Welcome to Cliff Palace: Ancestral Puebloans

This week we round out this month's coverage of indigenous Latin America with a look at the Ancestral Puebloans of the American Southwest. We couldn't fit 10,000 years of human experience and complexity into a single episode, so instead we highlight some architectural and engineering achievements, petroglyphs, and some of the mythological beings represented in them. Plus, the origins of the word "adobe" and a lengthy consideration of why the cultural appropriation of Kokopelli looms so large in our memory of the 1990s. To learn more, check out:Aztec Ruins National Monument--New Mexico NPS Historical Handbook No. 36, 1962 (Project Gutenberg)The Chaco Road System - Southwestern America's Ancient Roads (ThoughtCo)Native Languages of the Americas: Pueblo Legends and Stories (Native-Languages.org)Hopi Petroglyph Sites (CyArk)How Kokopelli, the Flute-Playing God, Conquered Pop Culture (Artsy)Books:Pueblo Gods and MythsKokopelli, Casanova of the Cliff DwellersChaco Handbook: An Encyclopedic Guide Chaco Canyon: Archaeologists Explore the Lives of an Ancient Society