Robert S. Weiner

|Research Associate
Academic Appointments

  • 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. 

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Department(s)

Religion

Education

  • A.B. Brown University
  • A.M. Brown University
  • Ph.D. University of Colorado at Boulder

Selected Publications

  • 2025  Processing Into the Past: The Chaco South Road as a Multi-Century Religious Corridor. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 33(20).

    2025  (lead author with Scott G. Ortman) Landscapes, Religion, and Social Change in Pueblo History. American Antiquity 90(3):530-554.

    2025  (lead author with Richard A. Friedman and John R. Stein) Parallel Roads, Solstice, and Sacred Geography at the Gasco Site: A Chacoan Ritual Landscape. Antiquity 99(404): 500–516.

    2024 (with Felipe Rojas)    Choreographic Empathy Beyond the Human. World Archaeology 56(4):440-458.

    2021  (lead author 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.

    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.

    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.

    2015  A Sensory Approach to Exotica, Ritual Practice, and Cosmology at Chaco Canyon. Kiva 81(3-4):220-246.