Event Details

The Friends of Coronado & Jemez Historic Sites present a lecture by Tom Swetnam, PhD, about stories of the cultural and natural history from the Southern Jemez Plateau.

The Jemez Mountains, a quintessential New Mexico landscape, tell many stories. Pueblo, Spanish, and Anglo cultures have mixed and melded here across the mesas and in the canyons below the Valles Caldera, the crater of a giant, slumbering volcano. The landscape tells tales of eruptions, lava flows, droughts, floods, forest fires, and hot springs. People tell stories of battles for land and water between conquistadores, pueblos, and priests while farming and sheep herders recall losses to raiders and rustlers. This talk will summarize these stories with photographs, maps, and voices from the past.

Dr. Tom Swetnam, a resident of Jemez Springs, is Regents Professor and Director Emeritus at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona. He has studied human land-uses, climate history and forest fire ecology around the world and testified to US Congress on multiple occasions. He was appointed to the first Board of Trustees of the Valles Caldera National Preserve. A recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Tree-Ring Society and the Association for Fire Ecology, he is the author of The Jemez Mountains, A Cultural and Natural History.

The lecture is free and takes place at Martha Liebert Public Library in Bernalillo, 124 Calle Malinche Street, behind the Town Hall at 829 Camino del Pueblo.