Kachina Fast Tax, Winslow, Arizona
This is the proposal I submitted for a term paper I am writing for a seminar on land use. While much more obviously relevant to what I talk about on this blog than the other paper I mentioned, it’s a bit far afield for the subject matter of the course. The professor liked it, though, and he suggested I try to link it to the “collapse” literature (Jared Diamond, etc.) as an example of a sort of “post-collapse” series of events and processes. I like that idea, and I’m going to try to see how to tie the specific evidence I’ll be looking at into that broader context. It should be an interesting project, and I’m pretty excited about it.
In the late prehistoric period, ca. AD 1200 to 1540, the indigenous societies of the American Southwest underwent a series of drastic changes that ultimately transformed them into the Pueblo societies encountered by the first Spanish entradas in the sixteenth century. While the existence of these changes is well-established, the causes and mechanisms involved remain obscure, and heated debates within Southwestern archaeology over these matters have been going on for decades. While the general outline of events is a matter of near consensus, the specific details are by no means settled.
Among the most important of the changes in the late prehistoric period was the aggregation of the regional population into a small number of large, compact, and extremely dense nucleated settlements typically consisting of one or two massive roomblocks containing up to a thousand rooms, replacing the previous community pattern of loosely clustered but detached dwellings of a few rooms each associated with community-level integrative public architecture. This transition occurred in all parts of the Southwest, though at different times and rates in different areas, and by AD 1350 virtually the entire regional population was living in aggregated villages. These villages took various forms, but one of the most common was the so-called “plaza pueblo” with connected roomblocks facing on and enclosing one or more internal plazas (these are also sometimes called “inward-facing pueblos”). This type of settlement has been proposed by some researchers as associated with another major change sweeping the Southwest at this time: the rise of the kachina cult.
The kachina cult is a religious tradition involving a variety of deities called kachinas that are worshipped through ritual dances in which masked dancers impersonate the various kachinas. It is best known today in its manifestation among the Hopi villages in Arizona, which have historically been more open to outside observation than the New Mexico pueblos, but it is thought to have been present in all the pueblos at the time of Spanish contact, and most of the modern pueblos, both eastern and western, still retain it in some form (although a few have apparently abandoned it under Spanish missionary pressure).
Many of the kachina dances at Hopi take place in the public plazas of the pueblos and in square subterranean ritual chambers known as “kivas,” and some researchers have proposed that the widespread adoption of the plaza-centered pueblo form with square kivas accompanied the spread of the kachina religion, which is generally thought to have originated somewhere in the southern Southwest under the influence of Mesoamerican religious ideas. Unlike some other forms of social organization found in the modern pueblos, such as matrilineal clans, the societies that organize kachina rituals are not kin-based, and they potentially offered a useful way to easily integrate an influx of people from previously separate communities into rapidly aggregating nucleated villages. Thus, the theory goes, during a period of confusion and change in Southwestern society the kachina religion offered an attractive means of organizing the new communities that were being hastily thrown together under new social conditions (possibly including deteriorating environmental conditions and increased warfare). The benefits of the kachina societies were such that most or all communities ended up giving them a prominent or even predominant place in community organization, and in many cases orienting the physical layout of the new communities around the needs of the kachina rituals, resulting in the widespread (though not universal) use of the plaza-oriented or inward-facing layout.
In this paper, I propose to test these theories by examining the spatial layouts of communities in the Southwest before, during, and after the spread of the kachina religion. Using data on both excavated and unexcavated aggregated villages, I will compare the presence or absence of plaza-oriented layouts and square kivas to various other attributes, including date, location, and other evidence of kachina symbolism. If the theory of plaza-oriented layouts with square kivas being associated with kachina ritual is accurate, this type of layout should correlate strongly with the spread of other types of evidence associated with the cult, such as rock art, beginning in the southern Southwest and spreading north over time. If this correlation does not hold, however, the importance of the kachina religion to other major changes in the region may be less significant than is often claimed, and other factors may have been more important in determining community layouts. I will examine alternative explanations and compare their explanatory power to that of the kachina theory given the evidence available.
Gambler's House 
I like the sound of it. A question for you: I’m going to be teaching a seminar on Jared Diamond next semester, including Guns Germs & Steel and Collapse. Any suggestions for key literature on the SW civilizations in relation to those themes?
Depending on the level of background you can assume, you’ll probably want a general introduction to the prehistory. Steve Plog and Linda Cordell are probably the most widespread in use for this purpose. I haven’t read either, and they’re both likely to be a little dated at this point, but that’s not really a problem for your purposes since you’ll want to give your students a solid sense of the “traditional” approach to Southwestern archaeology that Diamond is kind of reacting to. There are some other recent overall summaries that would probably work too (one by John Kantner), but I haven’t read any of them either. None of this stuff is going to engage with Diamond’s approach very directly; it’s really more just for background, so you only need one of these books.
As for more focused literature, there’s a wide variety of stuff, but most of it is very technical and not necessarily very accessible to non-specialists. The main exception is David Stuart’s Anasazi America, which you should absolutely include. It’s short and readable and deals directly with a lot of similar issues to what Diamond talks about. Beyond that it kind of depends where you want to go with the course and how much of it you want to spend on the Southwest specifically. Is this going to be an undergraduate or graduate seminar?
Oh, and Joseph Tainter is probably a good choice to include as well. I haven’t read his stuff either (noticing a pattern?) but I will definitely need to do so if I go in this direction in my own paper. He’s an archaeologist with a lot of experience in the Southwest, but he’s gone on to look at a lot of the same issues Diamond talks about in a much more rigorous way.
Noticing the two posts here on Kachinas I have to put in a comment as it is hard to leave as is. So, in summary the cult as presently identified is based on plazas, pictographs or petroglyphs, and pottery with their association to certain iconography. Well it is fine to say there is a florescence of the cult in central AZ in the 1300-1400s that I agree, but to suggest as Adams did that it began there at that time is to not look at all the evidence.
Plazas? Well Chaco has them, Mimbres has them, other northern Anasazi also had them as they probably began out of the stockade concept on much earlier sites. Does Chaco have any relation to Mimbres? The hachure horizon talked about in other posts was there between those locations the entire way represented by Gallup, Reserve, Tularosa, Mimbres, and Chupedero design styles. Most far northern traditions were mostly into geometrics they also used the hachure but I doubt they would have illustrated their pottery with kachina figures even if allowed to as it really was not in their tradition to add realistic images. Masau might be an exception to this, as he seems to show up over a large area as one of the first figures. The most extravagant they got up north with ceramics was in effigies as was discussed.
There is a continuous line of great kiva oriented villages from Chaco to Mimbres including a few of the better known from north to south: Zuni (village of GK), Quemado (Mariana mesa), Apache Creek (multiple GK villages), Reserve to Glenwood are several and so on down the San Francisco river towards the Mimbres, with one of the larger great kiva sites on the southern end of the river. This was Chaco’s main southern route! It is a very old, natural, easily traversed route dictated by topography with the east slope of the Chuskas in the north and the east slope of the Sierra Madres in the south. Remember the classic period at Mimbres was the same as Chaco, ending ca. 1150. Other routes of Chacos influence went west, mostly above the Mogollon rim, flowing along the lines of that hugely popular hachure design work found on Reserve and Tularosa ceramics.
So, no proof of the cult in Chaco? Take a look at a book called Wooden ritual artifacts from Chaco by Vivian et al. Several of these objects also have counterparts at Aztec. Unfortunately some of these are probably from extinct ceremonies and few people have ventured to say what exactly they are. There are several items that are unmistakably kachina related paraphernalia.
I think some of the confusion stems from what we (as honkies) identify as the “Kachina cult” The whole premise here is that the cult was meant to be seen and was integrative. When looking at ethnologies done at the turn of the century at Zuni, with probably the most elaborate manifestation of the cult, it is clear there are multiple layers. The earliest layers are the warrior cults that probably date back to Basketmaker days. Zuni not only had a kachina cult but a cult of kachina priests (part of the supported priestly class) that were very secretive. In looking at it there could have been a stage in development of the cult where it was not public or only partially public. So there is a difference in representation through time and place with more limitations in northern material culture, and also in what would be comparable to advertisement. If something is selling fine to an established client why advertise?
OK, so with time it becomes the bigger, more public, and integrative pan pueblo event that everyone likes to talk about. Or does it? What about Acoma’s legendary battle with the Kachinas after which they never returned? An awful lot of violence in the big PIV villages between Acoma and Zuni for such an integrative time. There is a bit of the chicken and egg effect here, and the Kachinas may not have always been the peaceful form of inter-pueblo cohesion the archaeologists would like them to be. Why a cult focused on rain would have anything to do with irrigation farmers on the Rio Grande I don’t know. Seems the medicine cults; moieties and other social structures were stronger on the Rio for a reason.
There are other influences on the cult in material culture that may hint to origins. How about those lines of dancer like figures on Hohokam pottery? Or tinklers, ankle rattlers, and other objects likely to be used on dancers outfits. The whole relationship between Chaco and the Hohokam in this and other topics is understated. Snaketown (with plazas) is peaking at the same time as Chaco- what happened between those two amazing civilizations at that point in time anyhow? After their peak both Snaketown and the Mimbres areas had new influxes of people (or at least a new ethnogenisis) with a drastically different style of village with compound wall and rectangular room blocks. The Oodam say that was when the Pueblo people took over and made slaves of them. And I would have to agree from 8 years of Salado excavations, it fits. Since the first signals of these new comers is an increase in hachure designed Reserve and Tularosa pottery followed by an increase in puebloan architecture perhaps the Chacoans lost the battle at Chaco but after a bit of reformatting won the war over a large part of the southwest. There is must be more to this story….