Book review of "The Native American Southwest in the Middle Ages" by Frederick S. Paxton, 2025

The Native American Southwest in the Middle Ages by Frederick S. Paxton

Human history is not the full record of the human past, but only of what has been written about the human past (and what has been written about what has been written about that past, and ad infinitum). Where there are no historians, there is no history.

As a college professor of history, Paxton “…wondered why the people who had lived [in the American Southwest] had no place in American history.” When I studied American history in high school in the 1960’s, I, too, wondered why the rich cultural and social heritages of the diverse native tribes of North America were totally omitted from the syllabus. To rectify the lacunae of my generation’s miseducation, this historian has written an admirable monograph on the Native American history of the American Southwest.

For the European early colonizers, “the people they encountered were prehistoric objects of natural history, not human history.” Thus the arrival of Europeans upon American shores marked the beginning on an apocalypse for Amerindians across both American hemispheres. The peoples and their cultures that remain today are only post-apocalyptic. What about the pre-, for instance, the Middle Ages, the years 500-1540 CE? What sometimes are called the Dark Ages in Europe were far from dark in the American Southwest.

This professor of European medieval history sets the American medieval record straight. Yet this book is not merely revisionist history. It is also a labor of love. The many “in situ” photos by the author are testaments to his intimacy with his subject. The book is profusely illustrated with maps, plans, drawings, and a plenitude of his own photos. I wish, however, that the photos were larger, though that would have increased the page count and therefore the price. As a work of scholarship, a fifth of the book also provides requisite bibliographies and endnotes, mercifully in micro-font, which reduced the page count and therefore the book price.

Documented primarily through the architecture, pottery, and stone and bone tools that survived the ravages of time, this history was unexplored territory for me. The advanced civilizations displayed in the architectural remains of the Mayans and the Aztecs are better known. Lesser known is the complexity of the architectural ruins of the American Southwest that provide evidence of nearly equally advanced civilizations. This was all news to me as a lay reader.

Do not mistake this book as simply an architectural guide to the ruins of ancient civilizations. Rather, it is a chronicle of the peoples who built and lived amid these structures. Their challenges Sharing the challenges of all societies throughout history and across the planet, theirs included droughts, famines, and wars, meaning wars among themselves, before the arrival of the European invaders. Warfare was neither unique nor confined to Europe.

I appreciate each chapter's prologue summarizing Europe's parallel medieval history that provide a context with which I was more familiar. I wish, however, that Professor Paxton had not fulfilled his moral duty as an historian by closing with a gloomy Epilogue that chronicled the Spaniard genocide of the SW native Americans. Expressed in the vernacular, the Epilogue was a real downer. Among the Spaniard atrocities mentioned was chopping off a single foot of the Amerindians, implying that they could flee only by hopping away. This reawakened grim memories from my childhood. While browsing my dad's copies of the hardbound magazine, “American Heritage,” I was horrified by illustrations of the European invaders cutting off the hands of the Amerindians and then sending them scurrying away. A morose note with which to end both this book and this review.

Reviewed by Mark Mathew Braunstein www.MarkBraunstein.Org