Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance

“The important point is that they are still there.” In the mid-1970s, architecture historian Vincent Scully decided to go west (southwest to be precise) from New Haven to Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. Scully compiled and published his documentation of his journey in the book Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance, which was first published in 1975, but, as Scully stated in its preface, was written over the course of twenty years. While the historian is known for having shaped (and reshaped) the genealogies of American architecture, in this book, Scully admits, “as an art historian I feel that I must apologize for any trespass upon ethnographic ground, which is as little as I could make it, and for the occasional intrusion of the first person, which I have hitherto managed to avoid in my writing. It was the dances that drove me in that direction; I came to feel somehow that it was the only proper way to describe [the Pueblo peoples and their architecture].”