Please join the Department of Anthropology for another weekly Proseminar talk:

Title: Rethinking “Marginal” Landscapes: Lifeways and Connections on the Shivwits Plateau

Speaker: Karen Harry, Ph.D., Department of Anthropology UNLV

Abstract: The western uplands of the Grand Canyon–Parashant region lie along the far edge of the Puebloan world, in a landscape defined by environmental variability, limited water, and low population densities. Long viewed as marginal or intermittently used, this area is better understood as a frontier zone—one where sustaining life required ongoing adjustment rather than reliance on any single strategy.

Drawing on multiple lines of research from the Shivwits Plateau, this talk explores how flexibility shaped daily life, from subsistence practices to social organization and identity. In a setting where communities were small and widely dispersed, connections across the landscape were essential, supporting cooperation, mobility, and access to resources. Rather than a peripheral margin, this region emerges as a place where adaptability, interdependence, and shifting strategies were central to how people lived and interacted.