Battles and massacres are intimate affairs for combatants and others involved, their physical and emotional violence often stemming from fervor and fear. Although mass killing characterizes both battles and massacres, the two are profoundly different. Battles take place between armed forces; massacres are one-sided events in which the dead are mostly innocent victims. Yet the fog of war shrouds both massacres and battles in a functional amnesia. Participants remember what exactly happened during such a violent encounter only imperfectly, and later clarity cannot always rectify accounts thus rendered. Even naming the events as battles or massacres already imposes an interpretive framework upon them.
This unique study centers on four critical engagements between Anglo-Americans and American Indians on the southwestern frontier: the Battle of Cieneguilla (1854), the Battle of Adobe Walls (1864), the Sand Creek Massacre (1864), and the Mountain Meadows Massacre (1857). Editors Ronald K. Wetherington and Frances Levine juxtapose historical and archaeological perspectives on each event to untangle the ambiguity and controversy that surround both historical and more contemporary accounts of each of these violent outbreaks. Both disciplines, the contributors make clear, yield surprisingly similar narratives and interpretive agreement; and the lessons learned from these nineteenth-century killing fields about wartime reporting and command failures remain relevant today.
"Contributions by" T. Lindsay Baker, J. Brett Cruse, Will Gorenfeld, Shannon A. Novak, Lars Rodseth, Douglas D. Scott, and Joe Watkins

When an archaeology student excavates the final layer of debris filling an ancient pueblo room, she dramatically and unexpectedly exposes a sacred kiva lying below. The sinister events that follow, including a murder, hurl the young Graciella into a vortex of dangers from both past and present. With the help of an Apache detective investigating the murder, she attempts to escape from haunting forces that seek to destroy her, while treading a serpentine path that crosses the line between myth and reality. This tale of a prehistoric pueblo and its living descendents confronts one of humankind's most ancient questions: can the past reach into the present and can the present influence what happened long ago? RONALD K. WETHERINGTON is professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, Texas. He has conducted archaeological investigations in Egypt, Mexico, Guatemala, and New Mexico. His excavations in the Taos area form the basis for this novel. He is former director of the Fort Burgwin Research Center near Taos. He has extensive publications in both physical anthropology and archaeology, including "Ceran St. Vrain: American Frontier Entrepreneur" from Sunstone Press.

First a trapper and trader, then a merchant, and finally an emerging capitalist in the flour industry of New Mexico and Colorado, Ceran St. Vrain was an iconic image of the industrious and self-reliant western pioneer of the 19th century. He was also a military hero, aiding the U.S. dragoons as an officer in the New Mexico Volunteer army in their fight against marauding plains Indians alongside Kit Carson. An intelligent and affable soul, he helped lead the southwest from a barter economy, poor in cash and lacking political infrastructure, into a post-military commercial society on the road to statehood. His name has long been associated with a small handful of astute and skilled leaders in the transformation of the southwest: Carson, the Bent brothers, Charlies Beaubien, Lucien Maxwell, Colonels Sterling Price and E.V. Sumner, and yet until now his story has been largely hidden in footnotes and brief accounts of particular exploits. This story of St. Vrain was stimulated by the author's earlier excavation of his first flour mill in Taos, and the need to make that excavation record public. Hence, this volume is in two parts: Part I is a biographical account of St. Vrain's life from his entry into New Mexico in the 1820s until his death in 1870. Part II is a detailed description of the mill excavations and interpretations. RONALD K. WETHERINGTON is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. From 1964 until 2001 he spent summers at SMU's Fort Burgwin Research Center in Taos, New Mexico, variously directing archaeological operations and developing its academic program. He served two years as the Center's Associate Director and another two as its Director.