The vast and beautiful landscape of the American Southwest has long haunted artists and writers seeking to understand the mysteries of the deep affinity between the land and the Native Americans who have

lived on it and in it for centuries. In this pioneering study, art historian Vincent Scully explores the inhabitants' understanding of the natural world in an entirely original way—by observing and analyzing the complex yet visible relationships between the landscape of mountain and desert, the ancient ruins and the pueblos, and the ceremonial dances that take place within them.

Scully sees these intricate dances as the most profound works of art yet produced on the American continent—as human action entwined with the natural world and framed by architectural forms, in which the Pueblos express their belief in the unity of all earthly things.

Scully's observations, presented in lively prose and exciting photographs, are based on his own personal experiences of the Southwest; on his exploration of the region of the Rio Grande and the Hopi mesas; on his witnessing of the dances and ceremonies of the Pueblos and others; and on his research into their culture and history.

He draws on the vast literature inspired by the Native Americans-from early exploration narratives to the writings of D. H. Lawrence to recent scholarship—to enrich and support his unique approach to the subject.

To this second edition Scully has added a new preface that raises issues of preservation and development. He has also written an extensive postscript that reassesses the relationship between nature and culture in Native American tradition and its relevance to contemporary architecture and landscape.

"Coming to Pueblo architecture as he does from a provocative study of sacred architecture in ancient Greece, Scully has much to say that is both striking and moving of the Pueblo attitudes toward sacred places, the arrangement of structures in space, the lives of men and beasts, and man's relation to rain, earth, vegetation."

—Robert M. Adams, New York Review of Books

VINCENT SCULLY is Sterling Professor of Art History and William Clyde DeVane Professor of Humanities at Yale University. His many books include The Shingle Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright; The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture; and American Architecture and Urbanism.

This new edition provides a welcome

opportunity for me to look at the Pueblo people and their pueblos once again after an interval of almost twenty years. In one sense nothing much has changed with them during that time. The important point is that they are still there. The events of the past generation have not swept them away, and only in the tragic Navajo-Hopi land dispute does their continued existence, no less than their Navajo neighbors', seem seriously threatened. It is primarily my own view of the significance of the Pueblos in relation to contemporary American culture as a whole that has changed. The relationships involved seem closer and more critical now. In general, therefore, it has seemed advisable to leave the original text and illustrations of this book as they were and to add only this preface and a considerable postscript in which some of the issues suggested by the original study can be looked at afresh, especially in terms of those meanings which seem to have intensified during the intervening years.

Clearly enough, it is no longer useful to refer to the Pueblos as a primitive people. If that term ever had any meaning for any people anywhere, which is doubtful, it has none any longer. Nor can the more recent adjectives such as "preindustrial" or "non-European" be employed to describe the Pueblos with any degree of accuracy. The Pueblos have been as flooded as everybody else with the effects and products of industrialism. They are also as clued-in to contemporary European-American culture in general as most other Americans are. They are a modern people with a long history and strong traditions, which they would like to preserve. They are therefore making a conscious choice at present, one that would be good for all Americans to think about. They have on the whole chosen to defend their traditional values and to resist attempts to merge their culture into the more common contemporary pattern. It is true that some of them are spreading out across their reservations in single-family houses in the time-honored Anglo-American way, but they are also systematically restoring their plazas and preserving their ceremonial life. They know that all communities need centers, and they are defending theirs from the encroachments of anarchic commercialism as well as they can. Their determination to do so seems even more comprehensible and important today than it did twenty years ago. Now the Pueblos can be admired as effective preservationists, which is exactly what so many other Americans have had to learn to become during the two decades just past.

By the 1970s, national Redevelopment, the International Style of architecture, the automobilistic way of life, and private commercial development had gone far toward destroying the traditional structure of the urban environment in which most contemporary Americans lived. The Pueblos were very early in recognizing that threat. They were able to do so sooner than most of their fellow countrymen because their conceptual structure of reality recognized the deep and fundamental relationships that existed between the environment and themselves. For them that relationship was critical, not secondary. It could not easily be set aside in the name of other social or economic advantages. Such alternative satisfactions, however illusory, were normally not open to them in any substantive manner anyway. They knew that they had their place as it was traditionally supposed to be or they had nothing. The ensuing twenty years have shown how right they were.

Taos Pueblo is perhaps the clearest demonstration of that fact. All that is needed to recognize it is to drive north toward the pueblo through the Anglo-Hispanic town of Taos. A truly degraded Strip leads to it along I-25. We come up out of the gorge of the Rio Grande to see the whole incomparable upland stretching before us. Far across the plateau Taos Mountain rises out of the Sangre de Cristo range to mark the position of the town. We drive toward it in the high clear light, soon passing through Ranchos de Taos: largely Hispanic, poor, and disoriented, but the sculptural mass of the apse of San Francesco passes quietly on our right. Ahead the mountain looms with, it would appear, groves of cottonwoods growing at its base. But the grand simplicity of that relationship turns out to be an illusion, because we are soon into the Strip, miles of it lining I-25 right up to the traffic light that marks the old edge of the town. Elsewhere such strips may be much less destructive and, where there is nothing, may offer something: motels, gas stations, fast-food outlets, supermarkets, lights, signs, action, visual confusion. In fact, all this was once sympathetically analyzed by our foremost architect. But under Taos Mountain the forms of the Strip cannot be romanticized or even grasped as reasonable shapes. They are an environment

road.

of junk, an urban dump, a wastebasket strewn along the Soon we are in the town itself. What there is left of it is literally choked with automobiles. The plaza has more people crammed into it than it can stand. Its shops, too, are full of junk. Around it the city has almost entirely disappeared. It is all parking; the old solid town has eroded away. Certainly the special pressures of tourism have played a considerable part in the destruction of Taos, but the results are typical of all too many American cities everywhere. There is literally no place left.

Finally we break out of the mess and enter Pueblo land It is paradise. The landscape is open and unencumbered, and the town is compact. The plain stretches out with its buffalo herd, and the brown cubes of the pueblo mass up close to the mountain. Everything makes sense. The cynical observer of a generation ago might have concluded that this effect of order against chaos was largely unreal, that the pueblo was in fact an artificial cultural survivor in relation to the reality, however sordid, outside. Nobody could really entertain that thought today. What is out there is not "real" in any rational sense. It is the result of a lot of careless choices, of uncaring generally, and of the lack of any communal sense. Taos Pueblo acts out of a living culture and makes another choice, one based upon the values of community. Recognizing that fact, and hating it, the egregious Watt, Reagan's first secretary of the interior, according to his consistent fox-in-the-henhouse principle of appointment, called the pueblos "failed socialist societies," which, therefore, were, by Darwinian projection, ripe for plunder. Socialist probably not, community-oriented certainly, failed not yet. Taos still values what it has and knows how to defend it. The same is true in varying degrees of all the other pueblos as well. So they cannot be seen in a remote or detached way any longer.

The major problem they have set themselves to deal with is one that everyone, everywhere, has to face at present: how to preserve the world before greed destroys it.

This book is written in love and

admiration for the American Southwest and its people. It is primarily about Pueblo architecture and dances but is intended neither as a complete history of Pueblo buildings nor as a proper anthropological exploration of the mythology and ceremonials, of which the dances are only a part. Much fine work has been done along both these lines, and the reader's attention is directed to it. Here is proposed only a general analysis of the form of the existing pueblos (though only incidentally as they looked in 1972 rather than, say, in 1900 or to Stubbs in 1950),? and of some of their dances in themselves and as they are framed by the buildings and as both are related to landscape forms. I think that the contemporary pueblos can be best seen and valued in this way and can, in fact, hardly be understood or sympathetically appreciated otherwise. The dances themselves I believe to be the most profound works of art yet produced on the American continent. They call up a pity and terror which only Greek tragedy rivals, no less than a comic joy, at once animal and ironic, that suggests the precursors of Aristophanes. And to the beginnings of Greek drama they are, I believe, fundamentally allied in a comparative sense. For these reasons, only enough reference is made to the grand, enduring, and much admired architectural remains of Anasazi prehistory, primarily of the so-called Great or Classic Pueblo period of c. A.D. 1100-1300, as seems necessary to approach the existing pueblos in their historical context and to set their position in a general art-historical develop-ment. I also have something to say about Christian churches and Navaho hogans and, by way of epilogue, about the sacred tepee of the Mescalero Apache.

So approached, I hope that this topic as a whole can open up several wider avenues of thought about archi-tecture-about, that is, all our natural and man-made environments and the meaning of human action in them. As such, this book grew directly out of my previous work in Greece, whose landscape the American Southwest strongly recalls, not least in the forms of its sacred mountains and the reverence of its old inhabitants for them. Only in the pueblos, in that sense, could my Greek studies be completed, because their ancient rituals are still performed in them. The chorus of Dionysos still dances there.

As an art historian I feel that I must apologize for any trespass upon ethnographic ground, which is as little as I could make it, and for the occasional intrusion of the first person, which I have hitherto managed to avoid in my writing. It was the dances that drove me in that direction; I came to feel somehow that it was the only proper way to describe them. We see everything from our own psychic stance (as Taylor pointed out some time ago, and it is at once inhuman and unscientific to pretend otherwise.

Every ceremony, every dance, for example, also changes in some way each time it is performed, so that abstract generalizations can be historically mis-leading, despite their "structuralist" popularity at the present time. The question of feeling also arises, since we are involved here with works of art, which always deal with feeling and which must therefore be described in terms of our experience of them—an experience which probes as rigorously as possible toward that of the culture which produced them but which remains our own nonetheless. For this reason I have tried to write only about things I have experienced at first hand and have relegated much other material to bibliographical references.

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