“A Sensory Approach to Exotica, Ritual Practice, and Cosmology at Chaco Canyon”with Robert Weiner

Chaco Canyon (850-1200 CE) in northwestern New Mexico has been the focus of a century’s worth of archaeological research, but fundamental questions remain about the site’s status as the center of the Ancient Four Corners world. Rob outlines evidence for some components of a Chacoan religious movement in the form of artifacts (including imported Mesoamerican exotica), landscapes, and the cultural knowledge of descendant Pueblo and Diné people, with special attention given to the sensory impact of objects and places in driving larger histories of change in the precolonial U.S. Southwest.

Robert S. Weiner is now a Postdoctoral Fellow, Dartmouth Society of Fellows, in the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College. His research interests include religion, cognition and mind, monumentality, cross-cultural comparison, mythology, oral tradition, Chaco Canyon, and Diné traditional history.

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