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 memories and the architecture of Numic knowledge, Ruuska demonstrates convergences of oral traditions, ethnography, ethnohistory, archaeology, and geology.

When the Earth Was New critically compares and considers multiple forms of knowledge that contribute to overlapping as well as disparate understandings of both recent and distant pasts in the regions of California, the Great Basin, and the Colorado Plateau. It works at balancing key themes in these regions’ histories within a more holistic framework, exploring ancient and modern strands of knowledge with the assistance of twenty-four Tribes and Consolidated Organizations.