Close reading of foundational historical texts in the Western tradition forms a central component of the St. John’s curriculum. This talk expands these historiographical inquiries to consider a geographical and temporal context for which no written texts survive, but instead, physical remains and landscapes serve as the primary materials from which history may be known. I take as my focus Chaco Canyon, a precolonial Indigenous American urban center located approximately 150 miles west of St. John's College in northwestern New Mexico and occupied from AD 800-1200. Specifically, I consider the epistemological and ontological challenges of interpreting the traces of hundreds of nine-meter-wide linear avenues found throughout the Chaco region. Histories of Chacoan roads have long been plagued by interpretive biases that equate these features’ road-like form with functional use as corridors for the expeditious movement of people and resources. In contrast, I trace the relational character of roads, whose placement within the landscape, orientations, materiality, and use for ritual performance define a complexly layered gesamtkunstwerk. Overall, I present a distinct vision of how cosmologies are materialized through ritual movement and sculpting of the landscape, and offer a general rethinking of the forces driving historical change among past human societies globally.

Robert Weiner is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Lecturer in the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College. His research combines archaeology, religious studies, cultural anthropology, and cognitive science to study the history of Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico. Weiner has published over twenty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and he is currently completing a monograph titled Chaco Ways: Roads and Religion in the Indigenous Southwest. He conducts collaborative archaeological fieldwork on the Navajo Nation and elsewhere throughout the Four Corners region. Weiner earned concurrent BA-MA degrees from Brown University (2016) and a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Boulder (2023).