Carrie Heitman, associate professor in the Department of Anthropology, will have a film from her forthcoming book The Greater Chaco Landscape featured in several festivals.
The unique publication combines visual and textual material in an open-access format to examine Chaco Canyon and Chaco-era great houses and associated communities from southeast Utah to west-central New Mexico in the context of landscape archaeology. Interviews and presentations filmed in the Chaco Canyon area make up four of the 13 chapters.
One of the films, Yupkӧyvi – The Place Beyond the Horizon, was accepted into the American Indian Film Festival and the LASkins Festival, which will be shown Sunday, November 21 in the Native Short Documentary Program #1. In addition, the film has been entered into the Santa Fe Film Festival and the Durango Film Festival with more festivals pending.
The book was co-edited with Ruth Van Dyke, a professor of anthropology at Binghamton University, SUNY. Contributors analyze many different dimensions of the Chacoan landscape and present the most effective, innovative, and respectful means of studying them. Included in this work are indigenous perspectives on the landscape and the preservation and management of the landscape in light of the imminent threat posed by oil and gas development in the area.
Heitman is associate director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and part of the College of Arts and Sciences. She has helped build the Chaco Research Archive and the Salmon Pueblo Archaeological Research Collection.
Van Dyke is an archaeologist specializing in the North American Southwest and directs projects on the Chaco landscape in northwest New Mexico and on historic Alsatian immigration in Texas.
