The Summer Solstice in Alaska

Sign with Summer Solstice Sunrise and Sunset Times, Anchorage, Alaska

Today is the summer solstice, and here in the “land of the midnight sun” the longest day of the year is very long indeed. In Anchorage, we don’t quite get to 24 hours of daylight, but it is nevertheless well after 11:00 pm as I write this and the sun is still up. North of the Arctic Circle they do have periods where the sun doesn’t set at all, for varying lengths of time depending on latitude. The northernmost community is Barrow, which gets several weeks of non-stop daylight in the summer (with a corresponding period of darkness in the winter, of course).

Given that the solstice falls right in the middle of this period of extreme daylight, it might be expected that Arctic peoples would mark it in some way, as many other societies around the world do (including the indigenous cultures of the US Southwest, as extensively documented in prior posts here). And this does indeed appear to be the case, though with a typically Alaskan twist.

Whalebone Arch with Umiak Frames, Barrow, Alaska

The Inupiaq Eskimos of the North Slope of Alaska, which lies entirely above the Arctic Circle, have traditionally had a whaling-based subsistence system, and to a considerable degree still do. They hunt whales in the spring (and in some villages also in the fall) using a type of traditional skin boat known as an umiak. These are large, open boats made of a wooden frame covered with the hides of walruses or seals, made according to a rigorous traditional protocol. They are used in other areas further south along the Bering Sea coast as well, but their close association with whaling is most pronounced on the North Slope. A recent article by Susan Fair discussed them in the context of their architectural uses as temporary shelters in various settings and their cultural importance in both whaling and the demarcation of ceremonial and other culturally important spaces at certain times.

One of those times is the Whale Feast, often known as Nalukataq (although that name technically refers only to the blanket toss that is one of the most famous elements of it). This ceremony is held only in years when at least one whale has been taken, and while its exact date varies it is scheduled for sometime around the summer solstice. As the name “Whale Feast” implies, the main focus of this event is on sharing the meat from harvested whales with the community, and it is an opportunity for the whaling captains (known as umialiit) who own the umiaks to demonstrate their generosity and show off their prowess.

Umiak on Sea Ice, Barrow, Alaska

Fair focuses in her article on the role the umiaks play in both the ceremony and the social system behind it, in which the small number of umialiit in a village form an elite within it and the umiak serves as a symbol of their power and prestige, but I was more interested in the timing of the feast. The spring whaling season at least in Barrow generally ends in late May or early June (it had recently ended when I was up there at the end of May and there were umiaks with flags raised indicating whaling success all over the place), so having the feast in late June makes a certain amount of just practical sense given the preparations necessary, but I do wonder if there is a deeper significance to the association with the solstice, perhaps as a vestige of a large role for indigenous astronomy in the pre-Contact era. I have not been able to find much information on archaeoastronomy or ethnoastronomy in Alaska, but given the high latitude and spectacular celestial phenomena that abound here I’m sure Native people have long been attuned to the sky. Recent changes, especially aggressive Christian missionization that sought to stamp out Native religion, has obscured a lot of the earlier cultural practices, but I wonder if things like the timing of the Whale Feast preserve bits and pieces of aspects of traditional knowledge that are otherwise forgotten. Certainly a topic that could use more attention, I think.

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Land of the Twilight Noon

Delaney Park at Noon on the Winter Solstice, Anchorage, Alaska

Today is the winter solstice, which means two things: the anniversary of the beginning of this blog (three years now), and the shortest day of the year.  Up here in Alaska, the second is particularly noteworthy.  We had about five and a half hours of daylight today; officially, the sun rose around 10:15 and set around 3:45.  In Anchorage, however, which has mountains to the east, the sun didn’t actually appear until about 11:00.  The state likes to emphasize the converse of this phenomenon in summer in their promotional material, of course, hence the idea that Alaska is the “Land of the Midnight Sun,” but in the winter the “Twilight Noon” is equally appropriate.  Indeed, for the parts of the state that are below the Arctic Circle (most of it), it never gets completely dark or completely light for 24 hours straight, so the Midnight Sun never strictly appears even on the summer solstice.  Noon on the winter solstice definitely does start to look pretty similar to twilight, though.

I’ve talked a lot about archaeoastronomy in the Southwest on this blog, which is why marking events like the solstices has been such an important part of it, but as far as I can tell there is no evidence that the native people up here paid much attention to astronomical phenomena.  (It’s quite possible that they did and I just haven’t found the documentation of it, of course.)  This could be because of the lack of an indigenous agricultural tradition, since calendar-making has generally been linked to agriculture, although of course seasonal events like salmon runs are often very important to non-agricultural people and it would presumably be helpful to have a means of marking them.  I believe navigation by the stars was pretty well developed among some of the more maritime-oriented societies of the North, which makes sense given the general lack of landmarks along the Arctic Ocean coastline, but use of the sky to tell time doesn’t seem to have been as important.  Presumably people just paid more attention to other time markers.  This is a topic I should definitely look into.  Anyway, happy solstice, and thanks for reading.

Captain Cook Statue at Noon on the Winter Solstice, Anchorage, Alaska

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The Stars Bursting in Air

"Supernova" Pictograph

Happy Fourth of July, everyone.  The Fourth is actually a pretty important date for the study of Chaco, but in a roundabout (and somewhat controversial) way.  It all has to do with a very famous pictograph panel below Peñasco Blanco at the west end of the canyon.  While the interpretation of this panel is a matter of considerable debate, one way it’s been seen is as a record of an astronomical event that is known to have occurred during the height of Chaco’s power and influence: the supernova of 1054, which formed the Crab Nebula.

We know from several Chinese reports that the “guest star” resulting from the supernova first appeared on July 4, 1054 and continued to be visible day and night for almost two years.  There are a few Japanese records of the supernova as well, along with one report from the Arab world.  No clear-cut and unambiguous accounts are known from Europe or elsewhere in the world, although a few rock art panels in the Southwest have been proposed as representing the event.  The most famous of these is the one at Chaco, which is often referred to as the “Supernova Pictograph” (even by the park itself in a sign at the site).  It consists of three symbols painted onto the rock face in red: a hand, a crescent, and a starburst-like shape.  It’s the starburst that has been interpreted as representing the supernova itself, of course, and the crescent has been seen as representing the crescent moon.  On the morning of July 5, the moon, which was a crescent at the time, would have appeared in roughly the same relationship to the supernova, as seen from the pictograph site, as the relationship between the two symbols on the panel.  Furthermore, the handprint points in the direction one would have looked to see this at at the time.  The combination of the three symbols together, plus the fact that this would have happened at a time of considerable activity in the canyon, has led some to suggest that this pictograph panel was created to commemorate this historic event.  The specific location may have been an established sun-watching position, from which the new star was seen unexpectedly and recorded.

Sign at the "Supernova Pictograph"

It all sounds fairly plausible as it goes, but there are some problems with this theory.  Probably the biggest problem is that the specific set of symbols on the panel is known from ethnographic evidence to have been used by the Zunis to mark generic sunwatching sites, with the crescent representing the moon, the starburst representing the sun, and the hand marking the location as sacred.  Now, it’s certainly possible that these symbols came to be associated with this activity as a result of the observation of the supernova at this site, but as far as I know there’s no reference to the supernova in ethnographic descriptions of astronomical observation at Zuni or any of the other modern Pueblos, so this is a pretty tenuous claim.

Furthermore, while the 1054 supernova would certainly have been noticeable at Chaco, there was an earlier supernova in 1006 (also recorded by the Chinese, and possibly by the Hohokam in southern Arizona) that was much brighter, and it’s not clear why the Chacoans wouldn’t have recorded that one too.  It took place before the Chaco system really got going on a regional scale, but there was plenty of activity in the canyon during the 900s, so people there would presumably have seen it.  It’s possible that it was recorded too, at some other site that hasn’t been found or that has disappeared in the thousand years that have elapsed since the event (note that the existing Supernova Pictograph has only survived because it was under a protective overhang), but again, there’s not any evidence for this.  The Chacoans are definitely known to have kept careful track of regular patterns in the skies, such as the solstices and the lunar standstills, so they surely would have seen unusual events such as supernovae, but it’s not clear how they would have reacted to them or how inclined they would have been to record them.

View Looking East from "Supernova Petroglyph"

So it’s not really clear how to interpret the Chaco pictograph.  I think the balance of evidence at this point leans slightly against it being a representation of the supernova, but I could be talked out of that position if some additional evidence for the supernova theory can be found.

Others, however, have proposed even more extreme theories based on the 1054 supernova.  Among the more noteworthy of these is a proposal by Timothy Pauketat and Thomas Emerson, in a 2008 article in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, that the rather sudden florescence of the Cahokia site in Illinois around AD 1050 may have had something to do with the supernova.  The theory they present is interesting, but hard to effectively support.  For one thing, dating methods in the Midwest are much less precise than in the Southwest, so pinning down any event to the year is usually not possible.  There is certainly a suggestive correspondence between the sudden rise of Cahokia and the supernova, however, and this is supported by the apparent use of stellar imagery and symbolism at Cahokia and the importance of the stars to later cultures in the area, so there may well be something to this.

Opening at Casa Rinconada That Channels Sunbeam at Sunrise on Summer Solstice

I’m a bit troubled, however, by the reliance of Pauketat and Emerson on evidence from Chaco and the way they interpret it.  For one thing, they say that the Supernova Pictograph is “above” Peñasco Blanco, when it’s actually below it, and not visible from the great house itself.  More importantly, they say of the effect of the supernova:

Some believe that this particular cosmic event, which left behind the Crab Nebula, was commemorated in architecture and iconography at the time or in subsequent years. The most compelling evidence for this comes not from the Cahokia region but from the American Southwest, where a tree-cutting date places the construction of the largest and most isolated ceremonial building in Chaco Canyon, Casa Rinconada (noted for its many astronomical alignments) to AD
1054.

Now, it’s true that there is a single tree-ring cutting date from Casa Rinconada that dates to 1054.  This is, however, the only tree-ring date for the site, so while it’s plausible that it dates the construction of the site this definitely cannot be stated as definitively as Pauketat and Emerson state it here.  There is no specific provenience information available for this beam, so there’s no way to tell how it was used and whether it can plausibly be said to date to the initial construction of the site.  The general architecture of Casa Rinconada is consistent with a construction date in the 1050s, but without more specific information tying it to a specific year on the basis of one unprovenienced beam is unwarranted.

Looking through Solstice-Aligned Opening at Casa Rinconada toward Aligned Niche

Furthermore, even if Rinconada was built in 1054, that doesn’t establish that it was built because of the supernova.  There was extensive construction in the canyon throughout the mid-1000s, associated with Chaco’s apparent rise to regional dominance, and this began well before 1054.  The major expansion of Pueblo Bonito began by the 1040s at the latest, and various other construction projects at other sites in the canyon dates to this general period.  Rinconada could easily have been part of this general process without any specific relationship to the supernova.  Indeed, there’s nothing about Rinconada that seems to refer to the supernova, despite the various astronomical alignments (some of them controversial as well, it should be noted) identified there.

None of this means that the supernova didn’t have an important role at Cahokia, of course, and it doesn’t even rule out an important role at Chaco itself.  It does mean, however, that developments at Chaco shouldn’t really be used as evidence for developments at Cahokia, even though the two sites are contemporaneous and Chaco can be dated much more precisely.  Cahokia may well have risen as a result of the 1054 supernova, but neither the Supernova Petroglyph at Chaco nor the one tree-ring date at Casa Rinconada provides evidence that it did.

Pauketat, T., & Emerson, T. (2008). Star Performances and Cosmic Clutter Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 18 (1), 78-85 DOI: 10.1017/S0959774308000085

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On This Solstice Day

Fajada Butte from Pueblo Alto

Happy solstice, everyone.  To mark the occasion I figured I’d say a bit about archaeoastronomy, which is an important topic at Chaco that I don’t discuss very often.  The various alignments identified at the great houses in the canyon have become quite famous through the work of the Solstice Project to document them, and while I don’t think all of their proposed alignments are necessarily real, there is enough evidence by now to suggest that at least some of them are.  Cardinal direction alignments are the most obvious, and the least likely to be coincidental (in my view), and these are found at a few of the sites at Chaco, particularly Pueblo Bonito, Pueblo Alto, and Tsin Kletzin.  Interestingly, these three are all in the center of the canyon (“Downtown Chaco”), and the line running due north-south from Pueblo Alto to Tsin Kletzin runs between Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl through the “Chaco Amphitheater.”  This all suggests some pretty extensive planning, but it’s interesting that the other parts of the canyon don’t seem to have been part of it.  I find the Solstice Project’s proposed alignments at many of the other sites in the canyon a lot more dubious, especially since so many of them are allegedly to the minor lunar standstill.  It seems more plausible that there would be solstice alignments in the canyon, and there do indeed seem to be some “viewing points” from which solstice sunrises are marked by prominent features on the horizon, but the only solstice-aligned building proposed by the Solstice Project is Aztec West, which isn’t even at Chaco, although it’s clearly Chacoan in style.

Steve Lekson has proposed that one possible reason for the variety of alignments in Chacoan great houses is conflict between factions within Chacoan society.  The way he sees it, solstice alignments were the regional tradition, and cardinal alignments were a new idea at Chaco, perhaps threatening to the old order in the way that many new developments at Chaco were.  Indeed, alignment to the southeast was a common architectural practice in pre-Chaco communities, and this may well have had something to do with the solstices, although as far as I know none of these buildings have been demonstrated to have precise solstitial alignments.  I’m not so sure that cardinal direction alignments were not present in the region before Chaco, however, and I’m also unsure of whether differences in building orientation really represent ideology the way Lekson proposes.  I’m more inclined to wonder if they may instead reflect different ethnic or regional origins for different groups.  In either case, though, the factionalism idea is interesting, and quite compatible with what we know of later Pueblo societies.  In Lekson’s version, the solstice alignment of Aztec reflects the founding of that center by the solstitial faction at Chaco, while the cardinal faction went elsewhere, maybe to Paquimé, which has a strong cardinal alignment.  I’m not sure how much of that I buy, but it’s worth thinking about.

Pueblo Alto and New Alto from Tsin Kletzin

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Two Years

Beginning of Lunar Eclipse on Winter Solstice 2010 from Highland Park, New Jersey

Today is the winter solstice, which means it’s now been two years since I started this blog.  In the past year my readership has increased quite a bit, which has been quite gratifying.  This has always been something of a niche blog, so I don’t expect it to ever get huge numbers of readers, but it’s been quite nice to see how it’s developed.  When I started it one of my main purposes was to find a place to permanently put versions of my well-rehearsed answers to the questions I would frequently get as a tour guide at Chaco, and I’ve mostly accomplished that goal at this point and moved on to other things.  Right now, since I’m in school and have access to a major university library system and a lot of scholarly databases, one of my main purposes is to present and explain important and interesting pieces of scholarship that the general public does not generally have easy access to.  That may change in the future as my personal circumstances and intellectual interests change, but I don’t see this blog going away any time soon.  Thanks to all my readers for making this a fantastic two years so far.

Oh, and the eclipse last night was quite impressive.  Here in New Jersey the sky was clear and we could see it very well.  I hear it was overcast in much of the Southwest so a lot of people couldn’t see it, which is unfortunate.  I took some pictures.

Total Lunar Eclipse on Winter Solstice 2010 from Highland Park, New Jersey

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Solstice Eclipse

Winter Solstice Sunset

Astronomical events are closely associated with Chaco Canyon, and the summer and winter solstices seem to have been particularly important to the ancient inhabitants.  The winter solstice is coming up tomorrow, and there also happens to be a total lunar eclipse that will coincide with it.  It’s very rare for an eclipse to occur right on the solstice, so I figured I’d put out the word for any of my readers who haven’t heard and might be interested in watching it tonight.  It’ll be visible throughout North America, provided the sky is clear, starting at about 1:30 am Eastern Time.  At particularly dark locations like Chaco the eclipse will be more spectacular, of course, but the thing about eclipses is that they’re visible even in more developed areas with more light pollution, so a lot of people should be able to see this one.

Sun Temple, Mesa Verde

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Happy Solstice!

Window at Casa Rinconada That Channels Sunbeam at Sunrise on Summer Solstice

Today is the summer solstice, which is a pretty important time at Chaco.  It’s also a good time for me to announce that I’m going to be coming back to Chaco this summer to work for a few weeks.  When I left last year I had no intention of ever working there again, but I’ve come to realize that for a variety of reasons this is a good thing for me to be doing this summer.  So if you’ve ever wanted to see one of my tours, now’s your chance.  I’ll be there from roughly the beginning of July to the middle of August.

Niche at Casa Rinconada That Gets Hit by Summer Solstice Sunrise Beam

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Anniversary

Close-Up of Sun Marker at Edge of the Cedars State Park, Blanding, Utah

Today is the winter solstice, which means that this blog has now been around for one year.  Overall, I’d say this first year has been an enormous success.  I wasn’t sure exactly how this experiment was going to turn out when I started, but so far it’s been very successful, and I’ve managed to accomplish pretty much everything I initially intended to do with it and more.  Credit for that success goes mainly to my enthusiastic and devoted readership, without which I could never have kept this thing going.  So thanks, everyone, for reading, commenting, and otherwise supporting this project.  I have no intention of stopping it anytime soon, so keep an eye out for new posts.

Oval Enclosure, Probably Astronomical, at Casa Malpais, Springerville, Arizona

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The Constant Threat of Coincidence

Fajada Butte with Green Vegetation

Archaeoastronomy has been a major research topic at Chaco Canyon for a long time, especially since the discovery of the “Sun Dagger” petroglyph atop Fajada Butte in 1977.  While the Sun Dagger is the best-known proposed astronomical marker in the canyon, many others have been suggested in the years since its discovery.  These have been accepted as valid by the archaeological community to varying degrees; the Sun Dagger is among the most widely accepted, but many others, particularly those identified by Anna Sofaer’s Solstice Project, have met with much more skepticism.

Wall Dividing East and West Plazas, Pueblo Bonito

The root of much of this skepticism lies in a fundamental difficulty with archaeoastronomical research.  Basically, there’s usually no way to prove that a given alignment was intentional rather than coincidental.  If you draw enough lines something is bound to line up, so the risk of a proposed alignment being coincidental is always there, and there’s no sure way to demonstrate that coincidence is not the explanation, at least when dealing with prehistoric cultures lacking writing systems.  The main way these alignments become accepted, then, is by demonstration of various qualities of them that are unlikely to be coincidental.  These can include the precision of the alignment, as at the north-south and east-west walls at Pueblo Bonito, the way the alignment sheds light on other puzzling aspects of the site, as at Chimney Rock, or the combination of multiple alignments in a single marker, as at the Sun Dagger.  The more of these other lines of evidence for intentionality there are, the more likely it is that the alignment is intentional rather than coincidental, but coincidence can never be completely ruled out.

Plaque at Fajada Butte View Describing the "Sun Dagger" Petroglyph

A good example of the role of coincidence in archaeoastronomy comes in a short article by Jonathan Reyman, one of the pioneers of archaeoastronomical research at Chaco and elsewhere, reporting on some research he did on an alignment at Wupatki that turned out to be completely coincidental and spurious.  While it is usually not possible to show that an alignment is definitely coincidental, much as it is impossible to show that it is definitely intentional, in this case it happened to be quite clear.

Wupatki Pueblo

What happened was that Reyman and his crew arrived at Wupatki, intending to test the alignment of a window in the east wall of Room 44 at Wupatki Pueblo.  This room was unusual in several respects, which led Reyman to believe that it might have had astronomical functions.  It is high in the building, which afforded it good visibility, it has a t-shaped doorway in its south wall, it has a window in the east wall, which is very unusual at Wupatki, where there are few windows, and its floor is paved with flagstones, also very unusual.  In addition, Room 44 contained bins with unusual artifact assemblages found during excavation, and one of the bins had two macaw skeletons in it.  All of this made Room 44 a plausible candidate for a sunrise alignment marker of some sort, so Reyman and his team made arrangements to come to Wupatki in the summer of 1976 to do some measurements.

Wupatki Pueblo from the South, Showing T-Shaped Doorway into Room 44

When they arrived at the monument, they looked through documentation on the site, which has been excavated and substantially rebuilt.  Unfortunately, most of the pertinent documentation was out on loan, so they couldn’t look through everything, but what they did have available seemed to show that Room 44 was in basically the same condition it had been in when it was excavated in 1933.  So they did their measurements and found that the window did indeed have alignments to the sunrises on the summer and winter solstices as well as on the equinoxes.  Success!

View of Wupatki Pueblo from the East, Showing Spurious Window in Room 44

The very next day, however, the documentation that had been out on loan was returned to the monument, and when Reyman looked at it he realized that his results were totally spurious.  It turned out that Room 44 had been almost completely reconstructed in the 1930s.  When it was first excavated, only the northwest corner was still in place, and the rest of the walls had been reduced almost completely to the floor level.  After excavation, the Park Service decided to turn this part of the site into a ranger station and museum, so they rebuilt the walls entirely, added a door in the south wall and a window in the east wall, put on a roof, and paved the floor, which was originally clay, with flagstones.  Later, when a separate headquarters for the monument was built, the Park Service dissassembled some but not all of this reconstruction, including the roof and the upper parts of the walls, but left the paved floor and the window and doorway in place for some reason, and they remained in place when Reyman arrived in 1976.  Since it was very unlikely that the Park Service and the Museum of Northern Arizona, which did the reconstruction in the 1930s, intended to put in alignments to the solstice and equinox sunrises when they built the window in Room 44, Reyman was forced to conclude that it was all just a coincidence and that there was no evidence that Room 44 ever had any astronomical alignments (or, for that matter, any windows or doorways).

Wupatki National Monument Headquarters

Despite the disappointing nature of this exercise, Reyman decided to publish his account of it anyway, as a cautionary tale for would-be archaeoastronomers.  Many of the prehistoric sites in the southwest, especially those managed by the National Park Service, have been substantially reconstructed, and it’s very important to check the documentation of that reconstruction before taking any measurements to make sure that there is actually something original there to measure.

Very Faint Spiral Petroglyph at Wupatki National Monument

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Chimney Rock

Companion Rock and Chimney Rock

I’m in Cortez, Colorado, for the Pecos Conference, an annual gathering focused on southwestern archaeology which moves from place to place.  On my way up here I stopped at Chimney Rock, one of the most interesting of the Chacoan outliers and one that I had not been to before.

Chimney Rock Mesa

The main reason for both those things is Chimney Rock’s location.  It’s the furthest known outlier to the northeast of Chaco, near Pagosa Springs, Colorado, and there are no other outliers very close to it.  The great house is perched in a bizarre position up on top of a high, steep mesa, and further down the mesa ridge there are many smaller sites, most of them having a distinctive architectural style suggesting that they are basically above-ground pithouses (perhaps because on the mesa there wasn’t enough soil to dig into to create regular pithouses).  There are also more typical pithouses, possibly from a slightly earlier period, further down on the banks of the Piedra River.  While the great house is distinctive in being very “Chacoan” in style, more so than many closer outliers, the small sites on the mesa seem to have more similarities to the architecture of the Gallina culture to the south.

The "Parking Lot Site," an Above-Ground Pithouse below Chimney Rock Great House

Because of its odd location and distance from Chaco, Chimney Rock has been the subject of considerable research over the years, and the University of Colorado has just started a major new research project there headed by Steve Lekson that has already gotten quite a bit of press coverage.  The theories about Chimney Rock’s relationship to Chaco itself vary, and aren’t really that different from theories positing various roles of outliers in general.  The main theories about the founding of the Chimney Rock great house (among those who agree that it was founded by Chacoans at all rather than being an indigenous development) fall into two main groups: resource-procurement and astronomical observation.  The resource-procurement theories emphasize Chaco’s need for wood and the possibility that by the time Chimney Rock was founded in the AD 1070s closer sources such as the Chuska Mountains had been largely exhausted.  The astronomical theories, on the other hand, focus on the two large geological features, known as Chimney Rock and Companion Rock, that give the site its name.  Protruding from the mesa, they have a small gap between them when viewed from the great house that appears to align perfectly with the northernmost moonrise at the lunar major standstill, which only occurs every 18.6 years and did in fact occur around the time the great house was first built, and again when it was expanded or renovated in the 1090s.  This theory has been pushed largely by Kim Malville, an astronomer at the University of Colorado, and investigated thoroughly by Ron Sutcliffe, an engineer and surveyor in Pagosa Springs who has also worked at Chaco.

Trail to Chimney Rock Great House

Given my skepticism about the idea of floating beams down the Piedra River to Aztec or Chaco, it may come as no surprise that I much prefer the astronomical explanation.  While it’s certainly possible that some wood used in great houses elsewhere (more likely in the Totah area than in Chaco itself) came from the Chimney Rock area, there has not been any clear evidence yet establishing this, and if they were carried overland rather than floated, as was apparently the case, upstream areas like Chimney Rock wouldn’t have had any particular advantages over other, closer areas with similar vegetation for procurement purposes.  The procurement scenarios make sense on a general level, but when applied to Chimney Rock specifically they leave many questions unanswered.  Why would the great house need to be way up on top of the steep mesa if the point was to harvest trees?  Why weren’t there any other procurement outliers nearby?  And why so far away?

Piedra River Valley from Chimney Rock Mesa

All these questions are easily addressed by the theory that Chimney Rock was a preexisting religious site based on astronomical observations through the gap between the rocks (probably from various locations throughout the local area).  If the Chacoans were aware of this site, they may well have wanted to integrate it into their system, whatever it was, particularly if astronomical knowledge was an important aspect of the ritual authority that allowed them to put the system together in the first place, which it may have been.  While some archaeoastronomy can get a little too speculative for my taste, this Chimney Rock theory seems like one of the most clear-cut and useful examples of the archaeoastronomical approach as applied to Chacoan sites.  And, indeed, it seems that the astronomical theory has been winning out lately in both scholarly and interpretive circles.  Certainly the tour guide I had today talked about it a lot and didn’t mention wood procurement much.

Masonry at Chimney Rock Great House

In any case, it’s a fascinating place, well worth a trip, and hopefully the new research there will soon begin to shed more light on it.  With Lekson in charge, I have no doubt that the findings will, at the very least, be entertainingly described.

Chimney Rock Great House

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