Complex and time-consuming to produce, iron-ore mirrors stand out among Prehispanic artifacts for their aesthetic beauty, their symbolic implications, and the complexity and skill of their assembly. Manufactured Light presents the latest archaeological research on these items, focusing on the intersection of their significance and use and on the technological aspects of the manufacturing processes that created them.

The volume covers the production, meaning, and utilization of iron-ore mirrors in various Mesoamerican communities. Chapters focus on topics such as experimental archaeology projects and discussions of workshops in archaeological contexts in the Maya, Central Mexico, and northwest Mexico regions. Other chapters concentrate on the employment and ideological associations of these mirrors in Prehispanic times, especially as both sacred and luxury items. The final chapters address continuities in the use of mirrors from Prehispanic to modern times, especially in contemporary indigenous communities, with an emphasis on examining the relationship between ethnographic realities and archaeological interpretations.

While the symbolism of these artifacts and the intricacy of their construction have long been recognized in archaeological discussions, Manufactured Light is the first synthesis of this important yet under-studied class of material culture. It is a must-read for students and scholars of Mesoamerican archaeology, ethnography, religion, replicative experimentation, and lithic technology.

Contirbutors include: Marc G. Blainey, Thomas Calligaro, Carrie L. Dennett, Emiliano Gallaga, Julie Gazzola, Sergio Gómez Chávez, Olivia Kindl, Brigitte Kovacevich, Achim Lelgemann, José J. Lunazzi, John J. McGraw, Emiliano Melgar, Joseph Mountjoy, Reyna Solis, and Karl Taube.

Masked Gods is a vast book, a challenging and profoundly original account of the history, legends, and ceremonialism of the Navajo and Pueblo Indians of the Southwest. Following a brief but vivid history of the two tribes through the centuries of conquest, the book turns inward to the meaning of Native American legends and ritual—Navajo songs, Pueblo dances, Zuni kachina ceremonies. Enduring still, these rituals and ceremonies express a view of life, of man’s place in the creation, which is compared with Taoism and Buddhism—and with the aggressive individualism of the Western world.

Author Tammy Stone focuses on a number of general deliberations on the archaeology of middle-range society and the prehistory of the American Southwest. This includes the complex dynamics of migration, identity, ethnic interaction, and the ability of archaeologists to identify these patterns in the archaeological record. The integration and ultimate expulsion of a group of Kayenta Anasazi at Point of Pines Pueblo in the Mogollon Highlands of east-central Arizona provides a case study and location where these themes played out. Stone uses a detailed architectural analysis of the pueblo to attain a nuanced and dynamic understanding of migration from the perspective of both the Kayenta migrants and their Mogollon hosts. By examining the choices that individuals, families, and small groups made about identity and alliance from the perspective of both the migrants and host community—the latter being an aspect often missing from analyses of migration—this volume provides never-before-published data on Point of Pines Pueblo and contributes considerably to the study of community dynamics at large. 

The second in a two-volume series, Moquis and Kastiilam, Volume II, 1680–1781 continues the story of the encounter between the Hopis, who the Spaniards called Moquis, and the Spaniards, who the Hopis called Kastiilam, from the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 through the Spanish expeditions in search of a land route to Alta California until about 1781. By comparing and contrasting Spanish documents with Hopi oral traditions, the editors present a balanced presentation of a shared past. Translations of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century documents written by Spanish explorers, colonial officials, and Franciscan missionaries tell the perspectives of the European visitors, and oral traditions recounted by Hopi elders reveal the Indigenous experience.

The editors argue that only the Hopi perspective can balance the story recounted in the Spanish documentary record, which is biased, distorted, and incomplete (as is the documentary record of any European or Euro-American colonial power). The only hope of correcting those weaknesses and the enormous silences about the Hopi responses to Spanish missionization and colonization is to record and analyze Hopi oral traditions, which have been passed down from generation to generation since 1540, and to give voice to Hopi values and social memories of what was a traumatic period in their past.

Volume I documented Spanish abuses during missionization, which the editors address specifically and directly as the sexual exploitation of Hopi women, suppression of Hopi ceremonies, and forced labor of Hopi men and women. These abuses drove Hopis to the breaking point, inspiring a Hopi revitalization that led them to participate in the Pueblo Revolt and to rebuff all subsequent efforts to reestablish Franciscan missions and Spanish control. Volume II portrays the Hopi struggle to remain independent at its most effective—a mixture of diplomacy, negotiation, evasion, and armed resistance. Nonetheless, the abuses of Franciscan missionaries, the bloodshed of the Pueblo Revolt, and the subsequent destruction of the Hopi community of Awat’ovi on Antelope Mesa remain historical traumas that still wound Hopi society today.