Book Review

Canada and the United States

The southwest was not always the Southwest. Before a big, largely empty, arid spot on the map could be transformed into a mystical place of ancient pueblos and mysterious "cliff dwellers," it had to be imagined as such—created, constructed, invented, and presented to a public eager to consume it.	1
How the southwest got to be the Southwest is the story James E. Snead tells us in his fun and readable book. That process, which began late in the nineteenth century and continues apace today, had many participants, including cultural entrepreneurs, antiquities collectors and dealers, antimodern spiritual seekers, railroad tourism promoters, and local economic development boosters. Snead focuses his attention on archaeologists and on their role in creating chronologies and cultural pedigrees from which the Southwest could draw its historical and social identity.	2
On one level, Snead has organized his book analytically around a set of tensions. Among them are the conflicts between archaeologists and institutions in the East and their western counterparts; the suspicion with which increasingly professionalized archaeologists viewed those they considered "amateurs" (this latter being largely a subset of the former, because archaeologists got their professional credentials in the East: those from the West were ipso facto amateurs); soul searching within the field of archaeology itself as many wondered what its relevance was and whether it belonged under the larger disciplinary umbrella of anthropology; frictions resulting from what Snead calls "the dichotomy between utilitarian science and humanistic interpretation" (p. 29); and the competitions between research and public education within the museums that shaped southwestern archaeology.	. . .