Board Member
Ruth fell in love with Chaco when her University of Texas archaeological field school visited the canyon in 1985.
She received her B.A. in Plan II and Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1986. In 1988, with an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Arizona, Ruth began working in CRM jobs that took her across Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and the Pacific…but Chaco continued to call to her.
In 1991, Ruth took a job as crew chief on a major CRM pipeline project that traversed the San Juan Basin of northwest New Mexico. Working in Chaco outlier communities along the pipeline cemented her calling as a landscape archaeologist, and she returned to the University of Arizona to study with eminent Chaco scholar R. Gwinn Vivian.
Ruth’s dissertation investigated sociopolitical connections across the Chaco world through the medium of great house outlier architecture and involved the compilation of an extensive outlier database as well as fieldwork in the Andrews Chacoan community.
After receiving her Ph.D. from Arizona in 1998, Ruth embarked on an academic career that has taken her from California to Colorado to New York. She is currently Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University – SUNY, where she is advising the next generation of Chaco scholars.
Over the past three decades, Ruth has conducted archaeological projects within Chaco Canyon and across the Chacoan landscape, at outliers such as Andrews, Aztec West, Kin Bineola, Kin Klizhin, Padilla Wash, Pierre’s, and Red Willow.
Her research focuses on the sensory and experiential nature of places, Indigenous collaboration, and the nature and extent of Chacoan social and political relationships.
She is the author or co-editor of over 50 articles or book chapters and six books. In The Chaco Experience (2008, https://sarweb.org/the-chaco-experience/), Ruth presented a history of Chaco foregrounding sense of place and landscape, arguing that Chacoan monumental architecture illustrates for us how ancient Chacoans organized their spatial and social worlds according to cardinal directions, cyclicality, and visible high places.
Ruth’s most recent book, The Greater Chaco Landscape (2021, co-edited with Carrie Heitman), explores understudied dimensions of the Chacoan landscape, such as viewscapes, soundscapes, night skies, roads, agricultural fields, and rock art.
In this work, Ruth and her Indigenous and scholarly colleagues seek to raise public awareness of the threats posed to this fragile cultural landscape by encroaching mineral development.
The Greater Chaco Landscape book is part of a larger collaborative, multimedia project which won the 2021 American Anthropological Association Engaged Anthropology Award.
The multimedia project, which includes video chapters from Hopi, Zuni, Acoma, and Navajo cultural experts, is available for free at http://read.upcolorado.com/projects/the-greater-chaco-landscape.