Navajo Emergence in Dinétah:

• Main Authors: Douglas D. Dykeman, Paul Roebuck Ph. D
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Athabascan
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.524.632; http://www.drarchaeology.com/publications/navajoemergence.pdf

Many scholars speculate that Navajo culture arose as Athabaskan migrants gradually adopted Puebloan traits and maize agriculture following the Pueblo refugee period of the late 1600s. Recent archaeological work in Dinétah, the traditional Navajo emergence place, reveals sites dating from 1541 to 1625, rich in Navajo artifacts, diverse economies, and robust maize agriculture. The prominence of maize in these earliest sites is consistent with its importance in the Navajo social imaginary expressed in traditional Navajo creation accounts. Tradition and archaeology show that Navajo culture emerged quickly, distinct from Puebloan and other Athabaskan groups, 150 years before the Pueblo Refugee Period. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries we have witnessed increasingly complex articulations between culture and place. Global processes have impacted the creation and maintenance of community and identity under circumstances of migration, dislocation, and diaspora. Though its scale may be greater today, this is not a unique situation. Northern New Mexico, in the last millennium, was the scene of ancestral Puebloan community abandonment and consolidation, translocation of Athabascan and Numic speaking peoples and the creation of Apache and Navajo