When the Earth Was New: Memory, Materiality, and Numic Ritual

Explores the value of oral traditions and challenges entrenched beliefs about ethnogenesis in the Great Basin

In When the Earth Was New, Alex K. Ruuska explores riveting multigenerational memories of Numic-speaking communities that extend back, potentially, to the late Pleistocene. These diverse oral traditions describe geological, climatic, and ecological events that occurred over thousands of years and were passed down across many generations. Through the examination of place-based memori...