ABSTRACT
This chapter brings critical attention to the ways in which engrained concepts and terminologies commonly used by North American archaeologists have served to disconnect and silence the Indigenous descendants of New Mexico’s landscape. This discussion builds directly on the work of Gregory Younging and is organized into three sections that critique engrained sociological constructs (e.g., band), modes of talking about time (e.g., Archaic), and terminology associated with the material and/or ethnographic record (e.g., myth). In addition to problematizing archeological modes of writing, this chapter presents a new style guide, a literary map so to speak, that structures the remaining chapters of the book and that other scholars working in and outside the American Southwest might follow.
