The Proyecto Arqueológico Chihuahua (or PAC) began in 1990 as an attempt to explore the southern frontier zone of the thirteenth through fourteenth century AD Casas Grandes culture that extended across the northwest corner of the state of Chihuahua, Mexico. More than that, the project also examined aspects of the origins of the culture and the nature of the Casas Grandes phenomena centered on the site of Paquimé. The PAC region covers a vast area of central Chihuahua west-northwest of Chihuahua City. While several scholars have conducted work in the area, the PAC represents the first sustained survey and excavation the region received. Running for two decades under the direction of Jane H. Kelley, Joe D. Stewart, and Richard D. Garvin, the project shines light on a little-known region of the prehistoric Southwest/Northwest.

This volume details the work of the PAC and pulls together both new information and materials previously published as a series of technical reports with the Maxwell Museum at the University of New Mexico (https://maxwellmuseum.unm.edu/research/technical-series). Ill health prompted Kelley to seek the assistance of David A. Phillips on the completion of the volume, which went into production just as Kelley passed away in April of 2016. For those of us who knew her, this volume is a fitting testament to both her passion for archaeology and her support and mentoring of a new generation of Chihuahuan scholars. As she notes towards the end of this work, “surely the goal of archaeology is to get the facts about the past as right as we can, expose our biases so as to counteract them, and continue to refine our methods and our interpretations” (p. 178). Kelley and her coauthors do just this within the pages of this volume.

The volume includes a short preface, acknowledgements, and 11 chapters. The chapters range from empirically substantive explorations of data to synthetic summaries to examinations of historic context of the development of Chihuahuan archaeology. Chapter one, by Kelley, provides an introduction to the PAC and its objective to explore the southern frontier, what the PAC refers to as the “southern zone” of the Casas Grandes culture area. She provides a history of research in the region from the early 1900s on, discusses some of unique aspects of working in what many Mexican archaeologists see as El Norte, and gives an overview to the PAC efforts. In the second chapter, Kelley and Garvin provide a summary of the PAC region in geophysical and climatological terms. Their focus is on the impact of the environment on farming communities along the upper (southern) portions of the Rios Santa Maria and Santa Clara and the Laguna Bustillos and Babícora basin. The southern zone is similar to many Southwest/Northwest regions in being dependent upon moisture for successful agriculture. The third and fourth chapters describe respectively the Viejo (AD 800–1200/1250) and Medio (AD 1250–1450) period remains discovered by the PAC. These chapters outline the survey and excavations conducted and provide details regarding settlement patterns, architecture, burials, and artifact assemblages. Extensive reference is made to insights provided in the following three chapters.

Chapter five, by Karen Adams, presents the analysis of charred plant remains from the project. Over 1,000 flotation and macrobotanical samples were analyzed and demonstrate that the ancient inhabitants of the PAC region were “committed agriculturalists,” even though their relative success as farmers varied through time and space. Ceramics are the focus of chapters six and seven. Karin Burd Larkin and Kelley explain how the PAC went about analyzing the pottery recovered by the project. Eschewing a strict application of the typology established by the Joint Casas Grandes Expedition in the early 1970s, the members of PAC used a more descriptive approach that focused on individual variability within and across specimens. Their recognition that uncritical application of typologies (that are embedded in earlier empirical, methodological, and theoretical frameworks) can obscure important variation led, in 1999, to the identification of a new transitional type they named Santa Ana Polychrome. While chapter six explores the macroscopic features of PAC pottery, chapter seven provides the result of chemical analyses of the ceramics by Phillip Fralick, Pete Hollings, and Joe D. Stewart. These authors report the results of ICP-AES analysis of 290 sherds, 41 sediment and adobe samples, and 12 experimental mixtures. Analyzing a series of bivariate plots of elemental concentrations (or ratios of concentrations), they conclude that most samples appear to have been locally derived.

Following the empirically focused chapters, chapters eight and nine offer examinations of other frontier zones. Chapter eight, by A.C. MacWilliams, describes survey and excavations undertaken south of the PAC zone around Laguna Bustillos. There he identifies a culture group named La Cruz, represented by rancheria-style settlements of farmers that developed contemporaneous with the Viejo period (AD 800–1250) to the north. By AD 1250, the Bustillos Basin is depopulated. Chapter nine, by Rafael Cruz Antillón and Timothy Maxwell, examines developments on the eastern flank of the Casas Grandes world. Their project (Estudios del Patrón de Asentamientos Humanos del Este de Chihuahua) was an outgrowth of the PAC that identified and recorded 82 sites in the Río Carmen basin around the city of Villa Ahumada. While the Medio period sites in this region do contain some Casas Grandes polychrome ceramics, suggesting interaction with the core Casas Grandes region, frequencies are small, and the sites reflect a far more Jornada Mogollon affiliation.

Chapter 10, authored by Kelley, Stewart, Garvin, and Phillips, provides a synthetic summary of the PAC's findings. Most importantly, they note both continuity and disjunctions within and between Viejo- and Medio-period manifestations in the PAC zone. They find the Medio period to be a natural outgrowth from the Viejo and not an encroachment of Medio-period culture from the north. They find no strong evidence of control from the north and, moreover, a lack of the status differentiation and religious iconography seen in the core Casas Grandes region around Paquimé. The final chapter, part autobiographical and part sociology of the archaeology of northern Mexico, attempts to get at the second goal of archaeology Kelley identified in the passage quoted above—exposing biases. She provides a history of scholarship in the region with special attention given to Charles DiPeso and J. Charles Kelley. In unpacking the history of their work and ideas, she recognizes each as having had a significant intellectual “founder effect” on archaeology in Chihuahua and Durango/Zacatecas, respectively.

Overall, the volume is both appealing and valuable. For Chihuahuan scholars, it provides a useful reference and guide to the southern frontier of the Casas Grandes phenomena. Along with the Maxwell Museum technical series reports, this volume represents the empirical and intellectual legacy of the PAC.

There are some disappointing aspects to the work. I was surprised that no multivariate factor analysis was conducted on the ceramic compositional data reported in chapter seven that might elucidate more complex compositional recipes. I would have liked to have seen chapters summarizing faunal remains and lithics. But what was missing was more than made up for by what was in the volume. Kelley and her colleagues do not neglect history and the work of previous scholars; each of the chapters considers work done by others and integrates it into a more nuanced picture of the past. All are well written and packed with empirical data. Kelley is also diligent at disclosing her biases and the context within which she approaches the archaeological record. It would be refreshing if we saw far more of this sort of archaeology.