The American Southwest is one of the most important archaeological regions in the world, with many of the best-studied examples of hunter-gatherer and village-based societies. Research has been carried out in the region for well over a century, and during this time the Southwest has repeatedly stood at the forefront of the development of new archaeological methods and theories. Moreover, research in the Southwest has long been a key site of collaboration between archaeologists, ethnographers, historians, linguists, biological anthropologists, and indigenous intellectuals. This volume marks the most ambitious effort to take stock of the empirical evidence, theoretical orientations, and historical reconstructions of the American Southwest. Over seventy top scholars have joined forces to produce an unparalleled survey of state of archaeological knowledge in the region. Themed chapters on particular methods and theories are accompanied by comprehensive overviews of the culture histories of particular archaeological sequences, from the initial Paleoindian occupation, to the rise of a major ritual center in Chaco Canyon, to the onset of the Spanish and American imperial projects. The result is an essential volume for any researcher working in the region as well as any archaeologist looking to take the pulse of contemporary trends in this key research tradition.

There is an unsettling paradox in the anthropology of religion. A large body of scholarship now questions the universality of "religion" as an analytical category in ethnographic and historical studies. Modern understandings of religion emerged out of a specifically Western genealogy, and noting this, many have grown suspicious of any claim that such understandings can be applied with fidelity to premodern or non-Western contexts. Contemporary archaeologists, in contrast, now use the terms "religion" and "ritual" with greater ease than ever, even though their deeply premodern and fully non-Western objects of study would seem to present the greatest challenges to universal definitions of religion as a distinct sphere of human belief and practice. In this probing study, Severin Fowles undertakes a sustained critique of religion as an analytical category in archaeological research. Building from a careful dissection of the relationship between secularism, premodernity, and archaeology, Fowles explores just what is at stake in our reconstructions of an enchanted past. In doing so, he offers a detailed examination of the case of Ancestral Pueblo society in the American Southwest, widely regarded in the anthropological literature as a native tradition that was consumed with religious ritual. Moving against this orthodoxy, Fowles provocatively argues that-prior to Catholic missionization during the colonial era-the Pueblo people did not, in fact, have a religion at all. They had, he suggests, something else, something that cannot be easily translated into Western categories. Drawing upon the indigenous vernacular, Fowles concludes that Pueblo "doings" were this something else, and he charts a course toward a new archaeology of doings that moves us far beyond the familiar terrain of premodern religion.