William Carter pursues an ambitious objective: to address “the depth and breadth of the early Athepaskan and Pueblo past, the creation and transformation of southwestern cultures, and the important role of Indian alliances in the centuries before and after Spanish settlement,” using an approach that “bridge[s] the perspectives of the natural and social sciences with those of the humanities” (ix). Readers will likely judge the success of Carter's attempt differently depending on whether they come to the book from a historical/humanities or an archaeological/social science perspective. Historians will likely appreciate the yeoman's work Carter has done in synthesizing an impressive number of archaeological and ethnographic sources. Readers from archaeology, however, will likely raise a number of objections concerning the treatment of pre-contact periods.

Somewhat puzzling in a work covering the period from 750 to 1750 CE, the book begins with a summary of Athepaskan origin stories and cosmology. Athepaskans do feature prominently in the last two centuries of the book's chosen millennium, but there is no compelling archaeological evidence for their presence in the American Southwest prior to the fifteenth century, and the relevance of their origin stories to the Indian alliances Carter purports to treat is unspecified. The summary of Athepaskan origins relies heavily on ethnographic observations and oral traditions of contemporary Athepaskans like the Navajo, largely at the expense of archaeological evidence, and the author is prone to sweeping generalizations that gloss enormous swaths of people, time, and territory. For example, it is asserted that “[a]ll Athepaskans believe that knowledge of the world and a respectful attitude toward living things are necessary to a successful and good life, and they characteristically extend these principles to include nurturing productive relations with other humans” (7). Further, “[t]he ancient Athepaskans believed the cosmos functioned in moral ways and in cycles of flux” (16). Such statements would be hard to defend even for contemporary populations, much less for groups who lived a thousand years ago and migrated across half a continent during that time.

The treatment of language is also problematic, interpreting the widespread and very diverse Athepaskan language family to imply common cosmology, thought, and culture across the populations who shared it (4). Most seriously, the author accepts uncritically the Athepaskan oral traditions that depict their ancestors interacting with ancestral Puebloan populations for centuries prior to Spanish contact. Navajos certainly did live in Chaco Canyon (in Northwestern New Mexico) in the historic period, but there is absolutely no evidence that they, or their ancestors, were anywhere in the American Southwest in the 1000s CE when Chaco Canyon flourished, nor in the 1200s when Mesa Verde was at its peak (33–34). The author also makes the common, but nevertheless faulty, assumption that shared content between Pueblo and Navajo oral tradition reflects common ancestry rather than the borrowing of Puebloan culture by Navajo populations, a fact well documented for Navajo agriculture, pottery, and aspects of ritual and social organization.

Chapters 2 and 3 deal competently with pre-contact Pueblo history and with the Plains-Pueblo interactions of the period before Spanish arrival. The last four chapters cover Spanish contact and its consequences, and Carter is clearly much more in his element here. But for long stretches in these chapters the book becomes a very conventional historical summary covering the conquest of the Aztecs and subsequent expeditions to the north. The “alliance” theme, never particularly well developed, largely recedes into the background in these sections. In fact, the term “alliance” is never defined: it is absent from the index, and the range of economic, religious, and political behaviors grouped together under the term is so wide as to dilute its descriptive or explanatory power.

William Carter is to be commended for an ambitious attempt at historical synthesis, but significant errors in the handling of ethnographic and oral tradition evidence mar the result.