Stephen Plog is an American archaeologist and anthropologist, who specializes in the pre-Columbian cultures of the American Southwest. As the Commonwealth Professor of Anthropology at The University of Virginia, he currently teaches undergraduate and graduate students, and is working to digitize all the research on the Chaco Canyon through the Chaco Research Archive. On May 1, 2006 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Election to the academy is among the highest distinctions for a scientist, and is based on outstanding and ongoing achievements in original research. He was also a visiting fellow at the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2001-2002.
Plog's research focuses on understanding culture change in the prehistoric American Southwest. He is particularly interested in the changing nature of ritual, social organization, exchange and demography from approximately 1000 C.E. to the historic period.
Plog, who joined the U.Va. anthropology department as an assistant professor in 1978, is an archaeologist whose work focuses on understanding cultural change among prehistoric cultures in the American Southwest. His research on the Chaco Canyon region of northwestern New Mexico has changed several long-accepted ideas about early Native American peoples, ancestors of the Hopi, Zuni, and Rio Grande pueblos in Arizona and New Mexico, and what led to massive population shifts near the end of the 13th century.
Through a grant from the Mellon Foundation as well as a fellowship with U.Va.’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, he and colleagues have created an online digital archive (www.chacoarchive.org) for several of the key excavated sites in the Chaco region.
Plog also has served as anthropology department chair at U.Va., director of undergraduate studies, and associate dean for academic programs in the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.
His recent fieldwork in the Chevelon region of east central Arizona examines changing patterns of ritual, social relationships, and exchange ties during the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries. Evidence for significant social conflict in the 11th and 12th centuries appears a century or more before similar patterns become common in the northern Southwest and has been a particular focus of his fieldwork. Continued surveys and excavations in the Chevelon region are planned for the next several years.
Books and publications
1997
Ancient Peoples of the American Southwest. Thames and Hudson, LTD, London, England. ISBN0-500-27939-X.
(with Julie Solometo) The ever changing and the never changing: the evolution of western pueblo ritual. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 7(2):161-182.
1996
(with Michelle Hegmon) Regional social interaction in the northern southwest. In Interpreting Southwestern Diversity: Underlying Principles and Overarching Patterns, edited by P. R. Fish and J. J. Reid, pp.23–34. Arizona State University Anthropological Papers No. 48.
1995
Paradigms and pottery: the analysis of production and exchange in the American Southwest. In The Organization of Ceramic Production in the American Southwest, edited by Barbara J. Mills and Patricia L. Crown, pp.268–280. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
Equality and hierarchy: holistic approaches to understanding social dynamics in the Pueblo Southwest. In The Foundations of Social Inequality, edited by T. Douglas Price and Gary M. Feinman, pp.189–206. Plenum, New York.
Approaches to the study of style: complements and contrasts. In Style, Society, and Person, edited by Christopher Carr and Jill Neitzel, pp.369–87. Plenum, New York.
1993
(with Michelle Hegmon) The sample size-richness relation: The relevance of research questions, sampling strategies, and behavioral variation. American Antiquity 58:489-496.
1991
Chronology construction and the study of prehistoric culture change. Journal of Field Archaeology. 17:439-456.
1990
Agriculture, Sedentism and Environment in the Evolution of Political Systems. In The Evolution of Political Systems. Steadman Upham, ed. pp.177– 199. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1980
Stylistic Variation In Prehistoric Ceramics - Design Analysis in the American Southwest. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England. ISBN0-521-22581-7
Ethnoarchaeology is the ethnographic study of peoples for archaeological reasons, usually through the study of the material remains of a society. Ethnoarchaeology aids archaeologists in reconstructing ancient lifeways by studying the material and non-material traditions of modern societies. Ethnoarchaeology also aids in the understanding of the way an object was made and the purpose of what it is being used for. Archaeologists can then infer that ancient societies used the same techniques as their modern counterparts given a similar set of environmental circumstances.
Chaco Culture National Historical Park is a United States National Historical Park in the American Southwest hosting a concentration of pueblos. The park is located in northwestern New Mexico, between Albuquerque and Farmington, in a remote canyon cut by the Chaco Wash. Containing the most sweeping collection of ancient ruins north of Mexico, the park preserves one of the most important pre-Columbian cultural and historical areas in the United States.
The Hohokam Pima National Monument is an ancient Hohokam village within the Gila River Indian Community, near present-day Sacaton, Arizona. The monument features the archaeological site Snaketown 30 miles (48 km) southeast of Phoenix, Arizona, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964. The area was further protected by declaring it a national monument in 1972, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.
Caroline Ann Tuke Malone is a British academic and archaeologist. She was Professor of Prehistory at Queen's University, Belfast from 2013 and is now emeritus professor.
Alfred Vincent Kidder was an American archaeologist considered the foremost of the southwestern United States and Mesoamerica during the first half of the 20th century. He saw a disciplined system of archaeological techniques as a means to extend the principles of anthropology into the prehistoric past and so was the originator of the first comprehensive, systematic approach to North American archaeology.
Casas Grandes is a prehistoric archaeological site in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. Construction of the site is attributed to the Mogollon culture. Casas Grandes has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site under the purview of INAH and a "Pueblo Mágico" since 2015.
Pueblo Bonito is the largest and best-known great house in Chaco Culture National Historical Park, northern New Mexico. It was built by the Ancestral Puebloans who occupied the structure between AD 828 and 1126.
Harold Sterling Gladwin (1883–1983) was an American archaeologist, anthropologist, and stockbroker.
Emil Walter "Doc" Haury was an American archaeologist who specialized in the archaeology of the American Southwest. He is most famous for his work at Snaketown, a Hohokam site in Arizona.
Southwestern archaeology is a branch of archaeology concerned with the Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico. This region was first occupied by hunter-gatherers, and thousands of years later by advanced civilizations, such as the Ancestral Puebloans, the Hohokam, and the Mogollon.
Wirt Henry Wills is an American Southwest archaeologist and a Professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico. He has written numerous papers and books on the archaeology of the prehistoric southwest. He is most notable for investigations and excavations in or near New Mexico, including: the prehistoric site at Bat Cave in Catron County, New Mexico, the Mogollon Su site in western New Mexico and Pueblo Bonito located in Chaco Culture National Historical Park.
Richard E. Blanton is an American anthropologist, archaeologist, and academic. He is most renowned for his archaeological field and theoretical research into the development of civilizations in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, particularly those from the central Mexican plateau and Valley of Oaxaca regions. Blanton taught at Rice University and Hunter College of the City University of New York before joining the faculty at Purdue University in 1976. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Purdue's College of Liberal Arts.
Paul Sidney Martin was an American anthropologist and archaeologist. A lifelong associate of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Martin studied pre-Columbian cultures of the Southwestern United States. He excavated more than a hundred archaeological sites, starting with the groundbreaking seven-season expedition to the Montezuma County, Colorado in 1930–1938. His research passed through three distinct stages: field archaeology of the Anasazi Pueblo cultures of Colorado in the 1930s, studies of the Mogollon culture in 1939–1955 and the New Archaeology studies in 1956–1972. Martin collected more than 585 thousand archaeological artifacts although his own methods of handling these relics were at times destructive and unacceptable even by the standards of his time.
Charles Harrison McNutt III was an American archaeologist and a scholar of the prehistoric Southeastern United States. He conducted fieldwork and published works on the archaeology of the American Southwest and the Great Plains in South Dakota. His work emphasized on a strong understanding of cultural history and statistical analysis.
Peter N. Peregrine is an American anthropologist, registered professional archaeologist, and academic. He is well known for his promotion of the use of science in anthropology, and for his popular textbook Anthropology. Peregrine did dissertation research on the evolution of the Mississippian culture of North America, and conducted fieldwork on Bronze Age cities in Syria. He is currently Professor of Anthropology and Museum Studies at Lawrence University and Research Associate of the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University. From 2012 to 2018 he was an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
Ruth Leah Bunzel was an American anthropologist, known for studying creativity and art among the Zuni people (A:Shiwi), researching the Mayas in Guatemala, and conducting a comparative study of alcoholism in Guatemala and Mexico. Bunzel was the first American anthropologist to conduct substantial research in Guatemala. Her doctoral dissertation, The Pueblo Potter (1929) was a study of the creative process of art in anthropology and Bunzel was one of the first anthropologists to study the creative process.
The Ancestral Puebloans, also known as the Anasazi, were an ancient Native American culture that spanned the present-day Four Corners region of the United States, comprising southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado. They are believed to have developed, at least in part, from the Oshara tradition, which developed from the Picosa culture. The people and their archaeological culture are often referred to as Anasazi, meaning "ancient enemies", as they were called by Navajo. Contemporary Puebloans object to the use of this term, with some viewing it as derogatory.
Linda Sue Cordell was an American archaeologist and anthropologist. She was a leading researcher of the archaeology of the Southwest United States and Ancestral Pueblo communities. She authored a number of notable books familiar to both the general public and scholars, including the Prehistory of the Southwest. Cordell was well recognized for her mentorship and leadership in the field; she received many awards and honors throughout her career, including being elected to the National Academies of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an endowed Peabody Award was named in honor of her in 2014.
Edward Bruce (Ted) Banning is a Canadian archaeologist and professor at the University of Toronto. He was born in Montreal in 1955 but has lived in Toronto for most of his life. His research focuses on the beginnings of village life and political-economic inequality in southwest Asia, especially in the Neolithic, and concentrates on the southern Levant. He has also been very involved in theoretical and methodological research on archaeological survey.
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