Robert S. Weiner
Postdoctoral Fellow, Society of Fellows
Department of Religion
Robert Weiner is an archaeologist who studies the role of religious places, beings, objects, and experiences in the unfolding of human histories. He specializes on Ancestral Four Corners societies of the Indigenous Southwest, and specifically, Chaco Canyon (AD 800-1200), with emphasis on roads, religion and ritual, gambling, and Diné (Navajo) oral traditions. His current book project explores the history of monumental roads in the Chaco World: the places they led, practices carried out on them, and their ongoing significance in Diné and Pueblo cultures. More broadly, he is interested in practices of ritual movement, cognition and mind, monumentality, sensoriality, and comparative approaches.
Department(s)
Religion
Education
- A.B. Brown University
- A.M. Brown University
- Ph.D. University of Colorado at Boulder
Selected Publications
2015 A Sensory Approach to Exotica, Ritual Practice, and Cosmology at Chaco Canyon. Kiva 81(3-4):220-246.
2017 (with Richard A. Friedman and Anna Sofaer) Remote Sensing of Chaco Roads Revisited: LiDAR Documentation of the Great North Road and Aztec Airport Mesa Road. Advances in Archaeological Practice 5(4):365-381.
2018 Socio-Political, Ceremonial, and Economic Aspects of Gambling in Ancient North America: The Case Study of Chaco Canyon. American Antiquity 83(1):34-53.
2021 (with Klara Kelley) Asdzáán Náhodidáhí (Lady Picker-Up) at Fajada Butte: Astronomy, Landscape, and the Basketmaker III Origins of Chacoan Ceremonialism. Kiva 87(3):268-294.
2023 Ritual Roadways and Places of Power in the Chaco World (ca. AD 850-1150). Review of International American Studies 16(1):49-86. (special issue on Sacred Spaces in North America)