Michael Adler’s Transilient Acts and Resilient Villages: Pueblo Community Persistence in the Rio Grande illuminates people and practice through a thoughtful examination of the history of Tiwa-speaking Pueblo communities, particularly Picuris Pueblo in northern New Mexico. His careful attention to detail and the large amount and varied types of data that he integrates provide successful demonstration of how resilience theory can make room for accommodating agency and intentionality of community members and culturally embedded enduring practices. Adler connects abstract Tiwa-worldview concepts with concrete archaeological and historical manifestations of place-making, place-keeping, and place-protecting (stewarding) through examples of transilient ritual closure acts. He argues that transilience is a culturally specific way that communities can enact resilience and contend with change while stewarding and sustaining culture through socially embedded actions (transilient acts).

Chapter 1 defines resilience and how it has been used and applied in different disciplines, and it introduces the concept of transilience and its connection to culturally encoded acts. Chapter 2 illustrates the interplay of immigration and in situ population growth and resulting social institutions and their transformations (also thought of as the process of coalescence or becoming) in the Northern Rio Grande region between the ninth and fourteenth centuries AD. This chapter follows, compares, and critically assesses the various hypotheses and lines of evidence regarding dynamics of population movement. Chapter 3 focuses on social organization in Pueblo history, especially kin-based and dual-based (e.g., moiety) institutions. Adler outlines the organization, timing, and elements of both systems and uses archaeological and historic evidence to complicate the “one or the other” and the west-to-east and temporal gradients that some other scholars have applied to these two systems. He links resilience to these social institutions and discusses resilient aspects of each. Chapter 4 continues to problematize the west-to-east clan-to-moiety gradient through archaeological examples, applying ethnographic and archaeological evidence to social organization arguments. Chapter 5 dives into the history of the primary case study: Picuris Pueblo, examining the resilience and time depth of its dual organizational structures. Chapter 6 follows Picuris and Taos social organization into the ethnographic present. Adler summarizes the Picuris community-specific societies and structures through their archaeological footprints and compares Picuris to other ancestral Pueblo case-study villages in the Southwest (e.g., Sand Canyon, Arroyo Hondo, and Pot Creek). Chapter 6 is where the focus on examples of termination (ritual closure) practices takes shape. Chapter 7 provides several examples of transilient acts in the archaeological record of Pot Creek and Picuris, especially acts of structure closing. Adler connects this archaeological record to cultural practices (the people and social elements, or the “why” behind the practices) through his experience from years of research, conversations, and collaborations with Tiwa community members and his examination of archives and previous work. Chapter 8 focuses on Picuris transilient acts in the relatively recent past, such as the intentional burial and capping of bundles of materials in structures, to show the continuity of transilient acts in Tiwa culture through time. The cultural importance of transilient acts is emphasized in this chapter: “transforming spaces, items, and related identities from the world of the living into the realm of the ancestors” (p. 15). Chapter 9, the concluding chapter, summarizes the links among resilience, transilience, and archaeological applications, emphasizing the utility and importance of transilient acts for communities contending with change.

Utility of this book for Picuris Pueblo community members includes the synthesis and integration of a large amount of data in a culturally embedded way. Utility of this book for Picuris community members and Southwest archaeologists interested in social organization and movement as well as migration research includes outlining hypotheses and logical approaches or workflows for using various types of archaeological evidence to assess hypotheses about these topics so that others can assess such frameworks in their own case studies. Utility of this book for archaeologists and the general public includes demonstrating acts of establishing culturally significant places imbued with meaning. Additional utility of this book for the general public includes a data-rich, culturally mindful demonstration of how an Indigenous community maintains care of places even when they are not inhabited over centuries. I look forward to seeing the next step in applying the transilience and resilience frameworks with community input and, more specifically, for community benefit. Possible questions to inform the next phase of the work could include (1) what the transilience lens does for the community, and (2) what it would look like to link a theoretical framework that originated in non-Indigenous terms back to Indigenous or locally situated concepts and frameworks. For example, what would the Tiwa words for “transilience” and “resilience” be?