Episode 2: House of Shields

In the next installment of our archaeology podcast series, we discuss National Park Service archaeologist, Maxwell Forton’s thought-provoking work on the defensive imagery tied to rock shelters at Navajo National Monument in Arizona. Since the pandemic began, we have all come to understand the struggle of living in a world that’s suddenly shifted off its axis. In our discussion about ancestral peoples within a portion of northeastern Arizona, Maxwell Forton and I discuss evidence that hints at a similar upending and how people dealt with it at that moment in time. We also discuss landscape archaeology and the importance of context in trying to understand the larger picture.