex and the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca). The entradas of the Spanish and their Nahua allies into the present-day New Mexico thus already bore some of the “mythic homeland” associations for indigenous and mestizo persons that the region still has today for Chicano/a writers and artists.

 The new systematic comparative study of the culture histories of Mesoamerica and the Ancient Southwest begun some twenty years ago has since been carried forward by a growing corpus of newer scholarly studies, such as the conference sponsored by Dumbarton Oaks in 2001 devoted to the overarching theme, “A Pre-Columbian World: Searching for a Unitary Vision of Ancient America,” eventuating in a volume of essays of the same title edited by Jeffrey Quilter and Mary Ellen Miller (2006). More recently, an important overview article, "Ancient Cultural Interplay of the American Southwest in the Mexican Northwest," by Wilcox, Weigand, Wood and Howard, published in the Journal of the Southwest (2008), focuses on very specific trade goods and trade routes connecting the two regions. Additionally, a series of ground breaking symposia were held in 2001, 2004 and 2006, jointly organized by scholars from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Northern Arizona University, the Mexico North Research Network, and representatives of the Hopi people. The 2006 Conference, entitled "Noroeste - Southwest: raíces comunes/ Common Roots" [the proceedings are posted at < www4.nau.edu/commonroots > and published in a volume edited by Bonfiglioli, Gutiérrez and Olavarría]. Another significant contribution is Painting the Cosmos: Metaphor and Worldview in Images from the Southwest Pueblos and Mexico, edited by Institute scholar Kelley Hays-Gilpin and Polly Schaafsma (Museum of Northern Arizona, MNA Bulletin 67, 2010). These symposia and publications represent the first systematic collaboration of Mexican and U.S. scholars in conjunction with indigenous (Hopi) representatives in historical and cultural studies of the region.

In his recent History of the Ancient Southwest (School for Advanced Research, 2008), which will serve as one of our project texts, Institute scholar Stephen Lekson brings together for discussion the accumulated consensus of traditional 'separatist' Southwest archaeological research along with the new collaborative and integrative scholarship that inclusively encompasses the present U.S. Southwest and northern and western Mexico, from about 1500 BC to AD 1600. Along with his synthesis of Ancient Southwest history, he also offers what he calls a history of "Archaeologies," that is, of the various approaches or "schools" of archaeology that have been applied to the study of those regions from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. "I am pretty sure," Lekson says, echoing Carroll Riley, "that the Southwest will never be understood except as a part of much larger North America" (8). The cultural histories of the indigenous Southwest, and of Mesoamerica and of the later indigenous peoples of Sonora and Chihuahua in northern Mexico, were "shared histories," he insists, and can only be properly understood if intellectually we erase the modern nation-state border that seems to separate them (251). Current collaborative Mesoamerican/Southwestern scholarship thus explores and analyzes both the profound cultural similarities and the differences and distinctions among the various pre-Columbian and historical indigenous cultures of Mexico and the U.S. Southwest.

Lekson's review of the "archaeologies" of the Southwest is a reminder about why this new collaborative scholarship represents such a breakthrough. It's a complex history, but even in broad strokes it explains a great deal, in particular, why it is that until so very recently Mesoamericanists and Southwesternists have worked in virtual isolation from each other, often employed in different academic departments, attending different conferences, and publishing in different journals. Such academic and scholarly separatism must seem strange to the proverbial "naive observer," to whom the interconnections between Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and the Pre-Columbian Southwest must always have seemed fairly self-evident. As indeed it seemed to Spanish and Anglo colonials who, for instance, bestowed such confusing place names in the Southwest as Aztec Ruins (in New Mexico) or Montezuma Castle (in Arizona). This "naive" view of the interconnections between the two regions became codified in the nineteenth century as diffusionism. The diffusionists tended to seek out the origins of indigenous cultural forms from outside sources, from what were assumed to be more “advanced” core cultures. In this view the ancient Pueblos of the Southwest and the Mound cultures of the Mississippi were seen as peripheral extensions of the "more advanced" cultures in Mesoamerica.

In the early and mid-twentieth century "Americanist" archaeologists in a movement called the New Archaeology (or processual archaeology) rebelled against this implication of the cultural dependency of the Ancient Southwest on Mesoamerica. Instead, they developed their own methodologies and periodizations for Southwestern studies, deliberately independent of any Mesoamerican frame of reference, and focusing on a-historical processes (hence the name "processual") that would account for the archaeological facts on the ground: environmental conditions and the material adaptations humans made or attempted to make in response to those conditions. But, as Lekson notes, this strictly processual approach left not much room for contributions by the humanities disciplines, such as art and iconography, comparative religion, oral tradition or history; in particular it left no room for an indigenous history (321, n. 5).
The current turn in postmodern (or post-processual) archaeology within the past ten or fifteen years, however, represents a renewed recognition of archaeology as a humanities discipline as well as a scientific enterprise. The hallmark of this shift is a return to history and narrative, and to the realization that every indigenous culture has a history of change, negotiation and agency, and not just a record of material causalities. This is a shift that happens also to be consistent with the current recognition (made legally binding in the NAGPRA [Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act] legislation of 1990) of the need to take account of indigenous testimony in interpreting the archaeological record. Lekson adduces, for instance, the example of how Hopi oral tradition preserves a moralistic warning against the authoritarian social arrangements of an ancient center called the "White House" (possibly the 12th century ruins of Chaco Canyon). This Hopi tradition can serve, Lekson notes, as a useful commentary on the archaeology of Chaco Canyon, whose ruins reveal a hierarchical system that the more recent Pueblo cultures have rejected in favor of a more socially egalitarian model epitomized by the kachina cult, probably itself imported from Post-Classic Mesoamerica as a remedy to the warfare and other violent disruptions now known to be endemic to the Southwest c. AD 1300, marking the period of the Anasazi abandonment of the Four Corners region and the establishment of the historical Pueblo communities (186, 182, 235).  

 Much recent archaeological “action” has swirled around the immense but previously little-studied Pre-Columbian site of Paquimé at Casas Grandes in northern Mexico. At first, because of its Pueblo-like architecture, Paquimé had been regarded as a sort of southern extension of the ancient Pueblo world. But Charles Di Peso’s excavations in the 1950’s raised a storm of controversy, revealing pyramid platform mounds, ball courts, and macaw breeding pens that led him to conclude that what he had found was a major Mesoamerican “Gateway City,” a 14th century urban trading center from whence Mesoamerican prestige items (macaw feathers, marine shells, copper bells) were exported to the American Southwest, bringing “higher” Mesoamerican culture with them. The subsequent landmark publication, The Casas Grandes World (1999), edited by Carroll Riley and Curtis Schaafsma, systematically reviews the scholarship and re-examines the commonalities of settlement patterns, urban/ceremonial center design, and architecture in regional terms. Archaeologists have continued to debate whether Paquimé is essentially a southernmost Pueblo or a northernmost Mesoamerican city, and so this enigmatic ancient city in the Chihuahua desert, and which is now a World Heritage Site, will be an important focal point for discussions within our Institute.

Layer by layer, interdisciplinary scholarship on Mesoamerica and the Southwest is undertaking this “new history for an ancient land.” The term “palimpsest” borrowed from art history can serve as a useful way of referencing this ongoing process of the construction of cultural history and identity through an unfolding of successive layerings of superimpositions and erasures upon previous cultural realities. [We are pleased to borrow the metaphor from Daniel Cooper Alarcón, a participant in one of our previous NEH Institutes, and author of The Aztec Palimpsest (1997).] a study of representations of Mexican cultural identities). In fact, partial erasure and partial superimposition was already the age-old story of pre-Columbian ceremonial architecture, as pyramid mounds were built on top of one another in successive layerings in an ongoing reconstruction and rewriting of dynastic history. And the on-going writing and rewriting of Southwestern cultural history occurs not only in popular and academic literature, but in religious processions, in murals and street festivals, in kiva ceremonials, in sweat-lodge story-telling, and in border-crossing ballads or corridos, If an acceptable common discourse can be found by academics and by the cultural communities involved, we might even begin to talk about a Greater Mesoamerica or a Greater Southwest without confusion, and about Mesoamerica as a contemporary and not just as a pre-Columbian cultural designation. But that may still be a long time coming.

• Addendum: The Terms "Mesoamerica" and "Aztlan"
The project directors wish to take note that a couple of terms important to our Narrative need to be defined as used in this project.
First, "Mesoamerica." The term Mesoamerica, traditionally used to refer to an archeological and cultural zone of the maize-based, urbanizing Pre-Columbian civilizations that flourished from Central Mexico through much of Central America between about 2500 B.C. to 1500 A.D., has now been opened for re-definition both in geographic and in temporal terms. Scholars at archaeological conferences now can be heard discussing the ancient Hohokam ball courts in Arizona or even the Mississippian Indian mounds at Cahokia, Illinois, as “Mesoamerican” phenomena. And ethnographic scholarship now often uses “Mesoamerican” to refer to indigenous and even mestizo culture well beyond the period of first European contact, as is done, for instance, in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures (2001), edited by Davíd Carrasco. This larger sense of "Mesoamerica" informs much of the recent scholarship by Institute scholars John Pohl, Karl Taube, Kent Reilly and Kelly Hays-Gilpin as well, and will frame their respective seminar discussions for our project.

Secondly, "Aztlan." Both the catalog edited by Fields and Zamudio-Taylor and the monograph by Riley deploy in their titles the highly charged term "Aztlan," referring to the putative homeland to the north from whence, according to Aztec foundation narratives in oral and codical tradition, their ancestors originally migrated on their way to what would become Tenochtitlan/Mexico City. For Fields and Zamudio-Taylor the term invokes not only the narrative of ancestral migration out of a mythic homeland somewhere in the north, but the recent Chicano/a reclamation of the myth as an assertion that this mythic homeland is none other than the present-day U.S. Southwest, and which until 1848 had been, well, the Mexican Northwest. In this context, Aztlán thus refers to that northern mythic homeland claimed by the Aztecs as their place of origin, and which is understood in Chicano/a cultural reclamation, ever since the promulgation of the 1969 manifesto “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” to refer to the American Southwest as homeland to indigenous and mestizo peoples.

"Aztlan" in this sense therefore implies a fundamental restructuring of a major area of American Studies, bringing together for scrutiny under one roof the cultural histories of Mesoamerica and the Southwest, primarily in pre-Columbian but also in colonial, and modern contexts. As Fields and Zamudio-Taylor have summarized: “The theme of Aztlan . . . provides an ideal opportunity to investigate the relationship between myth and history as expressed in the art and material culture of the various peoples of the Southwest and Mexico over time, as well as the continuity and evolution of cultural practices throughout the pre-Columbian, colonial, and contemporary eras” (40). Aztlan in modern Chicano/a usage thus presumes to transgress or erase that border so focal to contemporary Mexican and U.S. cultural discourse. While not the primary focus of our more archaeologically focused project, Institute scholar Ramón Gutierrez will discuss this latter-day Aztlan in a pair of seminars carrying the Institute forward into more recent cultural history.

While acknowledging this more politicized meaning of "Aztlan," Carroll Riley, however, uses the term in a narrower and more specifically descriptive archaeological sense as referring to that portion of northern Mexico and those southern portions of Arizona and New Mexico that in the years AD 1200 - AD 1500 manifested a distinctively "Mesoamericanized" indigenous culture, with strong mutual trade relations with -- and largely south-to-north cultural influences emanating from -- Western Mexico and the Valley of Mexico to the south. This usage still sits nicely with the ancient Aztec oral tradition, and also frames a useful working archaeological hypothesis about the interconnectivity of Mesoamerica and the Ancient Southwest, and will be the subject of seminars by Institute scholar Stephen Lekson, whose recent book A History of the Ancient Southwest
(School for Advanced Research, 2008) will serve as one of our Institute texts.

II.                   Institute Design and Faculty
• On-Site and In-Context
Institute seminars, discussions and on-site field study with our nine renowned visiting specialist scholars in Mexico and in the Southwest will provide a compelling format for the selected group of twenty-four Institute summer scholars directly to engage with the “new history for an ancient land.” Site visits will enable participants to evaluate for themselves at first hand the similarities and differences between such Mesoamerican sites as Teotihuacán, Tenayuca and Tenochtitlan, and such Southwestern sites as Chaco, Mesa Verde and Aztec Ruins -- in terms of commonalities and differences in architecture, site design, iconography, and hypothesized worldviews and religious and ceremonial systems. Throughout the project, participants will be encouraged collectively to rethink course content and curricular design, to collaborate in the production of classroom materials and community resources (multi-media lectures, web sites, listserves) as well as to pursue individual research interests. At least once a week the project directors will conduct a mid-day round table to review and evaluate the proceedings and to discuss shared research or curricular interests.
The Institute is by design ambitious and demanding, involving a full schedule of seminars, travel, and field study. Some of the field study days are designated as optional, for the benefit of participants who may feel the need for more individual time for study and reflection, but as our previous experience indicates, almost all of the participants will want to take advantage of all of these offered options. The scholarship and design of the Institute builds upon our administrative experience in sponsoring and directing twelve previous on-site NEH Institutes, held in Mexico, Central America, the Andes and the Pacific Northwest Coast, including three which were, like this project, based partly in Mexico and partly in the Southwest
.
The Institute will run for five weeks, from June 17 through July 23, 2012, on-site in Mexico and the Southwest. Institute sessions will be conducted by the visiting scholars both in the form of seminar sessions and on-site field study. A typical seminar day will consist of a morning seminar (9 to noon) held in conference facilities in Mexico City and at conference facilities at the University of Northern Arizona and at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico. Seminars will be followed by lunch and opportunity for informal discussions and consultation with each respective visiting scholar. On-site field study will typically involve full day site visits conducted by the respective visiting scholars, with additional opportunity for informal discussions at lunch, dinner and in the evenings. It is central to the design of this Institute that throughout the five weeks, classroom seminars will be balanced by such museum and on-site field lectures, so that the various museum collections, monuments, archaeological sites, and indigenous communities visited and studied will constitute, along with the relevant assigned readings, the primary “texts” of the Institute.

Because the Institute schedule is a very full one, it will be important for participants to do as much of the assigned reading as possible in advance. After the selection process is completed, participants will be sent a short list of texts to acquire, along with a detailed Daily Schedule of assigned readings. All reading selections other than the basic Institute texts will be posted digitally on SAKAI, a digital classroom site dedicated to the project through the courtesy of The Johns Hopkins University Library. All seminar discussions and assigned readings will be in English or English translation, so that while fluency in Spanish (or a relevant indigenous language) is obviously advantageous, lack of fluency or literacy in these languages will not be a barrier to full participation in the Institute.
Participants will arrange individually to arrive in Mexico City on Sunday, June 17, 2012 and that evening CCHA will host a welcome reception. Four visiting scholars will conduct seminars during our time in Mexico City, to explore aspects of Mesoamerican iconography, settlement patterns and urban design, foundation myths and traditions, social organization and religious ceremonial. Our first scholar, John Pohl, who has done extensive work with Pre-Columbian narrative traditions concerning origin and migration stories and dynastic histories as recorded in codices and in oral traditions recorded after the arrival of Europeans. Pohl will focus on such narrative traditions coming from the Mixtec peoples of the Oaxacan highlands, who were immediate predecessors and subsequently contemporaries of the Aztecs, and whose artistic style (often called the Puebla-Mixteca style) formed an important precedent for Aztec art. Pohl has also explored the possible parallels of these origin and migration stories of the Mixtec and Aztec with comparable materials of the Puebloan Southwest.

Our second scholar, Karl Taube has vigorously pursued these very parallels in a series of groundbreaking articles that analyze certain iconographic themes that predominate in the arts of both Mesoamerica and Southwest: elemental themes such as mountains, clouds, rain, maize-corn, and fertility -- and the corresponding deities or spirit-beings associated with these natural forms. Together, Pohl and Taube will conduct a study visit to Mexico City's Museum of Anthropology to explore first hand some of the key artifacts discussed in their respective seminars, and together they will also conduct a field study to the nearby Classic-period urban center of Teotihuacán (3rd through 6th centuries A.D.), whose layout and artwork provided the later Aztecs a fundamental template for their own cosmology and their own socio-political, architectural and artistic expression.

A culmination of this line of study will be full-day visit to Aztec sites in Mexico City. We will begin with a study visit to the Aztec Templo Mayor, the remains of the great temple that stood at the heart of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, a tour conducted by the curatorial staff of the on-site Museum of the Templo Mayor. We will then continue by bus to the remains of the twin city of Tlatelolco and to two smaller Aztec temples (Tenayuca and Santa Cecelia Atitlan) now found in outlying districts of Mexico City. Seminar discussions led by our third scholar, Eloise Quiñones Keber, who has written extensively on sixteenth-century evidences of Aztec ritual and ceremonial, will enable participants to compare their on-site experiences with how these Mesoamerican ceremonial centers and their attendant rituals were described in such ethnohistorical sources as the writings of the sixteenth century Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún.

Our fourth scholar in Mexico, Alan Sandstrom will bring these Pre-Columbian themes into the currency of contemporary Nahua culture, that is, the culture of contemporary indigenous people of Central Mexico belonging to the same ethnicity as the Aztecs and speaking a variant of the same Nahuatl language as the Aztecs. In Corn is Our Blood/ Culture and Ethnic Identity in a Contemporary Aztec Indian Village, one of our Institute texts, Sandstrom has produced a comprehensive ethnography of a Nahua community that in terms of social organization and religious ideology helps to bridge the gulf between the Pre-Columbian and contemporary indigenous worlds of Central Mexico. Sandstrom's seminars will thus form an effective transition to our move to the Southwest where we will explore the same or similar themes in both Pre-Columbian and contemporary Puebloan culture.
After two weeks in Mexico City, our group flies to Phoenix, Arizona, where we begin immediately with a visit to the site and museum of Pueblo Grande, devoted to the remains of the ancient Hohokam culture, considered the Southwest culture closest in style and substance to the Mesoamerican cultures of Mexico. We then move on to Flagstaff, where we will be based for four nights in conference facilities of the University of Northern Arizona, Kelley Hays-Gilpin and Ramson Lomatewama and other Hopi colleagues have been engaged in a sustained comparative study of Mesoamerican history and culture in relation to traditional Hopi history and culture. Hays-Gilpin and Lomatewama will offer seminars and conduct field study of the Hopi mesas in connection with Hopi oral traditions about their tribal origins and history, themes explored in the recently published volume Painting the Cosmos: Metaphor and Worldview in Images from the Southwest Pueblos and Mexico, edited by Hays-Gilpin and Polly Schaafsma (2010) that is another of our Institute texts.

Our group then moves on to settle into residence at Santa Fe University of Art and Design, where we will have seminars conducted by Stephen Lekson and Kent Reilly. Lekson is the author the new essential text, A History of the Ancient Southwest (2008), which is devoted precisely to reviewing the past scholarship  -- and lack of it -- on the interconnections of Mesoamerica and the Southwest and he will build on his seminars around interpretations of the important sites of Chaco, Aztec (New Mexico), and Mesa Verde subsequently to be visited by the group. Reilly has long devoted his research and publication to the cosmovisions embodied in the material culture of the Olmec, the Maya and the Aztec of Mexico, the Pueblo of the southwest and the Mound-builder cultures of the Mississippi and the Southeast. In our schedule Lekson and Reilly will overlap (as did Pohl and Taube in Mexico) so that participants will have the benefit of their scholarly interchange.

Our group, as noted, will then have the opportunity to make study visits to the Southwestern archaeological sites of Pecos, Chaco, Aztec Ruins and Mesa Verde in overnight field trips escorted respectively by Fran Levine and Donna Glowacki. An assigned essay by Rina Swentzell, for instance, will show how this architecture of the Ancient Southwest can be “read” as cultural text, in her analysis of the symbolic dimensions of Pueblo houses, plazas and kivas. Additional readings from Lekson, Levine, Glowacki, Polly Schaafsma, David Grant Noble and J. J. Brody will suggest how the structures and the art and iconography of Mesoamerican and Ancient Southwestern centers can be read and deciphered, as Swentzell suggests, as cultural texts.
Our final scholar in the southwest, Ramón Gutiérrez will offer two separate sets of seminars for the Institute. The first set, prior to the overnight excursions in the Four Corners region, will focus on Pueblo culture on the eve of contact, based on his seminal study, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away (Stanford University Press, 1991). Then, to conclude our Institute, Professor Gutiérrez will return to offer a pair of seminars on the persistence of themes with strong Mesoamerican connections in Chicano/a literature and art, particularly in the reclamation of the Aztán theme in contemporary murals and folk art.

Based on the experiences of our previous Summer Institutes [held in Mexico and New Mexico, in 1995, 1998 and 2004; in Central America on "The Maya World" in 1997, 2000, 2002, 2006 and 2011; in Oaxaca in 2007; in Peru on "The Andean World" in 2005 and 2008; and in Alaska and British Columbia on the Pacific Northwest Coast cultures in 2010], we are confidant that the opportunity for the twenty-four participating faculty from different humanities disciplines to undertake this study of the cultural worlds of Mesoamerica and the Southwest will dramatically open up new areas of research, interdisciplinary study and curriculum development. The project will significantly enhance participants' courses in such disciplines as world history, American studies, Native American studies, art history, religious studies, language and literature, anthropology, archaeology, sociology and cultural geography; literature courses can make use of the newly accessible indigenous, colonial and modern texts that have emanated from the Mesoamerican and Southwest regions. Courses in American studies can use these materials to include more emphasis on the Native American experience and the indigenous voice in the humanities.

 

Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities."