Fajada Revisited

Fajada Butte at Sunset

Today is the winter solstice, which makes this the ninth anniversary of this blog. It’s a particularly appropriate date for the paper I’m going to discuss in this post, another chapter from Astronomy and Ceremony in the Prehistoric Southwest: Revisited. It’s by prominent archaeoastronomer J. McKim Malville, and entitled “The Enigmas of Fajada Butte.”

Fajada Butte is plenty enigmatic. Though it’s one of the most prominent landmarks within Chaco Canyon, and the “Sun Dagger” petroglyph on top of it is one of the most famous pieces of astronomically aligned rock art in the world, there has been surprisingly little detailed archaeological study of the butte itself. While there has been considerable more study of other ancient sites in the general area, that work has not really been well-integrated with what is known about the butte, which makes Malville’s integrative work in this paper extremely interesting, tentative though it is.

Much of Malville’s paper discusses cross-cultural examples of sacred mountains and stairways, as support for the idea that Fajada played this role in ancient Chacoan culture. This is plausible enough, though of course speculative, and I don’t have much more to say about it. More interesting to me is his discussion of the archaeology of the butte itself and the nearby Fajada Gap community, which contains three great kivas dating to the tenth century AD along with many small-house residential sites, some possibly dating as early as the eight century but most apparently from the tenth and early eleventh. Several of these small houses were excavated by the Chaco Project in the 1970s and are among the best-documented sites in the whole canyon. The great kivas, two of which are part of great houses (Una Vida and Kin Nahasbas), are largely unexcavated and much less thoroughly understood.

The third, isolated, great kiva (site 29SJ1253) is of particular interest to Malville, as it appears to have a winter solstice alignment with the butte. Malville presents documentation that on the winter solstice as viewed from the great kiva the sun rises over the summit of Fajada Butte. Malville suggests that the great kiva was positioned where it was in order to set up this alignment, which would have been an important ritual event for the people in the Fajada Gap community. Based on ceramic evidence, the great kiva appears to have been built in the tenth century, which makes it one of the earliest in the canyon. It is also one of the largest, with a diameter of 20 meters. Both of these characteristics suggest that it was a particularly important site from a very early point in the development of Chaco into a regional center, especially in the tenth century when the Fajada Gap community may have been particularly important, even more so than the South Gap community which may have become more prominent later.

Evidence for this importance also comes from some of the excavated small houses. 29SJ1360, the closest site to the butte, is known especially for one of its pithouses containing the remains of several people who apparently died accidentally there in the early eleventh century. One of the women was found with a necklace containing an exceptional number of beads, suggesting relatively high status in life. These are the remains, furthermore, that Nancy Akins in her biometric analysis found showed the greatest similarity to the extremely high-status burials in the north rooms of Pueblo Bonito, some of which we now know were quite early themselves (as are the rooms). 29SJ1360 contained the only macaw remains found outside of a great house context at Chaco, along with evidence that macaws may have been raised there, and it also had a cylinder jar, a high-status pottery form, perhaps used for consumption of chocolate, that is also very closely associated with the north part of Pueblo Bonito.

Overall, then, there are many indications that the people living at 29SJ1360 were of relatively high status and had connections, possibly familial, to some of the people associated with the earliest part of Pueblo Bonito. Malville documents a winter solstice alignment here as well: viewed from about 100 meters upslope, around noon on the solstice, the sun briefly disappears behind the butte then reappears. This is a less rigorous alignment than the one from the great house, obviously, but it is still suggestive, and combined with the other evidence reinforces the sense that this is an important site despite its small size.

Another small house in this community, 29SJ629 or the Spadefoot Toad site, had evidence for a workshop for the manufacture of turquoise beads, which Malville suggests indicates connections to trade routes coming up from the south. Turquoise at Chaco actually came from all over the place, but it’s true that the Fajada Gap community seems to have connections to the south, which makes sense given that the gap itself is an entrance to the canyon from that direction. As I’ve mentioned before, earlier sites to the south of Chaco are much less well understood than those to the north, but there are indications that these connections were very important in the early development of the canyon, and Malville’s argument that the spiritual status of Fajada Butte played an important role in this development is quite plausible.

Fajada Butte with Ramp (Lower Right)

So much for the community; what about the butte itself? Malville discusses two main items of interest: the ramp leading up the butte from its base, and the rooms at its top. The ramp, which appears to take advantage of some natural ridgelines but is definitely at least partly artificial especially in its upper parts, has received oddly little attention in the literature despite being an impressive accomplishment that, judging from the pottery found on it, apparently dates to the tenth century just like the nearby community sites. There are fire pits at the base and top of the ramp, which Malville suggests may have been used in winter solstice ceremonies that ritual procession up the ramp. Again, this seems pretty likely to me and may well have played an important role in Chaco’s rise to preeminence regionally.

The rooms at the top, on the other hand, appear to date much later than the ramp and to have had a quite different purpose. The pottery on them is overwhelmingly late, mostly thirteenth-century, and the construction of the rooms is rather slapdash by Chacoan standards. Extensive remains of the debris of daily life indicate that they were occupied residentially. Based on these characteristics, Malville suggests that these rooms were used as refuges by the thirteenth-century residents of canyon floor sites like the Gallo Cliff Dwelling during times of upheaval and violence. He associates them with the widespread pattern of “pinnacle” refuge sites throughout the northern Southwest during this period, which is very different from the residential patterns of the much more peaceful Chacoan heyday in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. He notes that most of the rock art on the butte was clearly accessed from these rooms, which suggests strongly that it dates to this late period rather than earlier.

This mention of rock art brings us to what might be considered the punch line of the paper: a reevaluation of the famous Sun Dagger spiral petroglyph with its alignment to the winter solstice. Malville proposes that the “sun dagger” alignment around noon on the solstice at the site with three rock slabs was discovered serendipitously by the thirteenth-century residents of the upper butte, who pecked the spiral petroglyph to mark it. This is quite different from the interpretation that others have made, that it was a primary focus of ritual during the height of the Chacoan era, but it does explain some odd things about it pretty well. The spiral could not have easily served a direct calendrical role in calculating the date of the solstice, which some other petroglyphs with astronomical alignments elsewhere in the canyon could have done, and its noon alignment is both not particularly precise and not documented to be of particular importance in modern Pueblo religion.

Most importantly, however, this theory explains something that has always puzzled me about the Sun Dagger: it no longer works. That is, the alignment of the slabs no longer results in a dagger going through the center of the spiral. This is generally thought to be the result of the ground underneath shifting as a result of too many interested people going to look at it in the period between its (re)discovery in 1978 and its closure to general visitation in the 1980s. If this really was a key site visited by at least some Chacoan ritual specialists for hundreds of years, after which it remained intact for several hundred more years until its rediscovery, why did it only take a few years for modern visitors to impact it enough to ruin the alignment? One possible answer was that it was so important in antiquity that it was only visited by very few people with particularly important roles, and may not even have been widely known about among the general population. Malville’s theory provides what I find a more plausible answer, that it was discovered late in the prehistoric occupation of Chaco by the small population who occasionally retreated to the top of the butte for refuge, and it may not even have been particularly important to them. There is extensive evidence in modern Pueblo ethnography for individual people marking astronomical alignments and keeping solar calendars, apart from the formal roles of Sun Priests and so forth to do so for the community. (Indeed, there is evidence that some people did this because they didn’t trust the Sun Priest to get it right.) I think it makes sense to interpret the Sun Dagger as part of this tradition. (Malville also notes that recent reevaluation of the supposed secondary alignments to lunar standstills and other astronomical events hasn’t confirmed that they are real and deliberate.)

Malville’s conclusions about the Sun Dagger are controversial in some circles, I’m sure, but for the more interesting part of this paper is the part about the early alignments between the butte and sites in the Fajada Gap community. This provides nice support for the theory I’ve suggested that the rise of Chaco was due in part to it being the place where certain kinds of astronomical knowledge were first developed or introduced within the (northern?) Southwest, which gave the canyon and its residents a kind of spiritual power that they were able to translate into considerable economic and/or political power, as manifested in the monumental architecture, exotic trade goods, and other things that make Chaco such an impressive place even today.

Fajada Butte with Green Vegetation

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Foreshadow: Chaco

Visitor Center and Fajada Butte from Una Vida

Chapter five of Crucible of Pueblos brings us to Chaco Canyon and the surrounding area. This is an area of particular interest for me, and I presume for most readers of this blog as well. While the rise of Chaco in the tenth and early eleventh centuries AD was clearly a development rooted in earlier events, there has long been less information available for the area of Chaco itself than for the areas to the north that have seen extensive relatively recent excavations of sites dating to the Pueblo I period. The Pueblo I occupations of those areas, the subjects of the earlier chapters in this book, are now fairly well understood, although there of course remain a lot of questions and gaps to fill. Further south the picture is still much murkier.

This chapter is written by prominent Chaco specialists Tom Windes and Ruth Van Dyke, and is particularly important and useful because it includes the first published synthesis of the work Windes has been doing for many years to identify sites in and around Chaco dating to the Pueblo I period. This work was written up as part of the series of reports on the work of the Chaco Project, but that report, dated 2006, remains unpublished. I presume that this is a deliberate decision on the part of the National Park Service to keep sensitive information on site locations from becoming public (although I don’t actually know for sure). This chapter, then, appears to serve as the published record of this important work, which significantly alters the conventional interpretation of Pueblo I in Chaco.

The authors define their geographic scope as what they call the “Chaco Basin,” which is essentially equivalent to what is commonly know in the Chaco literature as the “San Juan Basin.” I think this is a useful change to the terminology, since “San Juan Basin” in the hydrographic sense refers to a much larger area than it is used for in this context, and while some use terms like “San Juan Physiographic Basin” to clarify this, it’s more straightforward to redefine the area and use a new term. “Chaco Basin” is a good term to use because the area more or less corresponds to the drainage basin of the Chaco River, including its tributaries, although it extends a bit beyond to the east and south into the Puerco Valley and Red Mesa Valley respectively. However it’s labeled, this region is roughly bounded by the San Juan River to the north, the Chuska Mountains to the west, the Zuni Mountains to the south, and the Jemez Mountains to the east.

Temporally, the authors restrict their attention in this chapter to the period from AD 700 to 925, unlike some other authors in this volume who also address the preceding Basketmaker III period. This is understandable but in some ways unfortunate, since there was an important Basketmaker III occupation of Chaco Canyon that was likely important in setting the context for Pueblo I developments, just as those developments were important in setting the context for Pueblo II. Confusingly, they use the term “Pueblo I” for sites dating from AD 700 to 875 and “late Pueblo I” for sites dating from AD 875 to 925. As we’ll see below, the distinction between these two periods is important in this region, as population and settlement patterns changed significantly at around AD 875. The specific terms they use still seem odd and liable to cause confusion, however.

Part of the reason the authors argue that the Pueblo I occupation in this region is poorly understood is that the ceramic chronology is different from that of the better-known sites to the north, and using the same types to identify time periods for sites in both regions leads to problems. They carefully define the types they use to identify sites to time period, and also use architectural criteria (which are however difficult to apply to unexcavated sites).

Most of this chapter is a summary of what is known about Pueblo I settlement in each subregion of the Chaco Basin, based in large part on hitherto unpublished fieldwork. As a result, I will structure this post according to the same subregions in the same order and summarize the information on each.

Northern and Northeastern Areas

The heading for this section says “Northwestern” rather than “Northeastern,” but it’s clear from the text that this in error. These areas, north and northeast of the Chaco River but still within the drainage of the San Juan, were sparsely populated throughout the Pueblo period. Windes and Van Dyke note that the Largo and Gobernador canyons, to the northeast of Chaco, may have served as conduits for populations migrating south from the Mesa Verde region into the Chaco Basin in late Pueblo I. A recently discovered village at the confluence of Largo and Blanco Washes included a great kiva and at least 22 habitation sites, with tree-ring dates from the great kiva pointing to construction at about AD 828. This area is roughly due south of the Cedar Hill and Ridges Basin areas of the Animas Valley, considered part of the Eastern Mesa Verde region in this volume, which had extensive but short-lived populations early in Pueblo I. The tree-ring dates from the Largo-Blanco village suggest that it may have been associated with the initial migration out of the Ridges Basin/Durango area in the early 800s rather than the larger migration in the late 800s. The Chaco River may have been another conduit for migrants from the north, as Windes and Van Dyke note that surveys have found a major increase in sites dating to the late 800s along the east side of the Chaco, compared to a virtual absense of sites for earlier in Pueblo I. This will be a recurring pattern in the region.

Chaco Canyon Proper and Environs

The initial survey work of the Chaco Project in the 1970s identified a fairly extensive Pueblo I occupation in and around the canyon, and publications from that time posited a gradual increase in population over the course of Pueblo I leading up to the florescence of Chaco as a regional center in Pueblo II. Based on his more recent work with ceramic classification and dating, however, Windes disputes this account. He argues that the number of sites assigned to Pueblo I in those surveys is vastly inflated, and that for most of the Pueblo I period the Chaco area had a small population which increased dramatically, presumably due largely to immigration, in the late Pueblo I period. In this chapter Windes and Van Dyke (though clearly this part is mostly Windes) summarize the results of Windes’s reevaluations of the Pueblo I occupation in and around the canyon, moving from east to west.

Pueblo Pintado Great House at Sunset

At the east end of Chaco Canyon, the Pueblo Pintado area was apparently unoccupied until about AD 875, when it was colonized by two groups who had markedly different material culture and appear to have come to the canyon from different directions. They formed separate site clusters about 3 km apart, north and west of the later great house of Pueblo Pintado.

The first cluster, located just north of the great house, includes one exceptionally large roomblock more than 50 meters long, accompanied by a trash midden that is also unusually large. Based on the temper of early ceramics in this cluster, the people appear to have come from the Mesa Verde region to the north, presumably as part of the mass exodus following the collapse of the Dolores villages in the late ninth century.

The second cluster, 3 km west of the first one, appears to have also been founded around AD 875 but continued in use well into the Pueblo II period. The ceramics are quite unusual in manufacture for the Chaco area and indicate origins to the south in the Mt. Taylor area. Interestingly, the roomblocks in this cluster were aligned along the road connecting the Pueblo Pintado community to the core area of Chaco Canyon, implying that this road may date to the late Pueblo I period.

Moving west, the next major cluster of Pueblo I sites is what is known as the Chaco East community, which also featured a later great house. This area also appears to have been unoccupied until about AD 875, when it was colonized by a group occupying small residential sites, possibly only seasonally. In the 900s the community grew considerably, and initial construction of the great house may date to this period, although it’s impossible to tell for sure without excavation.

Third-Story Walls with Type I Masonry at Una Vida

Fajada Gap, at the eastern end of the main concentration of sites in Chaco during Pueblo II, is one of the areas where early surveys indicated a dense Pueblo I occupation which Windes disputes based on current understandings of the ceramic chronology. In fact, while there was unquestionably a small occupation of the area throughout Pueblo I involving scattered hamlets, this appears to be yet another part of the canyon where there was an influx of people in the late 800s who established the basis for the community that developed subsequently. There are two great houses in this community, Una Vida and Kin Nahasbas, both of which were constructed beginning in the late ninth century.

The largest Pueblo I (pre-875) settlement in the Chaco area is actually outside the canyon, along the South Fork of the Fajada Wash. This community contained 26 sites in an arc along the west side of the South Fork; no contemporary sites are present on the east side. The community is loosely clustered around a complex of four roomblocks which were connected by a short road to a great kiva, and it likely included about 230 people overall. Its main occupation was around AD 800, making it contemporary with the earlier villages in the Mesa Verde region, but the layout of the community is more like later villages such as those at Cedar Hill and in the Largo drainage. (The description of the community in this chapter is very confusing and it’s hard to tell in what respects it’s being described as similar to or different from villages in other regions.)

Many of the potsherds from the South Fork community were tempered with chalcedonic sandstone, which is typical of sites to the south near the modern community of Thoreau. There is also an unusually high abundance of yellow-spotted chert among the chipped stone assemblage, again indicating connections to the south. This type of chert occurs in the Zuni Mountains near Thoreau and is common in sites in that area.

Although this was the largest Pueblo I community in the Chaco area, it appears to have been very short-lived, with little trash accumulation. This suggests that the Pueblo I period was a dynamic time of extensive population movements in this area just as it was in the better-understood areas to the north. The subsequent Pueblo II occupation of the South Fork was much more extensive than the Pueblo I occupation and quite different, with sites dispersed up and down the valley rather than clustered in one area. A similar though somewhat smaller cluster of sites dating to the Pueblo I period was also present in the upper reaches of Kin Klizhin Wash to the west of Fajada Wash.

Old Bonito

Returning to the main canyon, there were a few scattered Pueblo I hamlets between Fajada Gap and South Gap, but the occupation doesn’t seem to have been extensive. Even in South Gap itself, an area of considerable density during Pueblo II and the location of the cluster of great houses known as “Downtown Chaco,” Pueblo I occupation was sparse, with a few scattered sites in the gap. Apparently the only Pueblo I site known in this part of the canyon proper is Pueblo Bonito, where the earliest construction of the great house, known as “Old Bonito,” dates to the mid-800s (or possibly even earlier) and there is also an earlier pit structure excavated by Neil Judd in the 1920s. Judd thought the pit structure reflected an earlier occupation unrelated to the great house, but with improved dating showing that the great house was begun earlier than had been thought the idea of continuity is beginning to seem more likely.

There is no evidence for Pueblo I occupation between South Gap and the mouth of the canyon, possibly on account of flooding creating an intermittent lake on the canyon floor. At the mouth of the canyon itself, the Peñasco Blanco great house, begun in the late 800s, sits atop West Mesa, and right next to it is the important Basketmaker III village of 29SJ423. The period between these two important occupations, however, appears to have involved only minor settlement, although there are a few scattered Pueblo I sites. Just west of the mouth of the canyon, however, is Padilla Wash, which had a substantial Pueblo I occupation (possibly even more extensive than current records indicate, since many Pueblo I sites may have been misclassified as Basketmaker III in earlier surveys), another example of the main centers of Pueblo I population in the Chaco core being outside the canyon proper. Windes and Van Dyke note that Peñasco Blanco may have been an important focal point for migration into the canyon from the west and north during late Pueblo I, and that it was likely more important than Pueblo Bonito at this time.

The Chaco River

As noted above, the Chaco River (formed by the confluence of the Chaco and Escavada Washes at the mouth of Chaco Canyon) was likely one of the main conduits for migrants from the north, but it was much more than that. Pueblo I communities existed all along the Chaco and its tributaries, and some of these communities included early great houses that would have been influential in the development of the great house phenomenon that found its greatest expression in Chaco Canyon in the eleventh century. Windes and Van Dyke discuss a number of these communities, based on field research by Windes to reevaluate areas identified by early surveys as Chacoan outlier communities and to look for evidence of Pueblo I settlement and early great houses.

Just west of Padilla Wash is Kin Klizhin Wash, which was the site of extensive Pueblo II occupation but only has a few Pueblo I sites aside from the cluster at its upper reaches mentioned above. There is a late Pueblo I great kiva known as Casa Patricio in the upper part of the drainage, accompanied by a number of late Pueblo I residential sites; it’s not clear from the writeup here what relationship this site cluster has to the earlier Pueblo I cluster.

Just downstream from the mouth of Kin Klizhin Wash is the very important early site known as Casa del Rio. While this was initially labeled a large Chacoan great house, reexamination indicated that it is actually a composite of two building stages, both relatively early, with much of the bulk of the structure provided by a Pueblo I roomblock measuring 112 meters in length, with a later masonry great house built over the central portion beginning in the late ninth century. The early roomblock is by far the largest in the Chaco Canyon region, more than twice the length of the earliest construction stage at Pueblo Bonito, and it is estimated to have housed about 16 households or 88 residents. Windes and Van Dyke describe it as “reminiscent of those north of the San Juan River,” although again it is not clear what specific characteristics this refers to. A large number of food preparation tools were found in the area, although other residential sites are scarce. This was clearly an important site during the Pueblo I period which may have played a key role in attracting migrants to the area.

Looking North from Kin Bineola

One of the most important tributary drainages of the Chaco River is Kim-me-ni-oli Wash, which extends from the Dutton Plateau north past the current site of Crownpoint. The drainage of this wash includes several great houses and extensive Pueblo settlement, and it likely served as an important conduit between Chaco Canyon and areas to the south and southwest. The extent of Pueblo I occupation, however, seems to be unclear. Windes and Van Dyke mention large circular structures near the Bee Burrow great house that resemble Pueblo I great kivas, as well as small Pueblo I roomblocks in the same general area. The area around the Kin Ya’a great house at the upper end of the drainage appears to not have any Pueblo I occupation based on existing survey data, although there is a large Basketmaker III-Pueblo I site just west of Crownpoint and one arc-shaped roomblock near Kin Ya’a recorded as dating to Basketmaker III looks a lot more like a Pueblo I site. At Kin Bineola, site of a major great house dating to the early 900s or possibly slightlier earlier, there is a very small Pueblo I occupation that increased substantially after AD 875 as in many other parts of the region.

At the mouth of the Kim-me-ni-oli Wash near the current Lake Valley Mission there is a small cluster of Pueblo I sites “architecturally identical” to the South Fork cluster, with very sparse refuse indicating a very short occupation. A later occupation in the late 800s was more substantial, with three masonry roomblocks “sometimes portrayed as small great houses” and “enormous amounts of refuse” that Windes and Van Dyke describe as “excessive for normal domestic activities.”

Further down the Chaco drainage, the Willow Canyon area is unusual in showing evidence of both middle and late Pueblo I occupation in close proximity. The middle Pueblo I community consists of eight sites that show the typical “scattered hamlet” settlement pattern, while the eleven late Pueblo I sites are tightly clustered and associated with a large amount of refuse, leading the authors to interpret this as “a large group” that immigrated into the valley together. These sites show unusual amounts of Type I masonry, associated with later great house construction, although the authors declare that there is no “obvious” great house. It’s not clear what definition of “great house” they are using here, as one site in particular (known as the “House of the Weaver”) shows not only Type I masonry but a prominent mesa-top location with a broad view of the surrounding area, another common characteristic of later great houses. Another community south of Willow Canyon near the later Whirlwind great house also shows a similar pattern but has less information available. The Great Bend area, where the Chaco River turns from flowing west to flowing north toward the San Juan, also shows this pattern. The possible use of the river as a corridor for populations migrating from the north after the collapse of the Dolores villages makes this potentially an important area for understanding regional prehistory.

Chuska Mountains and Chaco River from Peñasco Blanco

The eastern flanks of the Chuska Mountains, which parallel the north-flowing segment of the Chaco River and form the western side of its drainage basin, are also important for understanding Pueblo I settlement but are poorly known. The general pattern seems to be the same as elsewhere in the Chaco Basin, with a scattered occupation in early and middle Pueblo I that sees a huge increase, presumably from immigration, in late Pueblo I after AD 875, but due to depositional factors it’s likely that the earlier Pueblo I occupation has been underestimated. A few sites dating to this period have been excavated through salvage projects. Late Pueblo I sites are more common and seem to provide more evidence for the use of the river as a corridor from the north. The largest concentrations are in the Skunk Springs and Newcomb areas, both of which would become major Chacoan outlier communities in Pueblo II. At Newcomb, at least, there seems to be some evidence of a preexisting Pueblo I occupation. It’s not clear if there is any similar evidence at Skunk Springs, where the earliest stage of construction on the great house seems to date to late Pueblo I. Given the importance of Chuskan imports to Chaco at its peak, more research on the background of these communities would be helpful in understanding Chaco’s origins.

The Red Mesa Valley

The Red Mesa Valley is the area between the Dutton Plateau on the north and the Zuni Mountains on the south. It is topographically rather than hydrologically defined, and straddles the Continental Divide, with the western part drained by the Rio Puerco of the West and the eastern part drained by the Rio San Jose. This means it falls outside of the “Chaco Basin” as hydrologically defined, of course, but its culture history means that it makes sense to include it with areas to the north for purposes of this chapter. This valley was presumably an important travel corridor prehistorically, as it certainly was historically with the railroad and Route 66 running through it and remains today with Interstate 40.

Casamero Pueblo

This area has been the main focus of Van Dyke’s research, and it is clear that she rather than Windes is responsible for most of this section of the chapter. The same issues of ceramic identification as in the Chaco Basin make understanding the Pueblo I sequence here difficult, but the same basic pattern appears to apply as further north. Early in Pueblo I there was a small, scattered occupation, exemplified by a site on the mesa above the later Chacoan outlier community of Casamero. This site consists of at least two arcs of surface rooms fronted by five to seven pit structures, and resembles White Mound Village further west along the Puerco, which was excavated by Harold Gladwin in the 1940s and dates to the late 700s and early 800s. Another site like this from the same period was excavated near Manuelito during the construction of I-40 in 1961.

This sparse population expanded immensely in late Pueblo, when many of the later Chacoan great house communities were founded. Some of the earliest great house construction in the region took place in these communities, which Van Dyke has elsewhere used to argue that great houses were not initially associated particularly with Chaco Canyon specifically. The huge increase in population at this time seems to indicate immigration, but this chapter doesn’t address the issue of where the people in this area might have come from. Given the similarities to the communities to the north in the Chaco Basin, that seems like an obvious point of origin (with earlier origins probably further north in the Mesa Verde region), but developments to the south are poorly understood and can’t be ruled out as important factors. As noted above, some of the immigrants to Chaco Canyon and its surrounding area appear to have come from the south rather than the north, and southern origins would presumably be even more likely for the Red Mesa Valley populations given their location. The fact that the influx here appears to happen at the same time as the northern one is an interesting complication, however.

The Eastern Chaco Basin

This area, stretching from the area south of Chaco Canyon across the Continental Divide to the Rio Puerco Valley of the East, shows very little evidence for Pueblo I occupation. Today this is a very sparsely populated area used mainly for cattle ranching, primarily on private land, so there has been little archaeological survey, but what survey has been done shows very little prehistoric occupation at all. Only two exceptions are noted by Windes and Van Dyke. One is a recently discovered Pueblo I community southeast of Mt. Taylor, about which little is known. Detailed information from the survey that identified this community is apparently not going to be released. It’s not clear from the brief writeup if this has anything to do with the fact that the survey was for proposed uranium mining.

The other exception is the Puerco Valley of the East, around the later Chacoan outlier of Guadalupe. Here, survey by Eastern New Mexico University in the 1970s identified a “modest but scattered” Pueblo I occupation, which increased substantially in late Pueblo I and Pueblo II, culminating in the Guadalupe community with its apparently close connections to Chaco Canyon. Windes and Van Dyke note that the Puerco may have served as an important conduit connecting the Chaco Basin to areas further east, although it remains poorly understood. The eastern associations of Chaco are poorly understood in general, and this appears to be the case as much for Pueblo I as for Pueblo II.

Storm in the Distance through Fajada Gap

After going through the detailed geographical summaries, the authors briefly address some region-wide issues important for understanding the patterns they describe. They acknowledge environmental factors as probably important in understanding population shifts, pointing in particular to an apparent “spike” in rainfall in the immediate area of Chaco Canyon between AD 885 and 905 that might have served as a “pull” factor bringing people in from other areas. Conditions in the Chuskas and Red Mesa Valley appear to have been generally unfavorable during this period in which they, too, saw significant immigration, so clearly rainfall totals weren’t the only factor.

They also discuss violence, noting that there is very little evidence for it in this region, particularly in the central Chaco Basin, during Pueblo I, especially compared to areas further north where burned structures are common. There are more burned structures in the Chuskas and near Mount Taylor, on the edges of this region, however, and it is possible that the lack of them in the central basin relates more to the lack of construction wood than to any lack of violence. The authors suggest that, given the known evidence for strife and community abandonment in the Mesa Verde region, one attraction of the Chaco Basin might have been its relative emptiness, which may have drawn people into this much harsher and less fertile region. There’s a general tendency for settlement to cluster around drainages and particularly at  confluences of drainages, likely because these locations offered the best agricultural potential in a very dry area even by Southwestern standards. Regardless of what it was that initially drew people into this area, it’s becoming increasingly clear that this influx of population was a key factor in the later rise of Chaco.

Peñasco Blanco Framing Huerfano Mesa

The authors also discuss visibility and sacred geography, which has been a key concern of Van Dyke’s in her previous work. Many of the prominent community buildings in late Pueblo I sites in this region, whether or not they can be considered “great houses,” are situated in locations where important regional landmarks can easily be seen. This indicates that the concern with visibility associated with later Chacoan great houses likely had its roots in this period.

Finally, the authors summarize community settlement patterns in the region. One interesting pattern they note is that in late Pueblo I communities great houses and great kivas don’t tend to occur together, with great houses being more common in the Chaco Basin and great kivas in the Red Mesa Valley. This suggests that two different community integration systems may have been in place in the region during this time. The great house pattern at more northerly sites is interesting in the context of the “proto-great-houses” apparently present at some Dolores area communities further north, especially McPhee Village, and it’s quite likely that there is a direct connection between the two. Great kivas are also common further south, and while they were present at some Mesa Verde Pueblo I sites they weren’t very common. This suggests that at least some of the Red Mesa Valley late Pueblo I communities were in fact settled by immigrants from the south rather than from the Chaco Basin. Some of the earliest communities showing both features were in Chaco Canyon, and it may well be that one factor in the rise of Chaco was the ability of emerging elites there to combine the two traditions into a new social and ideological system, one that would spread far and wide, remaking the course of Southwestern prehistory.

Great Kivas A and Q, Pueblo Bonito

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Back to the Square Rooms

Peñasco Blanco

Returning to my theory that the large square rooms with hearths and other residential features found at some great houses in Chaco and elsewhere were in some sense replacements for earlier kivas, I think the best evidence for this at Chaco itself (as opposed to at outlying great houses like Salmon) comes not from Pueblo Bonito, which is just too complicated a palimpsest to make something like this easy to see, but from the other early great houses: Una Vida and Peñasco Blanco.  These at least seem to have simpler layouts than Bonito, though the extent to which this is just an effect of their being (mostly) unexcavated is unclear.  Nevertheless, at least some parts of these two great houses do seem to show basically the pattern that I’m proposing for the development of residential room suites at great houses.

To recap the idea: The very earliest great houses, those built in the AD 800s, seem to show a pattern of suites similar to that seen at small houses or unit pueblos, with each suite consisting of one rectangular room backed by two smaller rooms.  In front of each roomblock there are subterranean kivas, usually with slightly fewer than would be expected if each suite had its own kiva.  This suggests to me that the suites housed individual nuclear families, but that they were grouped into larger units, perhaps extended families, which shared kivas.  Whatever rituals these residential units would have conducted would probably have been in the kivas, but for the most part these were still residential structures, similar to the pithouses occupied in earlier centuries but with some of their functions transferred to the rectangular front rooms of the roomblocks.  The smaller rooms in the back would have been used for storage.  A typical great house would contain a few of these suites, with a kiva for every two or three.  It’s unclear what the relationships among different kiva-units within a great house would have been, but they could have either been separate extended families within the same real or fictitious “clan” or “lineage,” or they could have been separate lineages that were politically or ceremonially allied.  Importantly, all of these buildings are still residential at this point, although the residents may well host rituals or feasts open to the whole community either to solidify their political authority or because generosity is expected of them in exchange for community acceptance of their greater wealth or political/religious authority.  The main difference between great houses and small houses is just that great houses are bigger, with multiple stories in some instances and generally bigger rooms, as well as more extensive use of masonry rather than adobe or jacal construction.

Room 330, Pueblo Bonito

Then, at some point in the 900s, a change takes place in some (all?) great houses.  Use of the kivas is discontinued, and instead the activities that had been conducted in them are transferred to square surface rooms added onto the existing roomblocks.  This definitely seems to be what happens at Una Vida and Peñasco Blanco, although the extent to which there were earlier kivas is unclear given the lack of excavation.  In great houses newly begun during this time (it’s unclear how many of these there were in Chaco itself, but Kin Nahasbas may be an example), room suites were built without any kivas but with large, square rooms in front and smaller rectangular rooms varying in number behind them for storage.  This pattern continues well into the 1000s, at least at some great houses, and it’s associated with the very formal, symmetrical, rectilinear layout seen at sites such as Hungo Pavi, Chetro Ketl, and Pueblo Alto.  Some outlying great houses, such as Kin Bineola and (especially) Salmon, show this pattern as well.  Salmon seems to show that new great houses with (almost?) exclusively square rather than round living rooms were still being built as late as 1090, and if the early construction at Aztec is in the same pattern, which seems to be a matter of some dispute, it would still be going on well into the early 1100s.  This is probably also what we see at Pueblo Bonito too, with the possible addition of square rooms like 329 and 330 to the older suites at the west end of Old Bonito and the later addition of linear suites to the south of these rooms at the southwest corner of the site.

At some point in the late 1000s, however, a different type of room suite begins to arise at some Chaco great houses.  This is still a linear suite, sort of, but it consists of a round kiva built aboveground into a first-story square room, with one or two rows of two- or three-story rectangular rooms extending back from it.  These are the “blocked-in” kivas that are probably the most famous innovation of Chacoan architecture.  I see them as still residential spaces, in combination with the rooms behind them.  Their appearance at most outlying great houses indicates residential use of those sites, perhaps by local elites.  It’s not clear what the relationship is between these plaza-facing blocked-in kiva suites and the “elevated” kivas surrounded by rectangular rooms that start to appear at the centers of the rectilinear great houses with the square living rooms around this same time.  If those rooms are still residential, they’re pretty damn fancy residences.  They’re also quite unlike the other residential rooms at these sites, which are still square.  The “Tower Kiva” at Salmon is one example, as are the corresponding kiva at Hungo Pavi and the numerous examples at Chetro Ketl.  The central placement and unusual elaboration of these structures has led many to assume that they were ceremonial rather than residential in function, but I’m not so sure.  These sites do generally have great kivas, which pretty much everyone agrees were community-scale ceremonial/integrative structures, and they look quite different from elevated kivas (although it’s not clear to what extent the unique features of great kivas are due to structural requirements following from their size).

Kivas in the Southeast Part of Pueblo Bonito

In any case, the best examples of the plaza-facing blocked-in kiva suites are at Pueblo Bonito in the southeast and southwest wings.  These appear to have been built over earlier construction, so it’s not totally clear what was going on with these multiple, quite rapid changes in site layout during this period.  Again, though, they’re also obvious at Una Vida and Peñasco Blanco, where some (but not all!) of the earlier square living rooms are replaced by blocked-in kivas.  This also appears to have happened in the west wing of Chetro Ketl, but it’s unexcavated so it’s hard to say for sure.  There definitely are two blocked-in kivas there, though, and they appear to have rooms behind them like at Pueblo Bonito.

Then, at some point toward the very end of the eleventh century or very early in the twelfth, a totally new type of room suite begins to appear at Chaco great houses.  This is the famous “McElmo unit,” with a central blocked-in kiva surrounded on three or four sides by rectangular rooms, most of them significantly higher (three or four stories), creating a sort of “patio” over the kiva.  These rarely have ground-floor exterior walls, and they are remarkably uniform and modular in form.  The most famous of these structures are the freestanding ones, including New Alto, Casa Chiquita, and Kin Kletso (which comprises two adjacent units), but clearly analogous forms can be seen within certain great houses, including the north and south wings of Pueblo del Arroyo and the Kiva B complex at Pueblo Bonito.  Similar units that are just outside of existing great houses can be seen at Chetro Ketl and Peñasco Blanco.  The masonry of most of these is very different from that used at earlier great houses, being composed of blocky yellow sandstone rather than fine, hard, dark sandstone, and this has been used to argue that they represent influence from the north.  The masonry may indeed reflect northern influence (though in a different way from what the original proposers of this idea thought), but the form predates the shift in masonry and probably developed locally in Chaco.

Kiva E, Kin Kletso

There has been a lot of debate over the function of McElmo units.  Some see them as warehouses, while others see them as ritual (or possibly astronomical) special-use sites.  I’m increasingly thinking that all this speculation is based on an overemphasis on their differences from earlier great houses, and that they were probably residential and represent the final version of the Chacoan room suite.  More on this later.

McElmo units may represent the final development of Chacoan architecture in terms of form, but the great houses continued to be occupied for quite some time after the construction of these roomblocks in the early 1100s.  What we see at this point is an increased emphasis on the blocked-in kiva concept, with new kivas, often of “non-Chacoan” form, being built into earlier square or rectangular rooms.  Some call these “intra-mural” rather than “blocked-in” kivas, to emphasize that they were built into earlier rooms rather than having square rooms built around them, and I think this is a helpful distinction.  These really proliferate at Pueblo Bonito late in the occupation period, and this also happens at Aztec and Salmon during their “post-Chacoan” (also called “secondary” or “Mesa Verdean”) occupations.  At the same time, many great houses also see the construction of new subterranean kivas in the plazas, often with accompanying small blocks of square rooms.  These aren’t usually datable directly, but they appear to be very late.   Pueblo Bonito has particularly many of these, and there are a few in the southeast corner of Chetro Ketl too.  These appear to represent the construction of typical small-house or unit-pueblo style residential units within earlier great houses, and they may or may not represent an occupational discontinuity of some sort.

So basically, what we see is a sequence of underground kiva to above-ground square room to above-ground kiva.  There are plenty of variations and complications, but that’s the general sequence.  The later use of intra-mural kivas, especially at Pueblo Bonito, has tended to obscure the middle stage here, but it really seems to represent something meaningful at least as a chronological marker in Chacoan architecture.  Does it mean anything else culturally?  That part I’m still looking into, but it may.

Fajada Butte from Una Vida

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What Makes a “Kiva” “Great”?

Reconstructed Great Kiva, Aztec Ruins National Monument

Although the idea that the small round rooms that area so common at Chacoan sites are ceremonial “kivas” has been increasingly challenged recently, it is still widely accepted that the large, formal, round structures known as “great kivas” were in fact community-wide ceremonial or integrative facilities.  Even Steve Lekson agrees, and he continues to use the term “kiva” in referring to these structures even as he calls the small “kivas” “round rooms” instead.  (He also uses the term “kiva” in referring to “tower kivas,” yet another form of round structure with proposed ceremonial associations.)  Ruth Van Dyke‘s chapter in The Architecture of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico is a good summary of current knowledge about Chacoan great kivas.  The great kiva is an architectural form that predates Chaco, and it may or may not have outlasted it.  The Chacoan form is distinctive, however, and found even in areas without a long history of pre-Chacoan great kivas.  It is highly standardized in both size and features, and is one of the surest indications of Chacoan influence wherever it is found.

Floor Features of Kiva Q, Pueblo Bonito

The following features are always found at Chacoan great kivas, although their specific realization can vary a bit:

1. Four post holes, arranged in a square, to support the beams or columns that hold up the roof.  The holes may be either round or square.  Generally the columns themselves would be huge wooden beams, stubs of which have sometimes been found in the post holes during excavation.  Sometimes, such as in the great kiva at Aztec Ruins, square masonry columns, possibly with small poles in them, would be used instead.  It’s apparently not totally clear if the use of square rather than round post holes necessarily indicates the use of pillars rather than beams, since the beams would typically be held in place by shale and this could be done in either a square or a circular space.  When beams were used, they were supported at the bottom by several stacked stone disks, presumably to distribute the weight.  Offerings of turquoise and other valuables were often found in the beam holes, apparently placed during construction.
2. Around the circumference of the kiva is a bench, sometimes doubled.  These benches were often refaced with new masonry, sometimes in connection with more general renovation of the kiva features and sometimes not.
3. There is typically a series of wall niches around the circumference of the chamber, above the bench.  These vary in dimensions and number, but there are usually about 30 of them, especially in later great kivas.  Sometimes there is more than one series of niches at different levels, as at Casa Rinconada.  The purpose of the niches is unclear; some of them had offerings sealed into them, but these may have been construction offerings rather than indicating anything about post-construction use.
4. Entrance is from a staircase leading down from an antechamber.  There would probably have been a smokehole in the roof as well, but it is unclear whether there would have been a ladder providing entrance through the roof as was the case in smaller round rooms.  An intact great kiva roof has never been found, which is unsurprising since the roofs would have been enormously heavy and very likely to cave in once the structure was no longer maintained.  The antechamber is on the north side in most cases.  Kiva Q at Pueblo Bonito has an apparent staircase and antechamber on the south side instead, but Van Dyke suggests that this may have been an error of reconstruction.  She doesn’t go into any more detail about this, however, and it’s unclear what the implications are if the room on the south side of Kiva Q is not an antechamber.  Casa Rinconada has antechambers with staircases on both the north and south sides.
5. Along the central north-south axis, slightly offset to the south from the center point, is a firebox.  This is usually a masonry cube with a circular or oval firepit in it.
6. Just south of the firepit there is a deflector.  This is a common feature in small kivas, which usually have a ventilation shaft on the south side, but since great kivas don’t have ventilation shafts and usually have their entrances on the north side it is unclear how useful this deflector would have been in practice.  Assuming there was a smokehole, a great kiva was big enough that it’s unlikely ventilation would have been a major concern.
7. Attached to the two southern postholes on the north side, and sometimes running all the way to the northern postholes, there are two rectangular masonry “vaults.”  They are usually but not always subterranean.  The function of these is unclear.  Some have claimed that they are “foot-drums,” which would have had boards on top of them and people dancing on them, but not everyone accepts this interpretation and I don’t find it very convincing.  Small kivas sometimes have a single subfloor vault on one side of the firepit, but it is unclear if there is any connection between that type of feature and the much more formal vaults of great kivas.

These are the basic features that are repeated again and again at Chacoan great kivas.  Relatively few have been excavated, but all of those that have show these same features with minor variations.  Van Dyke provides a comprehensive list of the known great kivas at Chaco.  There are 21 of them, of which 11 have been excavated.  Ten of these are associated with the great houses Pueblo Bonito (4 great kivas), Chetro Ketl (3), and Kin Nahasbas (3).  (Note that Van Dyke is counting remodeled versions of earlier great kivas separately here.)  The only “isolated” great kiva to be excavated is Casa Rinconada.  It is also the largest excavated great kiva in the canyon at 19.5 meters in diameter, although it is not the largest excavated great kiva (the one at Village of the Great Kivas, a Chacoan outlier on the Zuni Reservation, is 23.7 meters in diameter), nor is it the largest great kiva in the canyon (the unexcavated northwest great kiva at Peñasco Blanco is 23 meters in diameter).

Casa Rinconada, Looking North

Van Dyke explicitly cautions her readers to be careful about the possibility of overemphasizing the importance of Rinconada just because it is so well known, and this is an important warning.  It does appear that Rinconada is unusual among all known great kivas in several ways, including the two antechambers and the “secret tunnel” leading from a back room of the north antechamber to a subsurface round enclosure around the northwest posthole.  It is also positioned in a very significant location, across from Pueblo Bonito, and there may be astronomical alignments encoded into it.  However, it is important to note that like the other great kivas at Chaco that are visible today, Rinconada has been substantially reconstructed.  In general Chaco has had a much lighter touch with reconstruction than many other parks, but great kivas, which are typically found in a substantially reduced state with large v-shaped breaches in the upper walls, are an exception.  Kivas A and Q at Pueblo Bonito as well as Casa Rinconada have all been built up to what their excavators considered a reasonable approximation of their original condition.  The great kiva at Aztec, of course, has been completely reconstructed to give an impression of what it might have looked like, and while there was apparently once talk of doing something similar at Casa Rinconada nothing ultimately came of it.

In addition to the excavated great kivas, there are ten unexcavated ones at Chaco.  It is hard to tell much about these, since they are basically just big recessed circles in the ground, but they are generally at least in the same size range as the excavated examples and can probably be assumed to be similar.  There may well be additional unknown ones, either associated with great houses or isolated.  It is particularly likely that early great kivas would not be apparent on the ground, since they are generally smaller than later ones and the excavated examples (or possible examples) all come from within early great houses where they are often overlain by later construction.

Northwest Great Kiva at Peñasco Blanco

The known unexcavated great kivas associated with great houses include two at Una Vida, one at Hungo Pavi, and four at Peñasco Blanco.  There are also three “isolated” great kivas, all of them at the east end of the canyon: one in Fajada gap, one on the south side of the canyon across from Wijiji, and one in a side canyon at the foot of Chacra Mesa below the Basketmaker III village known as Shabik’eshchee.  As noted above, the northwest one at Peñasco Blanco is huge, probably the largest at Chaco.  The one in Fajada gap appears to be about 20 meters in diameter, which puts it in the same size range as Casa Rinconada, although the difficulty of measuring diameter precisely with unexcavated great kivas makes it impossible to say if it is actually bigger than Rinconada or not.  One interesting thing about these isolated great kivas is that they are all on the south side of the canyon, as is Casa Rinconada.  This contrasts with the tendency of great houses to be on the north side and provides some support for the idea that the great kiva is conceptually separate from the great house and has its own history as a form.  It’s hard to say how to interpret this in the context of the postulated attempt by great-house elites to incorporate great kivas into their great houses as a way to legitimize their authority, which Van Dyke proposes as an explanation for why most great kiva construction at great houses didn’t take place until the mid-1000s.

And, indeed, early great house construction does seem to be notably bereft of great kivas.  Or does it?  Tenth-century “great kivas” are in fact postulated at Pueblo Bonito, Una Vida, and Kin Nahasbas, and Van Dyke includes them on her list, but it is unclear whether they really “count” as great kivas.  They are smaller than the later versions, which may just be because they are older.  They are also poorly documented, however; the ones at Pueblo Bonito and Kin Nahasbas have been excavated, but records about them are scarce and scanty.  The one at Pueblo Bonito is about 10 meters in diameter, which Van Dyke considers “within the range known for domestic pitstructures,” and furthermore it lacks postholes for roof support beams but does appear to have pilasters on its bench, which implies a roofing system like that of small kivas.  Since the roofing system is one of the most consistent features of classic Chacoan great kivas, this is a major strike against great kiva status for this one.  However, it’s possible that the specialized roofing system for later great kivas was an innovation to handle the large size of the ones built from the mid-1000s on, and that earlier structures with “regular” kiva roofs may have had “great kiva” functions in the 900s.  (This reminds me that I should do a post on small-kiva roofing, which is an interesting and surprisingly contentious issue.)

Kin Nahasbas from Una Vida

Evidence that the specialized roofing system for great kivas was already in place in the 900s comes from the early “great kiva” at Kin Nahasbas, which was more thoroughly excavated than the one at Pueblo Bonito.  It underlies the two later great kivas, which had classic great kiva features.  Its own features were largely obscured by the later construction, but it does appear to have postholes.  It couldn’t be dated directly, but the excavators concluded that it was probably associated with the tenth-century greathouse behind it.  This implies that there was at least one great kiva this early, but that the one at Pueblo Bonito was not one.  Interestingly, the diameter of this great kiva was only 7 meters, making it smaller than the Pueblo Bonito example and suggesting that size isn’t everything when it comes to great kivas.

The early great kiva at Una Vida is very poorly known and may not exist at all.  There is certainly another, later great kiva at the site.  Van Dyke refers to William Gillespie’s account of Una Vida’s architecture in Steve Lekson’s Great Pueblo Architecture of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico as the source for the idea that there is a great kiva associated with the early-tenth-century construction there, but Gillespie is very vague about the basis for his speculation that such a great kiva existed, and says only that “surface evidence is inconclusive.”  Van Dyke lists the diameter of this postulated great kiva as 17 meters, which is remarkably large for such an early structure and only slightly smaller than the later great kiva, which is much more obvious and has a diameter of about 18 meters.  Una Vida is a very confusing and poorly understood site, so the lack of clarity regarding its great kiva(s) is not really surprising.

The only other early great house, in addition to these three, at Chaco is Peñasco Blanco.  It apparently has four great kivas, none of which has been dated.  It’s quite possible that one or both of the two great kivas in the plaza dates to the 900s, but neither has been excavated.  It is also possible that there are additional early great kivas either underlying the later ones or elsewhere in the site.  The number of apparent great kivas is one of the many reasons I think this site is likely much more important to Chaco than is usually appreciated.  It is both one of the earliest sites at Chaco and one of the largest, and it may have served as an important connection to the communities downstream on the Chaco River, where many of the early great houses were, as well as with the Chuska Mountains beyond.  Van Dyke has little to say about it in this chapter, which is understandable since the great kivas are unexcavated (as is the rest of the site).

Snow at Kiva A, Pueblo Bonito

The upshot of all this is that there probably was at least one great kiva built at Chaco in the 900s, and there may have been more, but it does seem to be true that great kiva construction increased dramatically after around 1030.  This is the same time that a lot of other changes were happening in the canyon, including massive construction projects of various sorts at several great houses, and it is probably the time when Chaco first became the regional center for the San Juan Basin (though it had likely been an important center for a long time).   Van Dyke argues that part of this was the appropriation of the great kiva form, which in previous times had been particularly common in communities to the south, by emergent local elites attempting to legitimate their increasingly hierarchical authority and control over periodic regional gatherings in the canyon that were beginning to draw pilgrims from throughout the Basin (and perhaps beyond).  In another article she argues that this process was part of a “tipping point” or “qualitative social transformation” that changed a predominantly egalitarian society into a more hierarchical one.  In this context, the use of great kivas may have been an attempt to establish links with the past by incorporating an old, traditional architectural form into the new and potentially threatening form represented by the great house.  I’m not sure I buy this entire story, but I think at least parts of it are likely true and it’s certainly thought-provoking.

Great Kiva at Lowry Pueblo, Colorado

Wherever they came from and whenever they became part of the Chacoan architectural repertoire, by the height of the Chacoan era great kivas were among the most standardized parts of the highly standardized Chacoan “system,” whatever it was.  There are plenty of puzzles remaining about them, as is true with most everything associated with Chaco, but regardless of whether we are ever able to answer all the questions they pose they are still among the most impressive achievements of this very impressive society.

Van Dyke, R. (2008). Temporal Scale and Qualitative Social Transformation at Chaco Canyon Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 18 (01) DOI: 10.1017/S0959774308000073

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