Aftermath: Introduction

Keyhole-Shaped Kiva at Pueblo Bonito

In my previous posts on books, I’ve generally discussed entire books, even if they consist of chapters on multiple subjects by multiple people, as whole entities.  I will continue to do that for some books, but starting with this post I’m going to be trying something different, discussing a book chapter-by-chapter in a series of posts as I read it.

The book in question is The Prehistoric Pueblo World, edited by Michael Adler.  It’s the result of a conference sponsored by Crow Canyon on the Pueblo III period, which is to say the period immediately after the decline of Chaco Canyon and the Chaco System.  This time period is, I think, pretty important to understanding Chaco and what it meant, both as a contrast to the Chacoan era and as a time when Chacoan ideas seem to have continued to wield some influence at least in some areas.

As Adler explains in his introductory chapter, the book is organized mostly by region, with some more general analytical chapters toward the end.  The main focus is on settlement patterns throughout the Pueblo world in this period, which is marked in most places by a preponderance of very large, aggregated sites.  The period is also notable for the abandonment of huge swathes of territory previously occupied by Pueblo peoples, and Adler notes that there is likely some connection between this abandonment and the contemporaneous tendency toward settlement aggregation.

Adler suggests one possible connection between aggregation and abandonment, namely that aggregation may have led to “increasing volatility” throughout regional social systems, which in turn led to abandonment.  This is a bit vague, but it’s pretty clear what he’s getting at here in general terms: the process of aggregation is a marked shift from earlier settlement patterns, and it surely would have had some effect on the social relationships connected to those earlier patterns.  This shift could have changed the previously dominant social relationships enough to cause groups to abandon large areas.

There’s a certain amount of plausibility to this argument, but I think it’s just as plausible that Adler has it backward.  Perhaps aggregation didn’t lead to “increasing volatility” but rather instability, perhaps spurred on by climatic change (for which there is some evidence in this period), upset previous social relations and forced people to move into aggregated settlements.  The mechanism by which this would most likely have occurred, of course, is warfare, which Adler doesn’t mention at all except in a brief quote by Alfred Kidder noting the defensive nature of the aggregated communities.  This is perhaps a typical example of the reluctance of southwestern archaeologists to seriously address warfare as an important aspect of southwestern prehistory, as argued by Steven LeBlanc, who has a detailed and quite different interpretation of settlement aggregation in his book on prehistoric southwestern warfare.

Be that as it may, Adler rightly notes that both regional and community-level scales are important domains of archaeological research which are addressed throughout the book, in addition to the more traditional focus on the individual site.  In particular, he mentions the importance of regional variation in settlement patterns, with the example of community integrative architecture being particularly important for interpretations of social systems.

Finally, and most importantly, Adler emphasizes the importance of collecting sufficient data to address questions of interest, and the most important contribution of this volume is likely its attempt to collect as much data as possible on site locations and patterning for this period and make it available in published form.  While, as Adler rightly notes, this data was in some ways obsolete by the time the book was published, since new data is being collected all the time, and it is considerably more out-of-date now, more than ten years later, the value of just having this amount of data in one place is still considerable.  Despite whatever quibbles I may have with Adler or the other contributors in their emphasis or interpretations, I am still thankful to them for putting this information together and making it accessible.