Recent Housing Development, Kayenta, Arizona
I’ve written quite a bit here about warfare in the prehistoric Southwest, but I’ve only said a little about one of the areas where it has been most carefully documented and studied: the Kayenta area of northeastern Arizona. This is partly because this area seems to have had very little contact with or influence from Chaco Canyon (although obviously that criterion hasn’t stopped me from talking about all kinds of other places with no connection at all to Chaco), but mostly because I just haven’t read much of the voluminous literature on Kayenta archaeology. Dan Bailey has an interesting guest post at Scientific American on the research of Jonathan Haas of the Field Museum on settlement dynamics in Long House Valley, west of modern Kayenta, pointing to the same processes that have been documented elsewhere in the Southwest by Steven LeBlanc and others.
In the eleventh century AD, contemporaneous with the rise of Chaco, Long House Valley was occupied by scattered communities of small houses. At this time environmental conditions were good, agriculture was productive, and there is no evidence of warfare. Starting around AD 1150, however, things took a turn for the worse (sound familiar?). The droughts that ravaged the Southwest during this time began to impact agricultural productivity in Long House Valley, and at the same time the small-house residents began to band together into five aggregated villages in defensible locations and connected to each other by line-of-sight, which in one case required digging a notch out of a hill. This transition was complete by AD 1260. It appears that the most likely adversaries of the Long House Valley people were the people of the Klethla Valley to the south, due to a “no man’s land” between the two clusters of settlements and the fact that the southern portion of Long House Valley was abandoned in the early thirteenth century, with its inhabitants presumably joining the people who were aggregating into large villages in the northern part of the valley. Again, this is all in line with LeBlanc’s arguments about clustering of settlements and development of buffer zones in response to warfare. By 1300, the whole Kayenta area was abandoned, along with most of the Colorado Plateau.
Black Mesa from Kayenta, Arizona
Bailey mentions there being “some dispute” over who the descendants of the Kayenta people are, and it’s likely that they ended up joining a variety of other Pueblo groups, but I don’t think there’s much reason to question the obvious conclusion that most of them probably ended up joining the Hopis, who lived on the mesas on the other side of Black Mesa from the Kayenta area and live there still. Their route may have been rather circuitous, however, even if most did end up at Hopi; there is abundant evidence of at least some Kayenta groups migrating to southeastern Arizona, as far south as the Tucson area, at this time, and there may have been substantial Kayenta populations moving into the mountains of east-central Arizona in the late thirteenth century. These immigrant settlements didn’t persist, however, and in one famous case a roomblock with Kayenta-style architecture at Point of Pines was occupied alongside other roomblocks of local style from about AD 1265 until it was suddenly destroyed around 1300 and not rebuilt, even though the rest of the site in question continued to be occupied for another 150 years. It appears that the Kayenta immigrants were initially tolerated without having to assimilate, perhaps because the process of aggregation in the local area was leading to widespread changes in social relations as reflected in community organization. Later on, however, the locals apparently turned on them, or at least didn’t interfere when someone else in the area did, and the survivors either moved on (Kayenta sites further south dating to a slightly later period are known) or went back north to try their luck with the Hopis. This seems to be a very probable case of ethnic violence, which is starting to get some attention as an explanation for certain events in the ancient Southwest but which is in most cases going to be extraordinarily difficult to see in the archaeological record. In this case, however, apparently because of the very recent immigration and lack of assimilation, a difference in ethnicity is visible in an unusually clear-cut way.
Anyway, Bailey’s discussion of Haas’s research is interesting, although I’m not really convinced by his conclusion that the lesson of Long House Valley is that people got along peacefully for centuries before special circumstances forced them to fight, and that this “challenges the conventional wisdom that warfare has been a constant throughout human history.” LeBlanc’s argument is that it is instead the period of peace and abundance during the eleventh century that was anomalous, and that there is plenty of evidence for warfare before this, though admittedly much less than for the period afterward. LeBlanc concludes from this that warfare has indeed been a “constant throughout human history” and that it is peace, rather than war, that needs explaining when it occurs. Of course, the early evidence is pretty limited, due in part just to the fact that less information has survived for early periods in general, so the extent to which LeBlanc’s conclusion is better supported than Bailey’s (which also appears to be Haas’s) is highly debatable. Also, Bailey very kindly linked to me in his post at his own blog pointing to the guest post (apparently in response to a tongue-lashing from Bill Lipe in the comments about giving Haas’s research more context), for which I thank him.
Stone, T. (2000). Prehistoric Community Integration in the Point of Pines Region of Arizona Journal of Field Archaeology, 27 (2) DOI: 10.2307/530593
Are there any traces of a compound origin in the Hopi language?
Good question. I don’t know enough about the Hopi language to say for sure, but given the history of extensive immigration implied by the archaeological record (and by Hopi oral tradition) it seems likely that there would be some evidence of other languages influencing it. Finding them would be a bit complicated by the fact that Hopi is apparently the only surviving member of a rather divergent branch of Uto-Aztecan, so determining which of the ways it differs from the other languages in the family are due to internal change over time and which to external influence is tricky. It’s also quite possible that the languages of the people who migrated to Hopi were other members of the same subfamily, in which case teasing out specific contributions from them may be impossible.
Furthermore, from the general standpoint of contact linguistics, lower-prestige languages that are abandoned in favor of a higher-prestige language rarely leave very substantial traces in that language except under special circumstances. It’s plausible that Hopi would have been considered of higher prestige by the immigrants, in which case they may have quickly abandoned their own languages. If there were enough of them, however, their imperfect learning of Hopi could have contributed to structural changes in Hopi under the influence of their native languages.
Having lived some years in the Kayenta area a while ago, I can personally testify that to that day, periods of peace were the anomalies, even if the ethnic origins of the people there had changed from 1200 AD. The wind blows viciously in the spring and that was generally called the ‘war season’ in the local politics of my day. I wouldn’t doubt that those winds made people cranky hundreds of years ago, too!
Heh. Yeah, those winds are intense.
While the blame for these events is placed on the drought of the 1150s and later, the events that lead to it are really the most critical. When times are good, population quickly builds past the average carrying capacity of an area. For the southwest, the era of volcanoes going off in 1064 is a peak period for places like Chaco, and my guess is we were getting rainfall at the right times in summer to produce bumper crops from the resulting cloud formation and haze cooling things down. Proving the exact timing of rain suitable for corn growing is tougher to tease out of the dendro and other climatilogical data than it would seem. At any rate, summer rains were apparently good enough that populations increased as well as spread out to otherwise marginal areas in the late1000’s. People were busy farming, procreating and conflict was relatively rare.
In the old days moisture fluctuation was the primary cause of an increase of local population once agriculture was established. Now we artificially raise the bar world- wide by practicing various non-sustainable methods of agriculture: mining ground water, use of petroleum based fertilizer and pesticides with questionable long term effects, plus farming methods that deplete the soil, all creating an artificial low cost for food and it’s transport. In short we have stretched the limits of agriculture in any way we can with little thought to the future, at the same time our population increasingly covers our best farmland. With most people well fed now, and relatively little fighting with your neighbors is it possible there is at least some analogy to past trends in the southwest to the present moment?
Lugar muito interessante.