San Francisco Peaks from Wupatki Citadel
While many recent theories seeking to explain the widespread aggregation of communities in the late prehistoric Southwest have emphasized economic factors tied to environmental change, there is another way to look at this process. This perspective sees environmental factors as still being important drivers of aggregation, but indirectly, through increased competition for scarce resources leading to an increase in conflict and warfare, which results in aggregation as a defensive measure. Probably the most prominent proponent of this idea is Steven LeBlanc, who has argued that warfare played the main role in driving Pueblo aggregation. LeBlanc’s arguments are based in large part on the (to him) obviously defensive nature of many settlement locations during the period of aggregation, the limited but important direct evidence of violence in the form of destroyed communities during the same period, and the coalescence of the population of the Southwest not only into large, defensible, aggregated communities but also into clusters of such communities with large open areas between them that could have served as buffer zones between enemy groups.
Tuzigoot National Monument, Clarkdale, Arizona
LeBlanc makes what I consider a convincing case for the importance of warfare in driving settlement aggregation in the late prehistoric period, and it adds an important element to Charles Adams’s model explaining the adoption of the kachina cult. Specifically, it adds two earlier stages to the model. The new model is outlined below.
- Environmental deterioration resulting in decreased resource base and increased competition for scarce resources.
- Increased intercommunity conflict and warfare resulting in some aggregation of formerly dispersed communities into larger and more defensible communities without necessarily involving long-distance migration.
- Migration of groups away from resource-poor, war-torn areas into more attractive locations.
- Aggregation of communities in target regions into plaza-oriented villages, either by incorporation of immigrants into existing aggregating communities or by immigrant communities migrating together and establishing defensive settlements in hostile territory.
- Introduction of the kachina cult to aggregated or aggregating villages, improving integration of formerly distinct groups into united communities.
- Continued aggregation and incorporation of new immigrants into successful communities with a strong kachina cult.
The presence of plaza-oriented or inward-facing community layouts is crucial to this model in two ways. For one thing, the plaza-oriented layout is highly defensible; it generally contains few or no external entrances, with all access to the roomblocks that make up the community being from the plaza. This explains why, in a context of widespread warfare, newly aggregating communities would have chosen this layout. Recall that Adams noted in his model that the adoption of plaza-centered layouts tended to come before the adoption of the kachina cult.
Sign Describing Sun Point Pueblo, Mesa Verde
Beyond its defensive nature, however, the plaza-oriented layout is important because it facilitated public performance of kachina ritual. As Adams pointed out, one of the most important attributes of the kachina cult is that it is public and accessible to the whole community, in addition to involving secret, esoteric knowledge that would be attractive to community leaders to enhance their authority. Pueblos that already had open plazas would have an advantage in adopting the cult and taking advantage of its power to integrate diverse communities, while those that consisted of massed roomblocks with no public open spaces would have been at a disadvantage and may have been inspired to add on roomblocks to form an enclosed plaza in which to perform kachina dances. Adams notes that some of the sites at Homol’ovi seem to have started out as single, massed roomblocks and to have added enclosed plaza areas later.
Plaque Showing Layout of Homolovi II, Winslow, Arizona
Whatever the reason for initial adoption of the plaza-oriented community layout, it necessarily led to significant changes in daily life. With all households in the village facing onto the plaza, everyone could potentially see what everyone else was doing, and the resulting lack of privacy could easily lead to interpersonal conflicts, both between individuals and between households, clans, or other segments of the village that may have been autonomous units not long before and not yet be fully integrated into the new, larger community. The potential tensions were both very real and very dangerous to group cohesion, which may explain why so many of the initial aggregated villages did not last very long. The introduction of a community-wide integrative system such as the kachina cult would have been a substantial advantage in addressing these problems.
Kiva and Tower at Sun Point Pueblo, Mesa Verde
Thus, increased warfare led to aggregated communities using a variety of layouts at first, and the introduction of the kachina cult, which itself may or may not have had anything to do with warfare or defense, made those communities that adopted it much more successful at integrating diverse immigrants than other communities using other layouts and/or ritual systems. This led other, non-plaza communities either to join kachina-using communities or to add plazas to their own communities and adopt the cult themselves.
Sign Describing Casa Malpais Pueblo, Springerville, Arizona
This new model, while obviously a drastic simplification of what was surely a very complicated process, can be an effective tool to examine the contexts in which the kachina cult was adopted and its usefulness for the communities that adopted it. It may also shed light on the issue of when and where the cult first arose, by considering the chronology of environmental deterioration and increased warfare as another factor to compare with aggregation and the appearance of kachina imagery.
Casa Malpais, Springerville, Arizona
Gambler's House 
Back in October you posted about your idea for a paper:
“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.”
I had just finished reading ” Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest” by Steven LeBalanc; mostly because of the influence of this site.
I must admit to paraphrase Ricki Ricardo: it splains a lot!
One idea I’ve toyed with in the meantime is the notion that “downtown” Chaco has very definite military and defensive advantages; more on the order of Moscow than of Monte Casino but advantages never-the-less. What group could mount an expedition sufficient to threaten Chaco across all that relatively open and empty space? What sufficiently large group would not be seen and counter attacked days before they reached the “downtown” canyon.? And what outlier polity had the resources to defend against a punitive or corrective foray from such a large population?
But back to the question at hand; the defensive attributes of aggegated pueblos.
One fact I find compelling is that the environmental consequence of defensive aggregation is a more focused and consequential (over) exploitation of a necessarily compact and defined “safe zone” for each pueblo or allied cluster of Pueblos which in turn leads rather perversely to a further exacerbation of the decline in the environmental carrying capacity for the region. ( ironic given the continuation or exacerbation of the decline was caused or exagerated by a disproportional and concentrated use of resouces in a defensible safe “umbrella”)
Populations were declining, access to resources and “quality of life” must have been in a decline and life was more and more constrained because of the lack of a regional authority providing a framework of order and safety. Each Pueblo of Cluster became in effect an island.
This grim outcome ( if true…….. and the evidence appears compelling) certainly has relevance to some of our current “potential” problems.
Thanks again for all your hard work and good luck in the New Year!
This post is an excerpt from that very paper, which ended up changing a bit in emphasis. While I was writing it I had something of an epiphany about how LeBlanc’s arguments about the role of warfare in aggregation could be integrated into the aggregation-kachina connection hypothesis.
The defensibility of Chaco is something I’ve been thinking about more. When I would give tours there I would always emphasize the absence of any evidence of warfare as indicating that defense wasn’t a major concern, and while I still think that’s basically accurate, I’ve been wondering lately about whether war may have been connected to the rise of Chaco in some other, perhaps more indirect way. The longevity of settlement in the canyon is one thing to consider; the 1000s were certainly unusually peaceful throughout the Southwest, but the 800s were decidedly not. It’s also possible that the Chacoans were involved in warfare in far-flung frontier areas, keeping potential enemies away from the core. Sort of a reinterpretation of Lekson’s “Pax Chaco” as something more similar to the actual Pax Romana. Rome was always at war with someone somewhere.
That’s how I was looking at it. Not Chaco as a fortress but rather as an oasis surrounded by visible open space that couldn’t be easily crossed without serious exposure.
And yes at the center was this BIG (in context) semi-urban complex that would take serious resources to challenge.
So like you I think the fighting occurred on the periphery and really was more in the nature of punitive or disciplinary raids until the center broke down.
Moving on to the aggregated defensive pueblos that coalesced in the 14th century; It is hard to see how they were anything but negative from the stand point of increasing the environmental carrying capacity of the region. All that impact concentrated and focused, the entire plateau abandoned.
And how to help everyone from these previously dispersed and probably very diverse groups to get along and feel or be enfranchised? I’m looking forward to reading what you have to contribute on that subject!
So did you make straight A’s or what?
I did make straight A’s; thanks for asking.
For more on the peripheral warfare interpretation of Chaco, take a look at the work of David Wilcox. He’s not taken very seriously by most Anasazi archaeologists (although his Hohokam work seems to be highly respected), but he’s done a lot of thinking about the implications of seeing Chaco as a militaristic state.
Congratulations! I’ll get my hands on Wilcox right away and thanks for the tip!
I wrote a bit about Wilcox here. He’s written several things about Chaco, mostly as chapters in edited volumes.