Upland Salado Iconography and Religious Change - Paperback

by Charmion R. McKusick (Author)

The Upland Salado people of the Globe-Miami area in central Arizona have left us an expansive trove of iconography. This volume documents a Kayenta immigrant population at Besh-Ba-Gowah. Development of Salado iconography is followed from the Old World, through the Early Postclassic International Symbol Set and Mimbres figurative pottery design, to A.D. 1440s Salado ceramic symbolism. Mesoamerican god cults and the psychoactive medicinals associated with them, as expressed in Salado iconography, are discussed in relationship to religious change and the local termination of the Salado phenomenon in this fascinating, very readable, and rigorously documented report, which is richly illustrated with nearly 200 drawings.

Author Biography

Charmion McKusick grew up in Waukegan, Illinois, sailing on Lake Michigan. Her ambition was to study physical anthropology, which brought her to the University of Arizona in Tucson in September of 1949. During a summer at Point of Pines Field School in 1952, she found bird and animal bones far more interesting than human bones. Her training in bird bones came while serving as a laboratory assistant to Dr. Lyndon Lane Hargrave. Charmion's tenure at the Southwest Archeological Center included training in mammal bone identification under Thomas W. Mathews. She has identified faunal specimens from the greater Southwest and Mexico, and has special interests in Indian Domestic Turkey breeds, Mexican macaws, birds of sacrifice, iconography, and the Upland Salado people. Charmion is also the author of "Evidences of Hereditary High Status at Gila Pueblo" (1992), in Proceedings of the Second Salado Conference, Globe, AZ 1992, an occasional paper of the Phoenix Chapter of the Arizona Archaeological Society; The Gila Pueblo Salado (1997), an Arizona Archaeological Society publication co-authored with Jon Young; Southwest Birds of Sacrifice, Arizona Archaeologist No. 31 (2001); and "Upland Salado Resource Use" in the festschrift Explorations in Ethnobiology: The Legacy of Amadeo Rea, edited by Marsha Quinlan and Dana Lepofsky from the Society of Ethnobiology, University of North Texas, Denton (2013).