An Exploration of Navajo-Anasazi Relationships

Abstract. Through a rich body of traditional Navajo narrative, poetry, and song we examine the relationship of Navajo people to the Anasazi. This corpus includes descriptions of initial interactions and of intermarriage between ancestral Navajos and Anasazis and illustrations of complex economic, social, and ceremonial rela-tionships between Navajos and Anasazis.We discuss standard methods of archaeo-logical inference, historical documents, traditional Navajo history as told by con-temporary hataałii, and traditional Navajo history recorded by anthropologists and others in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We present an example of how information from aNavajo ceremonial narrative, theWind Chant, enhances interpretations of a protohistoric Navajo site, LA55979. Finally, we argue for the inclusion of pertinent traditional history in reconstructing a more ethnically com-plex and intricate past. In short, the historian must justify his interpretation. Why should it be better than the local one?... This by no means is to say that the historian’s interpre-tations should be literal, but only that they should at least be more believable than the already existing oral hypothesis.... The argument that as sources from the inside oral traditions are invaluable in contributing evidence and cor-recting basic biases in foreign historical interpretation holds here as it does elsewhere.... Wherever oral traditions are extant they remain an indispens-able source for reconstruction. They correct other perspectives just as much as other perspectives correct them. —Vansina 1985: 196–99 The relationship ofNavajo people to the Anasazi—the archaeological name commonly used for the prehistoric Formative Stage occupants of the greater Four Corners region (see Willey and Phillips 1958: 144–47) of the Ameri-can Southwest—is increasingly commanding attention, partially due to th