To visiting geologists Black Rock, New Mexico, is a basaltic escarpment and an ideal natural laboratory. To hospital workers Black Rock is a picturesque place to earn a living. To the Zuni the mesas, arroyos, and the rock itself are a stage on which the passion of their elders is relived. William A. Dodge ex-plores how a shared sense of place evolves over time and through multi-ple cultures that claim the landscape. Through stories told over many generations, this landscape has given the Zuni an understand-ing of how they came to be in this world. More recently, paleogeographers have studied t