ABSTRACT
Scholars in history, anthropology, archaeology, and other disciplines have turned increasingly over the past two decades to the study of native people during the colonial period of North American history. The new work in Indian history has altered the way we think about the beginning of American history and about the era of European colonization. Substantive as this reorientation is, it remains limited. Beyond the problems inherent in representing Indian/non-Indian interactions during the colonial era lies the challenge of contextualizing the era itself. At the outset of the twelfth century, the center of production and exchange in the Southwest was in the basin of the San Juan River at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, where Anasazi culture achieved its most elaborate expression. Given the archaeological record, North American "prehistory" can hardly be characterized as a multiplicity of discrete microhistories. Cahokia's abandonment reverberated among other Mississippian societies in the Midwest.
