Montezuma Castle, a Sinagua Village
As I’ve mentioned before in reference to the Fremont culture of what is now Utah, while the Anasazi of the Four Corners region are by far the most famous of the prehistoric southwestern societies, and particularly famous for their allegedly mysterious disappearance, there’s actually very little mystery about what happened to them. They very obviously became the modern Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona. It has not been possible so far to trace connections between any specific prehistoric site and any specific modern pueblo (beyond obvious cases like the Zuni and Hopi pueblos that were abandoned in very late prehistory or very early historic times when the inhabitants moved to nearby communities that are still extant today). However, the general connections between the Anasazi and the modern Pueblos in material culture are quite clear and no one disputes them.
When it comes to the other prehistoric cultures, however, the situation is much less clear. While a few seem to have clear modern descendants, most show few if any obvious similarities to the modern indigenous cultures inhabiting their areas, and the extent of any continuity is controversial at best. A recent comment on my Fremont post mentioning the Gallina culture of north-central New Mexico reminded me of this. I may expand on some of these cultures in future posts, but for now I just want to list them so that people who are not familiar with the diversity of southwestern culture history get a sense for the range of cultures known from the archaeological record and the very limited extent to which it is correlated with the equally extensive ethnographic record of this region.
Before I get to the list, though, I should give a brief introduction to the “root-and-branch” system of southwestern archaeological taxonomy, which is necessary to understand what these archaeological units are and are not. This system was originally developed by Harold Gladwin, a New York stockbroker who moved to Globe, Arizona in the 1920s and established a nonprofit archaeological research institute known as Gila Pueblo that was immensely influential in the development of southwestern archaeology in the 1930s and 1940s. Gladwin’s conception of southwestern culture history was based on an analogy to trees, with “roots” as the basic units, which in turn were divided hierarchically into “stems” and “branches.” The data on which these units were based was mainly ceramic, as pottery is the most useful artifact class for distinguishing among the various cultural manifestations of the prehistoric Southwest. The “branches” were considered roughly equivalent to the “tribes” of the ethnographic record, but given the historical focus of archaeology at this time they were further divided into chronological “phases.” Gladwin’s scheme was revised by Harold Colton of the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, who renamed some of the roots to avoid Gladwin’s association of them with specific modern linguistic groups, given the uncertainty involved in this kind of identification. Colton also generally downplayed Gladwin’s intermediate “stems” in favor of a simpler system of “roots” and “branches” (which he still analogized to modern tribes). The system that emerged from this interplay of Gladwin’s and Colton’s ideas has remained in use ever since as the main taxonomic scheme for southwestern archaeology.
Within this system, “Anasazi” refers to one of the roots, with “Chaco,” “Mesa Verde,” Kayenta,” etc. as branches. Note that I have avoided using the term “Ancestral Puebloan” in place of “Anasazi” in this post so far; there’s a reason for that. While the term “Anasazi” has been criticized based on its Navajo etymology, it refers to a very specific unit in a taxonomic system, and “Ancestral Puebloan” is a problematic replacement because most or all of the other units in that system are also likely ancestral to the modern Pueblos. For want of a better term, then, I’m sticking with “Anasazi” for this purpose.
With that prologue out of the way, below are the roots and branches currently recognized by most archaeologists that don’t have obvious modern descendants. Note that while the Chaco, Mesa Verde, Kayenta, and Rio Grande branches of the Anasazi root are not listed here since they are clearly ancestral to the modern Pueblos, some other Anasazi branches are included since it is much less obvious what happened to them. They may have ended up as part of one or more modern Pueblo groups, but it is also possible that they changed their culture so much as to become unrecognizable archaeologically, or died out altogether. The branches belonging to other roots may have contributed to the formation of the modern Pueblos as well, or they may have developed into other cultures or disappeared entirely as well.
- Anasazi Root:
- Gallina Branch: Inhabited north-central New Mexico until about AD 1300. Late Gallina sites exhibit extensive evidence of violent death, implying conflict with other groups, perhaps those entering the area from the north and west around this time. While the Gallina are generally considered a branch of the Anasazi, their material culture shows many similarities to Plains groups to the east and their actual ethnic and linguistic affiliation remain unclear.
- Virgin Branch: Inhabited the Virgin River valley and adjacent areas of southern Nevada, southwestern Utah and northwestern Arizona from Basketmaker times until approximately AD 1150 (or possibly a bit later). They seem to have been part of the overall Anasazi culture area from early on, but the Virgin region was abandoned significantly earlier than other Anasazi areas further east, and it is unclear what this means.
- Fremont Root: Inhabited most of modern Utah for centuries until fading away in the late prehistoric period. The relationship of the Fremont to modern Pueblo and Numic populations remains unclear, and it is also unclear just how coherent a cultural unit “Fremont” ever was.
- Hohokam Root: Inhabited southern and central Arizona (below the Mogollon Rim) for millennia from the initial development of agriculture until the fifteenth century AD. Famous for their elaborate canal systems and distinctive pottery, as well as their apparently Mesoamerican-influenced ballcourts, the Hohokam remain one of the most mysterious of prehistoric southwestern cultures despite also being one of the best-studied. They may have been ancestral to the modern O’odham (Pima and Papago) peoples who inhabited the same area in historic times, but this is hotly disputed as there are many differences in material culture. There have also been suggestions that some Hohokam may have been ancestral to modern Pueblo groups (especially the western Pueblos of Hopi and Zuni) and Yuman-speaking groups west of the Hohokam heartland.
- Mogollon Root:
- Jornada Branch: Occupied south-central New Mexico until about AD 1400. Possibly descended in part from the Mimbres to the west and possibly ancestral to some of the Rio Grande Pueblos further north, the Jornada are among the less studied southwestern groups. Based on rock art, they have been proposed as the originators of the kachina cult that later became widespread among the Pueblos.
- Mimbres Branch: One of the most talked-about, but not one of the most-studied, groups of the prehistoric Southwest, the Mimbres are known mainly for their unique pottery featuring naturalistic decoration. This area showed a long developmental sequence under apparent Hohokam influence followed by a brief period of possible (but disputed) Anasazi influence including aggregation into large, nucleated villages, followed by regional abandonment in the twelfth century AD.
- Mountain Branches: There are several branches of the Mogollon proposed to have existed in the mountains of western New Mexico and eastern Arizona until around AD 1400 when this whole region was abandoned. There are many continuities between these settlements (which often took the form of large aggregated pueblos) and modern Hopi and Zuni, but the connection is not totally unambiguous.
- Patayan Root: By far the least studied of any of the southwestern roots, the Patayan occupied the harsh deserts of western Arizona and are generally considered to be ancestral to the modern Yuman-speaking tribes of that area. (Gladwin even called the root “Yuman,” which Colton changed to “Patayan” to avoid relating it quite so obviously to a modern ethnolinguistic group.) Despite the fairly straightforward relationship of at least some Patayan branches to modern Yuman groups, the root as a whole remains poorly understood, and the northern branches in northwestern Arizona (especially the Cohonina and Prescott branches) have seen very little research and their attachment to the root at all has been challenged by some archaeologists.
- Sinagua Root: This group, occupying the area around modern Flagstaff, Arizona, shows clear evidence of influence from both the Kayenta Anasazi to the east and the Hohokam to the south (and possibly the Cohonina to the west as well). It is not at all clear that they form their own root, but if they don’t it’s equally unclear which root they belong to. This may be more a flaw of the classification system than a real mystery about the people. Whether they belong on my list is dubious as well, as they are probably ancestral to certain Hopi “clans.” Still, enough doubt remains about their origins and fate that I thought it was worth mentioning them.
There are other groups as mysterious as these, including some whose very existence as cultural units is controversial (most notably the Salado of southeastern Arizona and adjacent areas). This list should give a general sense, however, of how much diversity there was in the prehistoric southwest and how little we know about the relationships among the various groups and their relationships to modern tribes. In this context, the Anasazi of the Four Corners don’t look particularly mysterious, and I suspect the unusual attention paid to them stems mostly from the picturesque nature of the remains they left behind, which certainly does distinguish them from most (though not all) of the other groups, which left less impressive architecture behind.
Colton, HS (1938). Names of the Four Culture Roots in the Southwest Science, 87 (2268), 551-552 DOI: 10.1126/science.87.2268.551
Gambler's House 
Thanks for this post. I really enjoy reading this blog and I love it that you include your sources.
Please change my mailing address from dwallen@uark.edu to dwallen.uark@gmail.com. Thanks,
*Debre W. AllenTeach For America – 2013 Corps Member*
*UofA ASG Judiciary – Chief JusticeFulbright College Honors – Anthropology * Learner∞Individualization∞Strategic∞Ideation∞Input
Do hope you are considering further posts on these roots/stems. Always interesting and coherent! Thanks!
This is a topic I’ve been hoping that you would tackle (or at least toy with) for awhile. The origins of the modern Pueblo in the ancient Puebloan traditions of the region are fascinating and confusing in equal measure. In no particular order, here are a couple of the problems/puzzles I wonder about.
1. Many modern Pueblo by origin traditions claim ancestral connection to Chaco. The scale and complexity of construction at Chaco, though, suggests a fairly coherent society. Specifically a common language. Organizing a workforce (particularly one that probably did not live in the canyon full-time) would likely require that everyone from architect and designer to mason and stone layer were mutually intelligible. The languages spoken by the Modern pueblo do not have common roots. You have Uto-Aztecan, Shoshonean, various isolates, etc., represented in the different modern Pueblo. To what extent does the diversity of language families evidenced in modern Pueblo society conflict with such society’s origin myths focused on Chaco or other ancient Pueblo traditions? The wholesale changing something as fundamental to a culture as language would seem extraordinary. On a language family basis, are there certain modern Pueblo who are more likely to have literally originated in Chaco for example than others?
Let me give an example of what I mean. You have eastern and western Keres speaking modern Pueblo. Keresan appears to be a language isolate. That is, it is mutually intelligible within those groups for the most part, and no spoken or related to languages spoken outside those groups. The Hopi, on the other hand, speak Uto-Aztecan dialects. Many other peoples both within and outside the Pueblo traditions speak Uto-Aztecan languages. Both the Hopi and Keres have origin traditions featuring Chaco. Is it any more likely that the Keres are “indigenous” and have literal roots in Chaco whereas the Hopi are immigrants to the region who adopted Pueblo cultural elements and technologies in emulation of indigenous Pueblo populations?
2. To what extent has there been DNA evaluation of human remains from ancient tradition burials (Mogollon, Anasazi, etc.) and comparison to DNA characteristics of modern Pueblo populations? Likely a sore subject for many reasons (high potential for inaccurate interpretation of results, messing with ancestral remains of some modern group, fear that conflict between origin traditions on one hand and the biological and genetic data on the other could be used to exclude, etc.), but still there ought to be a “there” there somewhere. Even is all modern Pueblo populations have extremely similar DNA makeup, it tells us something that might be useful in unraveling the origin mysteries. If there are marked differences among different modern Pueblo populations and some are more similar than others to the ancient populations, that potentially tells us something else.
Apologies in advance for any ignorance or insensitivity displayed in my comments. I am not an academic, nor am I current on the most recent southwest anthropological and archaeological literature, but I do read what I can when I have the time, and ask questions like these in hopes of being pointed toward recent scholarship on these topics and not to tick anyone off.
Thanks for the interesting questions, J. R. I’ve been thinking about the same things a lot lately. I’ll probably do a post later, but for now I’ll respond briefly to the specific points you raise.
On language, certainly carrying out projects on the scale of Chaco would have required effective communication, but there could still have been multiple languages involved. Multilingualism was common among the Pueblos historically (and indeed still is today), and it’s quite possible that Chaco was a multilingual society even if there was one dominant language, or maybe some sort of lingua franca, that enabled communication among different groups.
That said, it’s quite true that some of the modern Pueblo linguistic groups are more likely than others to have close historical connections to Chaco. The linguistic diversity of the Pueblos per se doesn’t give a whole lot of information on this, but the different linguistic groups also tend to pattern together in other cultural traits, which implies that they have had somewhat different histories. Oral traditions have been recorded in more detail among some groups than others, but those that have been recorded show some pretty clear differences. It’s interesting that you mention the Hopi and Keres specifically, because those two groups illustrate the range of connections particularly clearly.
The Hopi have been much more forthcoming about their traditions than any other Pueblo group, so we have a pretty good sense of what their clan migration stories say, and in general they don’t show a whole lot of evidence for close connections to Chaco. The clearest connections are instead to areas to the west and south, which also fits with archaeological evidence for migration from those areas to the Hopi Mesas. Of course, each clan does have a different history, and some claim descent from the Rio Grande Pueblos and might have closer connections to Chaco through that ancestry. Which of these clans originally spoke the Hopi language is unclear, however, as is the time and manner of its introduction to the Pueblo culture area. It is quite divergent from other Uto-Aztecan languages, however, so it seems to have branched off pretty early and may well have been spoken among people with “Pueblo” material culture at least as long as any other language.
The Keres, like other eastern Pueblos, have been more secretive than the Hopis, and much less is known of their traditions. What has been recorded, however, refers to an important ancestral community called “White House” that may well refer to Chaco. (Actually there are said to have been several successive White Houses in different locations, which also fits well with the archaeological record of the Chaco/Mesa Verde region.) The Keres also have a more hierarchical social structure than most other Pueblos, which could be a survival of the hierarchy that many archaeologists see evidence for at Chaco. This is in strong contrast to the much more egalitarian and decentralized nature of Hopi society, which has been the model for too many simplistic archaeological interpretations of Southwestern prehistory. Many words in other Pueblo languages referring to important ritual concepts are apparently loanwords from Keres, which implies an important cultural and ceremonial position that might also be related to the wide influence of Chaco. Finally, the Keres are also the closest Pueblos geographically to Chaco even today, and they seem to have particular regard for it. Anecdotally, while I was working at Chaco the only Pueblos from which people came to perform private ceremonies were Acoma and Laguna, both of which are Keres-speaking.
Personally, I think the available evidence points strongly to Keres having been spoken at Chaco and to the modern Keres Pueblos being the most probable direct descendants of the Chacoans. There’s a lot of evidence for cultural diversity in the Chacoan world, though, and I think it’s also pretty likely that other languages were spoken by people who participated in the Chaco Phenomenon, whatever it was, especially at the outliers but maybe also at Chaco itself. There’s a lot of dispute among archaeologists and anthropologists about all of this, of course, but the subject is starting to get more attention in recent years than it had for a long time.
On DNA, there hasn’t been a whole lot of analysis of either ancient or modern Pueblo populations, for obvious reasons, but there has been some. In general there has been a similar range of genetic results between the ancient and modern samples. There seems to be a distinctive “Southwestern” distribution of mitochondrial haplogroups (the type of study that has been done most often) that holds for both ancient (Anasazi, Fremont, and I think some Mogollon too) and modern samples. No clear patterns have emerged yet distinguishing among different Pueblo groups, either ancient or modern, or showing sufficiently close connections to imply direct ancestry, but the sample sizes are all quite small so it’s hard to know how representative they are. In general the picture that has emerged from DNA analysis is consistent with the archaeological and other evidence showing extensive contact among the various Pueblo groups as well as some contact with neighboring groups like the Navajos and Apaches. There haven’t been any big surprises that would force a reevaluation of the other evidence. But again, DNA research has been quite limited so far.
That’s probably enough for now. I’ll probably have a post or two expanding on some of these topics in the near future, with citations, so keep an eye out for that. And again, thanks for the interesting questions.
Thanks for taking the time to respond in such depth. I look forward to your future posts regarding these topics. Your comment does, however, rattle lose another question from me.
I am aware of the presumed hierarchical nature of Chacoan society (I alluded to the likely low full-time population in the Canyon in my earlier post, I think, implying that labor had to be sourced from non-residents of the Canyon). One thing I read within the last couple of years had to do with evidence of cocoa in the Canyon. It was probably on your blog, in fact.
I’ll paraphrase what I recall reading. Initial discoveries of cocoa residue were in ceramics excavated from older parts of Pueblo Bonito (the same parts with macaw remains I think). This is what everyone expected – cocoa was a luxury good, after all, and the red-feathered elite of east side Old Bonito surely were the choholics.
But then cocoa was discovered in ceramics found at some of the more crudely constructed small house ruins around Casa Rinconada . I believe macaw remains have also been found in Rinconada small houses. So if you have presumed luxury goods in the hands of the palace-dwellers and shanty-dwellers both, were they really perceived as luxury goods or rather were they given some other status (i.e., ritual, familial, “clan”, etc. associations).
I sometimes wonder if we don’t find only the evidence that our preconceptions lead us to expect to find. In any case, if you get an chance in a future post, I’d love to read about the various pieces of evidence of social stratification among the Chacoans.
Many thanks. This is a wonderful blog.
Sounds likes this is probably the post you remember; there have since been further developments in the chocolate research that have made things even more confusing. The relationship to hierarchy is, as you say, increasingly unclear.
A post on evidence for hierarchy is a good idea. I’ve mentioned the evidence for hierarchy in passing in many posts, but I don’t think I’ve ever done one trying to tie it all together.
When reading JR’s great questions, a question that occurred to me arose from his comment about the coherence of Chaco society. It is my (not very informed) understanding that Chaco was phased. If it was not a contiguous development, this might indicate different groups participating at different times and in different ways. This, in turn, could explain why various modern Pueblos all claim some connection to Chaco. These connections could have occurred at different times, or during different phases. I’m looking forward to the coming posts on this subject.
That’s a good point, Cris. The exceptionally long occupation of Chaco (by Pueblo standards) did look quite different at different times, and there is a longstanding school of thought in Chacoan studies that associates these differences with different ethnic or linguistic groups. I’m generally skeptical about this idea, but it’s certainly out there. A related idea that I find more likely is that different groups were responsible for the varied material culture present at the same time within the canyon at certain points in its history.
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