Next to Mesa Verde, Bandelier National Monument in northern New Mexico is the most visited archaeological park in America. Yet precious little is known about the ancestral Puebloan people who lived there from about A.D.1150 to 1600 in a setting that’s as spectacular as it is unforgiving. While a few of the earliest Americans made Bandelier home, its population ballooned dramatically after A.D. 1300, roughly the same time Mesa Verde and the entire Four Corners region was being abandoned. Many of those refugees made their way to the safety of what we now call Bandelier, where they flourished until moving to modern pueblos in the nearby Rio Grande Valley.
National Park Service archaeologist Bob Powers has assembled 17 noted archaeologists, historians, ecologists, and Puebloan scholars to tell the story of this isolated plateau in the Jemez Mountains that is also home to Los Alamos National Laboratory and the atomic bomb. This richly illustrated volume is written for lay people, and it informs the public of much of the new research resulting from three recent projects. The Bandelier Archaeological Survey was directed by Powers and recorded nearly 2,000 archaeological sites in the 33,000-acre monument. The eight-year Pajarito Archaeological Research Project was directed by James N. Hill of U.C.L.A., and six sites were tested by Timothy A. Kohler’s Bandelier Archaeological Excavation Project.
This wealth of new data shows that Bandelier and the surrounding plateau saw a number of dramatic changes in which Pueblo people moved in and out as conditions allowed. It is an area still used and held sacred by nearby Pueblo people. Every visitor to the dramatic sites of Bandelier National Monument will want this book, as will every student of the American Southwest.
