Cabezon Peak
Chapter 10 of The Prehistoric Pueblo World, by John Roney, addresses two areas that, while adjacent to each other, are otherwise not very similar either physically or historically. This is an issue that crops up elsewhere in this book, and it appears that the division of the Pueblo world into regions was in many cases based more on the interests and specialties of the chapter authors than on archaeological culture areas. Since one of the main purposes of the book is merely to collect data on sites and their distribution, it doesn’t end up making a whole lot of difference which chapter a given site falls into, but it makes it a bit odd to see the disjunctions in some of the chapters.
This particular chapter suffers from the additional oddity that one of the regions it covers has already been addressed in another chapter. I don’t know why this choice was made. It’s true that the overlap isn’t total, and the “Eastern San Juan Basin” addressed here seems to basically be the basin itself and its eastern peripheries, excluding the peripheries in other directions on which Stein and Fowler lavished considerable attention. I suspect that at least part of the reason, however, is that Stein and Fowler’s idiosyncratic take on the culture history of their region in some ways obscures patterns in the archaeology that a more traditional approach like Roney’s reveals and makes available for clearer comparison to other regions.
Roney’s account of the Basin, therefore, serves as something of a supplement to Stein and Fowler’s, providing the detailed data that, while not absent from the earlier chapter, was not really emphasized either. In any case, the general outlines of the history here are clear, and parallel the trends noted in other regions, with increasing aggregation in the post-Chaco era culminating in total abandonment by 1300.
Visitor Center and Fajada Butte from Una Vida
Further south, in the other region Roney addresses, the dynamics are not as clear. As in the neighboring Cibola region, this area suffers from significant discrepancies in the quantity and quality of available data in the various subdistricts. The best-known part is the El Malpais region at the western edge, which has been fairly extensively surveyed, and trends there seem to parallel those seen in the better-known Cibola districts. Further east, things get considerably murkier, and the lack of good data makes it very difficult to draw any firm conclusions.
This is unfortunate, because this area is notable for being the third part of the Colorado Plateau where Puebloan occupation continued until Spanish contact (and, indeed, to the present day). Roney calls it “Acoma-Laguna,” but since Laguna Pueblo was founded long after the period under discussion and is very similar to Acoma in most respects, it’s really Acoma that is important here. Like Zuni and Hopi, Acoma remained when the rest of the Plateau emptied out between 1300 and 1400. Also like the other two, it began as a cluster of several sites and dwindled over time, eventually (and unlike Hopi and Zuni) ending up as a single village in an extremely defensive position. Steven LeBlanc sees this as clear evidence of the importance of warfare in the processes of aggregation and abandonment that marked this period; Roney isn’t so sure. In any case, as the third example of survival in place, Acoma surely holds some lessons about the events the resulted in the population distribution we see today.
Unfortunately, and to a much greater extent than at Hopi or even Zuni, those lessons remain obscure. One of the most important reasons for this, which Roney doesn’t mention, is Acoma’s long history of suspicion and hostility toward outsiders, with the result that very little archaeological study at the pueblo itself or on lands it controls has been done. A lot of this hostility is the result of the violence and brutality that characterized the Spanish conquest and colonial period in this area, but the defensive configuration of the pueblo suggests that there may be deeper roots to it as well.
Thus, it’s pretty unlikely that the secrets of Acoma’s history and survival will be revealed any time soon. While this is unfortunate for archaeologists and others interested in the ancient history of the southwest and its implications for the present, I find it hard to blame the people at Acoma for not wanting to be involved in outsiders’ studies of them and their history. They’ve suffered a lot over the course of that history, and their distrust is quite justified. This is an important factor to keep in mind when studying the history of settlements and cultures. The people who make up those settlements and cultures are real people with their own opinions, and they aren’t always happy about being studied.
Chacra Mesa at Sunset
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