ABSTRACT
This chapter is about culture change and cultural continuity using data from western Pueblo people who live in villages at the southern tip of Black Mesa, Arizona, and on the Mogollon Rim between New Mexico and Arizona. It has two underlying premises. The first is that Hopi and Zuni people have successfully resisted acculturation efforts by the dominant society of the United States. The second is that Pueblo people are descendants of prehistoric Anasazi who built towns and settlements at Mesa Verde, Colorado, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, on the Pajarito Plateau, Black Mesa, Arizona. Graphic images, documented by ethnographers of the western Pueblos provide evidence of an iconographic system in operation for over 100 years. Animal shapes which are known ethnographic clan symbols may be a means of understanding the early representation of social organization. If the cognitive system is a development from the Anasazi, one can see the trend towards anthropomorphism as a process of self-recognition or awareness.
