The Star Lake Archaeological Project
Subtitle
Anthropology of a Headwaters Area of Chaco Wash, New Mexico
Edited by Walter Wait and Ben Nelson
These 15 essays inventory and evaluate the cultural resources discovered at the Star Lake Archaeological Research Project in northwestern New Mexico. Commissioned by the Peabody Coal Company to evaluate resources in a strip-mining area, the project turned up remains from the preceramic, Anasazi and historic periods.
The book is divided into three parts, the first of which provides background, with essays by Walter Wait and Neal Lopinot. Part two presents chapters by Wait, Joseph K. Anderson and Terry J. Powell. Part three contains five chapters dealing with the Anasazi period written by Wait, Terry Klein, Anna Pauline Fondaw, David Barde and Fred York.
This book is designed as a text in courses dealing with contract archaeology, with the application of archaeological method and theory, and with archaeological field techniques. The essays show archaeologists applying some of the newest methods and theoretical techniques, not in an academic setting, but on the job where they worked as archaeologists. In Wait’s terms, the book utters a challenge: “Be imaginative, be creative, be archaeologists.”
Bio
Ben Nelson is a professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change. His research focuses on cycles of social complexity and connectivity among the ancient cultures of northwestern Mexico and the American Southwest, on human roles in and responses to the desertification of grasslands in those regions, and on relating archaeology to indigenous cultures of the present day.
