Navajo's incarceration at Fort Sumner. In addition, most descriptions of
Navajo culture by early ethnographers and anthropologists stressed the
influences of other cultures on the Navajo.

This introductory chapter serves three major purposes. First, we pro-
vide a summary of Navajo history as it is known from historical docu-
ments. It is by no means an exhaustive history, but provides the necessary
background for understanding the context of Navajo archaeological stud-
ies. Second, a brief summary of the major efforts of Navajo archaeology is
presented to characterize the models and data that have guided Navajo
archaeology for much of this century. Again, the summary is necessarily
brief, and additional information is available in the references. Finally,
four major themes that continue to guide research on Navajo archaeolog-
ical remains are outlined. These themes, although not always concurrent
with the prevalent theories of American archaeology, demonstrate the
complexity of recovering the relatively recent Navajo past in all its rich-
ness and diversity. Within these contexts, however, are lessons about the
reliability of historical references, the utility of phase-based chronologies,
and the incorporation of different types of data into synthetic models of
cultural adaptation that can be applied to other archaeological remains.

Early Spanish documents provide glimpses of Navajo culture and history,
but often must be interpreted within the context of Spanish objectives and
the types of Navajo-Spaniard interaction that occurred. Because the
Navajo lived, for the most part, on the edges of the Spanish empire, refer-
ences to them are sporadic and often ambiguous. Interaction most often
took the form of raids or other military encounters, although there are a
few references to Navajo trade with nearby Puebloan groups.

When Coronado's Entrada encamped near the Rio Grande in 1541,
there were seminomadic bison hunters living on the eastern plains of
New Mexico. Historians generally agree that one of these groups, the
"Querechos," were Athapaskan speakers, possibly ancestral to the Navajo.
The Querechos lived in skin tents, used dogs to carry gear, hunted bison,
and traded the meat and hides to various pueblos ( Hammond and Rey
1940). Forty-two years later, in 1583, Antonio de Espejo met a group of
Querechos near Mount Taylor and received a gift of tortillas from them
( Hammond and Rey 1966). When Juan de Ofiate colonized New Mexico
in 1598, he assigned a priest to the Jemez and all the nearby "Apaches
and Cocoyes" ( Forbes 1960). These brief references may indicate early
Apacheans living in the vicinity of various pueblos both east and west of

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