McPhee Reservoir and Mesa Verde Escarpment
The second chapter of Crucible of Pueblos discusses the Central Mesa Verde region, which is defined as basically the southwestern corner of Colorado, bounded on the west and south by the modern borders with Utah and New Mexico, on the east by the La Plata River valley, and on the north by the highlands north of the Dolores River. This is the region where Pueblo I period villages have been most extensively studied, primarily by the Dolores Project during the construction of McPhee Reservoir in the 1980s and in subsequent research by archaeologists building on that work. As a result, there’s not a whole lot that’s new in this chapter for someone who has been following the literature on this topic, although it does make a good introduction to the subject for someone who hasn’t. It also discusses some parts of the area, especially the northern and eastern fringes, that have seen much less research than the well-studied Great Sage Plain (including the Dolores sites) and Mesa Verde proper. Overall, the data assembled here is among the most detailed and reliable available to analyze demographic trends and population movements during the Pueblo I period in the northern Southwest.
Among the key factors that the authors discuss are the inherent attractiveness of this region to early farmers because of its good soil and relatively favorable climatic conditions compared to other nearby areas. Indeed, this is the only part of the northern Southwest that has seen extensive dry farming in modern times, and it is still primarily agricultural in use. This makes it unsurprising that early farmers would have concentrated here, as indeed they did, starting in the Basketmaker III period ca. AD 600 and increasing steadily in population through about 725. These early sites generally consisted of scattered hamlets presumably housing individual families. Villages, which in this context means clusters of multiple residential roomblocks in close proximity, began to appear around 750, often in association with great kivas, which had previously been rare in this region for reasons that are unclear.
Villages to both the west and east, discussed in subsequent chapters, date to the same period as these early ones in the Central Mesa Verde villages, and there was a striking variety in community organization and layout across the broader region. The dissolution of the eastern and western villages seems to have contributed to an influx of population into the Central Mesa Verde area in the early ninth century, resulting in the largest and densest concentration of population seen to that date. Village layout also became more standardized, with two main patterns dominating, one associated with great kivas and another including U-shaped roomblocks that were likely ancestral to later “great houses.” These villages, most extensively documented at Dolores, were however short-lived, and by the early tenth century the area was almost completely depopulated, with the former inhabitants apparently moving primarily to the south, into the southern part of the San Juan Basin, where they seem to have played a key role in the developments that led to the rise of Chaco Canyon as a major regional center in the eleventh century.
As I said before, none of this is groundbreaking information at this point, and I’ve discussed some of the implications of the Dolores data before. It is however useful to have a synthesis of this region during this important period to refer to, and this chapter works well for that purpose.
Gambler's House 