The Southwest Symposium was launched twenty years ago by Charles Redman and Paul Minnis to provide an opportunity for archaeologists to discuss current ideas and develop new networks for research in the American Southwest. From the beginning, this biennial symposium has been organized to explore a limited number of topics in substantial depth and to provide considerable time for discussion among all participants.

The 2008 symposium will begin with a session that honors our 20th anniversary. In this opening session, the topics from the first Southwest Symposium (foraging, mobility and migration, social power and interaction, the protohistoric, and the history of Southwest archaeology) will be revisited by leading scholars in the field. They will look back over the last two decades of our accomplishments and forward toward new directions.

The relationships among people and between people and their landscapes, both social and physical, dominate Southwest archaeological research. Archaeologists of varied theoretical perspectives share an interest in understanding human movement, landscape change, and the connections among groups at local and pan-Southwestern scales. These topics are the focus of the three additional sessions of this year's Southwest Symposium.

Movement has been an essential aspect of native land use in the American Southwest for millennia. The papers in this session bring methodological and theoretical issues related to population movement and ethnogenesis into focus by developing comparisons among well-documented cases. Pairs of authors go beyond causal explanations to compare population movement, especially how migrants were integrated into the societies they joined or lived adjacent to in their destinations. Several pairs of authors explore the development of new social formations as a result of population movement. Throughout the papers in this session, movement is seen as an integral aspect of how people define themselves and the land.

Connectivity refers to the influence of actions and processes across broad spatial and temporal scales. Social change in any area can be understood not just in terms of historical contingency but also as a combination of local, regional, and pan-regional influences, the latter of which may occur at extremely broad scales. In this session, connectivity will be examined as an intentional phenomenon as well as the unintended consequence of change in other places and times.

Landscape change examines the nature and longevity of human modifications to Southwestern landscapes. In the Southwest, human actions have affected soils and biotic communities at varied temporal and spatial scales, and these changes, in turn, have affected various dimensions of human behavior. Papers in this session will explore the consequences of human actions affecting soils, plants, and animals through 1) analyses of archaeological and environmental data linked closely with sustainable subsistence and settlement, 2) analyses of specific archaeological case studies, and 3) modeling of environmental transformations.

In addition, two sessions of volunteered posters will offer updates on current research around the American Southwest. Please join us in Tempe, Arizona on January 17-19, 2008.

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