What's Up At Gambler's House?

Gambler's House had its sixth blog anniversary yesterday, and recently wrapped up a series of posts on the different lines of evidence regarding the origins and cultural affinities of cultures in the American Southwest.

This post is mainly just a list of the posts I’ve done in the “Tracing the Connections” series over the past few months. Here they are:

Introduction

The Lay of the Land

The Evidence from Linguistic Relationships

The Evidence from Linguistic Contact

The Evidence from Oral Traditions

The Evidence from Skull Measurements

The Evidence from DNA: Introduction

The Evidence from DNA: Southwest-Specific

Overall, the evidence from all these different sources is very consistent in indicating that the modern Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona are clearly the descendant communities of the ancient Pueblos in a general sense, but that tracing a line of descent between any specific ancient site and any specific modern Pueblo is not currently possible. With further research, however, I think there is a lot of potential for identifying more specific connections using multiple lines of evidence.

A winter solstice post, meanwhile, examined differences in building orientation that come in several macro-regional variations for reasons that aren't entirely clear.