Chaco Is Closed

“Area Closed” Sign at Fajada Butte View

This is just a quick post to share some information likely to be of interest to my readers. There has been a lot of confusion about exactly how the National Park Service is responding to the government shutdown, which park units are accessible and not, and so forth. I’ve been pretty confused myself, and unfortunately this led me to give incorrect advice to a reader who asked if Chaco Canyon is accessible during the shutdown. I said my understanding, based on media reports, was that the parks are open but no visitor services are being provided. Since Chaco is mostly a self-guided experience, I took that to mean that the park would be accessible but the visitor center would be closed and no tours would be provided.

Well, the reader took my advice and headed out to Chaco, only to find that the gate was closed and the park was definitely neither open nor accessible. He let me know, and was nice about it, but I felt bad about leading him astray so I figured I would pass that information on here. Chaco is closed for the shutdown. Anyone planning to visit in the next few weeks should keep that in mind and monitor the news for information on when the government and the park will reopen.

If you do end up having to redirect a trip to Chaco as a result of the shutdown, Salmon Ruins in Bloomfield, New Mexico is one of the largest and most accessible Chacoan outlier sites, and since it’s managed by San Juan County rather than the federal government it is unaffected by the shutdown. Another option a little further afield is Edge of the Cedars in Blanding, Utah, which is a Utah state park and similarly unaffected. Most other Chacoan outlier sites that are open to the public are managed by federal agencies and will likely be inaccessible.

Edge of the Cedars Great House, Utah

In previous shutdowns parks have been closed entirely, which is the simplest and, from a resource-protection standpoint, most reasonable approach. This time it seems the NPS is taking a different and more complicated approach for reasons that are unclear. To try to get a better understanding of what exactly the NPS is doing with parks in this shutdown, particularly as it relates to Chaco, I took a look at the official NPS contingency plan. Two sections seem to explain what’s going on there:

As a general rule, if a facility or area is locked or secured during non-business hours (buildings, gated parking lots, etc.) it should be locked or secured for the duration of the shutdown.

This seems to explain what’s going on on the ground at Chaco, as reported by my reader who went there. The park loop road is ordinarily gated at night, so it appears that they’ve closed the gate for the duration of the shutdown. There are a few things to see on the way in to the park before the gate, but the vast majority of the sites and trails are beyond it.

At the superintendent’s discretion, parks may close grounds/areas with sensitive natural, cultural, historic, or archaeological resources vulnerable to destruction, looting, or other damage that cannot be adequately protected by the excepted law enforcement staff that remain on duty to conduct essential activities.

It’s possible that this section is also relevant, though it’s less clear. Certainly it would be best for resource protection to close all the major sites and trails; it’s hard enough for the law enforcement rangers to monitor visitor activity when the park is operating under normal circumstances. The test for this would be whether the attractions on the way into the park, particularly the Gallo Cliff Dwelling and the trail to Wijiji, are closed, which is not clear to me from the information I have. The park website currently says it’s closed entirely but without explanation of what that entails, so it may well be the case that this section has been invoked.

Hopefully the shutdown will be resolved soon and things will go back to normal, but for now it’s best to steer clear of Chaco. If I hear of any changes or get more information I’ll do another post.

Central Roomblock at Salmon Ruin

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Fact-Checking Archaeoastronomy in the Archives

Cliff Palace and Sun Temple, Mesa Verde

In addition to reports of potential astronomical features at prehistoric sites and speculations on the role of astronomy in ancient societies, Astronomy and Ceremony in the Prehistoric Southwest: Revisited contains some chapters giving guidance on methodology for archaeoastronomical research, particularly aimed at developing increased rigor that can make the results of this research more useful for archaeologists. One of these chapters, by Gregory Munson, focuses on archaeoastronomy at Mesa Verde National Park and how it can be supported or challenged by using a methodology he calls architectural documentation or “ArcDoc.”

Munson spends much of the paper laying out the details of how to do ArcDoc, which basically amounts to a standardized set of recording procedures for sites and a commitment to fully research historical archives for materials relating to site excavation and restoration. The formal procedures are apparently those used by park management at Mesa Verde, but the basic ideas here are standard pretty much anywhere archaeologists have put in place a rigorous site documentation program (e.g., on most public lands in the US).

Munson then turns to specific examples of how ArcDoc has helped clarify findings from archaeoastronomy, focusing on three sites at Mesa Verde: Cliff Palace, Balcony House, and Sun Temple. In each case, archival research has either significantly challenged findings from initial archaeoastronomical research or otherwise improved understanding of the sites.

Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde

With Cliff Palace, Munson focuses on two features in the well-known “Tower” part of the site, both of which have been proposed to have associations with lunar standstill observations. One is a vent in the wall of the tower that has been demonstrated to align with moonset over Sun Temple during the southern major lunar maximum. The other is a nearby pictograph of four vertical lines with horizontal “ticks” that has been proposed to be a record of four 18.6-year lunar standstill cycles.

The vent alignment turns out to be very questionable after looking back at records of excavation and reconstruction of the site beginning with the work of Gustav Nordenskiöld in the 1890s and Jesse Walter Fewkes in the 1900s. Photographs from before the partial reconstruction of the site by Fewkes in 1909 show that this whole portion of the tower had largely collapsed, and the original size and shape of the vent in question is impossible to determine. Furthermore, the current vent that has the documented alignment isn’t even the result of Fewkes’s reconstruction, but of a later one by Earl Morris and Al Lancaster in the 1930s that replaced it. Munson claims that there is another opening in the wall that is more original and seems to display the same alignment, but this is an important cautionary tale for archaeoastronomers who, like many visitors, all too often assume that what they see at a site today is exactly what was there when it was originally occupied.

A similar problem affects the pictograph. The current version turns out to be a partial reconstruction by Lancaster in 1934 after two of the vertical lines had severely deteriorated, and the number of ticks on these lines does not match what appears to have been the original pictograph based on a photo taken in 1902, which Lancaster appears to not have had access to when doing his reconstruction. The numbers are still fairly close and Munson argues they could still be a record of lunar standstill cycles given the level of precision that might be expected for these observations, but still, another cautionary tale. Especially at a well-known, heavily visited, and actively managed site like Cliff Palace, you can’t assume that everything you’re seeing is original. (I used to make this point frequently to visitors at Chaco, and toward the beginning of my tours of Pueblo Bonito I would explain which parts of the masonry are and are not original.)

At Balcony House, Munson explains that proposed summer solstice and equinox alignments are thrown into question, in one case because an editing error resulted in results from observations at a different site being attributed to this one in publication, and in another case because archival research showed that a wall opening with a purported alignment had been partially sealed before impacts from recent visitation. These issues aren’t as major as those with Cliff Palace mentioned above, but they are noteworthy because they affect Munson’s own previous research, and he deserves a lot of credit for being straightforward and transparent about them.

Sun Temple, Mesa Verde

Finally, a happier story from Sun Temple. Fewkes excavated here in 1915, and a 1916 publication of his illustrates two prayer sticks found in these excavations. However, the collections from this work, housed at the park, do not include any prayer sticks. Where did they go?

Through some archival sleuthing in Fewkes’s papers at the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives, it turned out that he had also excavated at Oak Tree House in 1915, and the collections from this work are now held at the Smithsonian. And sure enough, this collection turned up two prayer sticks that could be matched to those in the illustration through their shapes and distinctive cracks. The fact that these actually appear to have come from Sun Temple rather than Oak Tree House helps to better understand the history and use of both sites.

In all these cases, the understanding of potential astronomical or ritual use of specific sites has been improved by carefully examining the archival history of their excavation and reconstruction. Archaeologists are increasingly aware of the importance of looking at this history when trying to understand sites like this, but this awareness is only beginning among archaeoastronomers, and Munson’s contribution here is a welcome illustration of its value.

Vent at Sun Temple, Mesa Verde

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Can Trump Actually Abolish Those Monuments?

Bears Ears from Natural Bridges National Monument

Last week, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order requiring the Secretary of the Interior to review all presidential designations of national monuments under the Antiquities Act since 1996 where the size of the designated monument exceeds 100,000 acres or where “the Secretary determines that the designation or expansion was made without adequate public outreach and coordination with relevant stakeholders,” and to provide a report within 120 days evaluating the extent to which any monument designations did not conform to the requirements of the Act and recommending actions the president or Congress might take to remedy these problems. This order has widely been interpreted and reported as an attempt by Trump to abolish controversial national monuments designated by his predecessors, especially Barack Obama, who designated more monuments than any other president. This certainly seems like a fair reading of Trump’s intent in signing the order, or at least of the impression he sought to make with it.

It’s not clear that he can actually do this, though. It’s noteworthy that the Executive Order itself only orders a review and report on whether there are problems with the designations and what might be done about them if so. It doesn’t directly have any substantive impact on anything. While this is a common pattern with Trump’s executive actions so far, in this case there is a very clear reason for it, which is that it’s not at all clear that a president actually has the authority to abolish a national monument or to revoke a designation made by one of his predecessors.

Much of the discussion of this order has centered on Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah, which President Obama designated on December 28, 2016. Local officials in Utah were furious about this particular designation and have been trying to overturn it since it was made. Bears Ears is the only specific monument designation mentioned by name in the Executive Order, in a section that requires an interim report within 45 days on it and any other designations the Secretary sees fit to include. Bears Ears is also potentially of interest to readers of this blog as the location of numerous ancient Pueblo (and other) archaeological sites, including the Mule Canyon and Butler Wash Ruins, which are easily accessible Utah Highway 95 and developed for visitation. It surrounds Natural Bridges National Monument, which also contains many archaeological sites in addition to the geological structures for which it is named.

Butler Wash Cliff Dwelling near Blanding, Utah

To understand why it is unclear whether the president has the authority to abolish a national monument designated under the Antiquities Act, it is necessary to go back and look at the Act itself. Passed in 1906 under president Theodore Roosevelt, who went on to use it to establish many monuments including Chaco Canyon in 1907, the Antiquities Act is noteworthy these days for being both remarkably short and remarkably ambiguous. It states:

That the President of the United States is hereby authorized, in his discretion, to declare by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States to be national monuments, and may reserve as a part thereof parcels of land, the limits of which in all cases shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected

Presidents since Roosevelt have interpreted this authority broadly, and have used it to designate monuments of up to millions of acres to protect the “objects of historic and scientific interest” therein. (Bears Ears alone is about 1.35 million acres.) This seems inconsistent with the colloquial meaning of the term “monument,” which to many people implies something much smaller than, say, a national park, but in fact the broad interpretation goes back to the very beginning and even Roosevelt himself designated 800,000 acres as Grand Canyon National Monument (which, like many monuments, was later changed by Congress into a national park). Furthermore, the courts have generally agreed with this broad interpretation of the president’s power under the Act, including in an important Supreme Court case in 1920 regarding Grand Canyon. Thus, opponents of particular monuments, such as the Utah politicians upset about Bears Ears, have sometimes been inclined to try to get a subsequent president to revoke a monument designation.

Tower at Mule Canyon, Utah

However, as a recent Congressional Research Service report explains, no president has ever tried to do this, and while this means there has been no test in court of a president’s authority in this area, there are other indications that it is unlikely to hold up. In 1938 President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to abolish a monument and consulted with his Attorney General to determine if this was possible. The AG determined that the text of the Act did not explicitly give the president the power to abolish a monument, and that there was no precedent for that power being given implicitly either. Roosevelt elected not to put this to the test.

It may seem odd that the president would have authority to take an action but not to revoke it, especially since Executive Orders are often described in exactly these terms (i.e., that they are weaker than Acts of Congress because a future president can unilaterally revoke them). A designation under the Antiquities Act isn’t quite a regular Executive Order, however. This is not an inherent power of the executive, but a Congressional power delegated explicitly to the president through the Act. Congress can also designate national monuments, and only it can establish national parks. The power to establish parks is an authority that Congress has not delegated to the president. The authority to abolish national monuments, including those designated by a president under the Antiquities Act, appears to be another such undelegated authority retained by Congress alone, and Congress has in fact abolished a few presidentially designated monuments by statute.

Sun Marker at Edge of the Cedars with Bears Ears in Background

So it seems that if Trump were to unilaterally try to revoke Obama’s proclamation and abolish Bears Ears or another monument covered by this Executive Order, the move would probably (but not necessarily) be overturned by the courts. This doesn’t mean these monuments are totally safe, however. There has been precedent for a president to add or subtract land from an existing national monument, and while the addition of land appears to be legally valid under the same theory underlying the power to create new monuments, the authority to remove land is more questionable. While this is also untested by the courts, presidents who have removed land from monuments have claimed to  have authority to do so under the provision of the Antiquities Act requiring that monuments be confined to the “smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.” In theory this means Trump could reduce the size of a monument like Bears Ears to a tiny area, perhaps the immediate surroundings of the eponymous buttes, and claim to be within the law. Obama’s proclamation, however, in this case referred to “numerous objects of historic and of scientific interest” within the monument boundaries, without being very specific about what those objects are, which might make it difficult for a reduction in size to pass muster with the courts. As with so much else on this topic, however, this theory remains untested in an actual court case.

Finally, setting aside all of these questions about the president’s authority, there’s Congress. Note that Trump’s order asks the Secretary for recommendations on congressional as well as presidential action to address any problems he identifies with the monument designations. Here, there is no legal ambiguity: Congress has the authority to modify or abolish a national monument in any way it wants. With Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, and Trump in the White House, it might seem like the obvious approach for the anti-monument forces would be for Congress to pass a law abolishing Bears Ears and whichever other monuments the Secretary recommends getting rid of. In theory this would indeed be possible, but in practice the current Congress and president have had a lot of trouble passing even their highest-profile priorities, so it’s by no means a sure thing that they would be able to get a bill like this through. Public lands are quite popular with the country as a whole, if not with Utah politicians, and it’s likely that any attempt to roll back monuments would stoke extensive public opposition that would make it a hard lift for a Congress with plenty of problems already. Similarly, while Congress could effectively neuter the management of new monuments by withholding funding for them from spending bills, the current state of budget negotiations suggests that they would have trouble doing that as well.

Does all this mean Bears Ears and the other monuments are definitely safe from the machinations of Trump and his congressional allies? By no means; if they’re committed enough there are definitely things they can do to harm them, such as through budgeting decisions within the executive branch departments tasked with managing them. But like so much else in our system of government, once a monument is in place it’s no easy feat to get rid of it.

Entrance Sign for Natural Bridges National Monument, Est. 1908

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Arctic Artifacts

Kotzebue, Alaska

From time to time I like to point out interesting resources I come across, even if they’re not directly related to Southwestern archaeology. One that I just saw via an article in my local paper today is a new website with pictures and information on artifacts discovered in 2013 during construction of a fiber optic line in Kotzebue, Alaska by the Alaska-based telecom company GCI. The artifacts, mostly bone tools, date to the thirteenth century AD based on two radiocarbon dates, and are associated with the Thule culture, which is directly ancestral to the Inupiaq people who now live in Kotzebue and the surrounding region.

Wind Farm, Kotzebue, Alaska

I’ve been to Kotzebue several times, and it’s an interesting place. It is located slightly north of the Arctic Circle and serves as a “hub” community for the Northwest Arctic region of Alaska, which means it’s a larger community (with a population of about 3,000) that provides services to the smaller villages in the region. Relevant to my own work, Kotzebue has also been a pioneering community for renewable energy development in Arctic environments. Like most rural Alaska communities, Kotzebue is not interconnected to a larger electric grid, so it runs its own system, which has historically been primarily based on diesel generation. However, the local electric utility has been integrating wind turbines into its diesel-based power system for about 20 years now, and wind currently provides a substantial portion of its total power production (18.5% in State Fiscal Year 2015). It doesn’t get as much attention as Kodiak, another pioneering Alaska community that has used a combination of hydro and wind power to make its electrical system virtually 100% renewable, but it’s nevertheless an impressive achievement in a very challenging environment.

Aerial View of Wind Farm, Kotzebue, Alaska

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Foreshadow: Perishables

Plaited Sandals at Chaco Museum

Chapter nine of Crucible of Pueblos looks at perishable artifacts (i.e., those made of materials that are often not preserved in the archaeological record, such as yucca fiber, animal hair, and cotton) during the Pueblo I period. Written by Laurie Webster, one of the most prominent experts on prehistoric Southwestern perishables, this chapter functions partly as an inventory and description of all known perishables from Pueblo I sites, and as such it is highly technical in nature and not very accessible for a casual reader. For this summary, therefore, I will focus on the high-level conclusions that can be made about Pueblo I cultural dynamics and relationships from the perishable evidence, rather than the evidence itself.

Those conclusions are quite interesting, as it turns out, especially when it comes to the patterning of different types of artifacts. Webster covers several different types of artifact, but I will focus on two with the most interesting cultural implications: sandals and textiles.

First, however, a note about the data. As Webster notes, the Pueblo I period has historically been poorly represented in the perishable data compared to earlier and later period that are known for extraordinary preservation from caves and rock shelters, especially the Basketmaker II and Pueblo III periods. People made much less use of caves and rock shelters during Pueblo I, and as a result many more of their perishable artifacts have, well, perished, and those that do survive are mostly in poor condition. Indeed, most of the best-preserved Pueblo I perishables are from areas like Tsegi Canyon and Canyon del Muerto in northeastern Arizona where caves did continue to be used in Pueblo I, although the Pueblo I occupation in these areas is poorly understood and it is not always clear that artifacts assigned to Pueblo I by early excavators really do date to this period. Luckily, however, the nature of perishable artifacts means that they can be directly radiocarbon-dated, and Webster mentions several examples that have been and many more that could be.

With that caveat out of the way, sandals. These were generally made out of yucca fiber and appear to have been a key way people at the time signaled their cultural identity, based on the geographic patterning of different types, and they likely had symbolic importance as well at least for some groups, based on the elaboration of some examples, implying an immense amount of labor, as well as the depiction of sandals in rock art and the creation of clay effigies (often called “sandal lasts” although that doesn’t appear to have been their actual function). In particular, highly elaborate twined sandals were common in western areas during Pueblo I, a continuation of a tradition from Basketmaker times. Pueblo I examples are known from northeastern Arizona, the eastern slope of the Chuska Mountains in New Mexico, the Dolores area in Colorado, and Chaco Canyon. In contrast, only one example is known from the Animas River Valley, and none from further east, despite the large recent excavations in this area in conjunction with large development projects.

Animas River, Durango, Colorado

A different type of sandal dominates in these eastern areas, a twill-plaited design that appears to date back to the Basketmaker II sites near Durango, Colorado. This type dominates in the Ridges Basin and Blue Mesa area of the Eastern Mesa Verde region and is also found in the Navajo Reservoir area further south, as well as at Grass Mesa Village in the Dolores area. The last is particularly interesting given that there is other evidence that Grass Mesa was settled by people from areas further east. It is also interesting that McPhee Village, also in the Dolores area, shows mainly twined sandals, again supporting other evidence suggesting western connections for this site. Similarly, the one site in the Animas Valley showing evidence for twined sandals also has other evidence of western connections.

A third type of sandal, plain weave with a rounded or pointed toe, appears to also have a western distribution extending from southern Nevada to northeastern Arizona and southeastern Utah but not into Colorado or New Mexico. Less is known about this type than the other two and its cultural significance is not clear.

While in general Webster concludes that Pueblo I perishables mostly continue Basketmaker III patterns without major innovations, she does note one major innovation by late Pueblo I: the increasing use of cotton. While many of the cotton textiles from northeastern Arizona attributed to Pueblo I have questions about their dating and associations, there is one example of a sash from Obelisk Cave in the Prayer Rock District (extreme northeastern Arizona) that has been directly dated to the AD 700s (early Pueblo I). One particularly interesting thing about this sash is that it actually consists of a mixture of cotton and dog hair, clearly showing the transition from animal hair and cotton for textiles. While the form of this item and the use of mixed materials strongly implies that it was made locally, it is not clear if the cotton was in fact grown locally or imported from the Hohokam in southern Arizona, who had a well-established tradition of cotton agriculture by this time.

By late Pueblo I, however, there is strong evidence that at least some Pueblo groups were growing their own cotton. At Antelope House in Pueblo del Muerto, cotton cloth in contexts dating to the AD 900s was found along with cotton seeds and bolls, clearly implying that cotton was being grown in this area by then, as it continued to be throughout the Pueblo period. Interestingly, there is no evidence for Pueblo I use of cotton textiles further east, again implying some sort of major cultural boundary. This is in contrast to later periods, when cotton grown in northeastern Arizona was traded to various other parts of the Pueblo world.

So anyway, those are the major points of interest about Pueblo I perishables. I find the most interesting point from the perspective of Chaco to be the fact that it patterns with the western rather than the eastern style of sandal, which reinforces other evidence for western connections for at least some of the people who came to Chaco in late Pueblo I and contributed to its rise into a dominant regional center in the northern Southwest.

Chuska Mountains from Peñasco Blanco

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Foreshadow: The Little Colorado

Little Colorado River from Homol’ovi Ruins State Park

Chapter six of Crucible of Pueblos brings us to the area immediately to the south and west of the areas previously considered. The region, which the authors call the Little Colorado after its main river, consists mostly of the drainage basin of that river but with some modifications. The southwestern part of the drainage around the modern town of Flagstaff, Arizona is excluded, as its culture history is quite different. Included despite being outside the Little Colorado drainage are the Chinle Wash area in northeastern Arizona and the Acoma area just across the Continental Divide in New Mexico. As the authors note early on, this region is geographically larger than all the previous regions in the book put together, but it makes sense to include it as a single chapter for several reasons. In addition to making it easier to track movement and changes across broad spatial scales, an important goal of this volume, considering this area as a whole helps to avoid some of the problems with considering its subregions separately, as is typically done. The Little Colorado straddles what have been considered the boundaries between traditional archaeological culture areas, and as a result its subregions have often been treated as peripheral to better-known areas rather than central in their own right. Particularly for understanding the Early Pueblo period (here defined as AD 600 to 925), however, it is useful to look at the Little Colorado region as a unit centered on the Rio Puerco of the West, which appears to have been the center of regional population for the period.

I say “appears” because another characteristic of the Little Colorado is that its archaeological record is not nearly as well understood as those of the regions to the north and east, especially for the early period. There are several reasons for this that the authors review:

• Surface architecture was generally less substantial and pit structures were shallower than in other areas, so they are harder to identify in surveys.
• Many parts of this region are very sandy and windy, so sites are often covered by large amounts of windblown sand to the extent that they can’t even be seen on the surface at all.
• While there has been a fair amount of excavation in connection with individual salvage projects for infrastructure like highways, much of this work has been in areas without significant Early Pueblo occupation, and there have not been any major projects on the scale of the Dolores or Chaco Projects combining extensive excavation with a focus on cultural synthesis.
• The regional ceramic sequence for the early periods is poorly defined and dated, making it hard to interpret the artifact collections that do exist from survey and excavation projects.

The authors suggest some ways to address these issues, and express a desire that this chapter serve as a starting point for synthesizing what is currently known about the Early Pueblo period in the Little Colorado region.

The overall picture they paint is of regional stability and gradual change over the centuries, which they note is quite different from the more dynamic picture emerging from work further north. This certainly is a plausible interpretation of the available evidence, but it’s worth noting (and they actually do) that a similar gradualist interpretation was also applied to the northern regions before the major excavation projects starting in the 1970s refined the picture. Could it be that the apparent gradual change in the Little Colorado is also due to the low resolution of the current data? The authors don’t discuss this possibility, but it jumps out at me.

Nevertheless, there are some differences between the Little Colorado and other regions that may well mean that developments here really were more gradual and stable. For one thing, there is strong evidence for the very early presence of maize agriculture (as early as 2000 BC) in several parts of the region, and evidence for irrigation canals in the Zuni area as early as 1000 BC. This earlier appearance of agriculture compared to areas further north isn’t necessarily surprising given its even earlier presence in the southern Southwest and Mesoamerica, but it does provide a potential reason that the arid but fertile river valleys of the Little Colorado drainage would have had more stability than the more marginal areas to the north and east.

With this regional background in mind, the authors give brief summaries of each of their subregions then address some of the key topics that are emphasized throughout the book. I will briefly summarize their summaries below.

Rio Puerco of the West and Train Tracks at Petrified Forest

As I mentioned before, the valley of the Rio Puerco of the West seems to be a key subregion during this period. Early Pueblo sites are rare in the upper valley, but are very common from the Manuelito area to Petrified Forest (where the Puerco flows into the Little Colorado). Basketmaker II and early Basketmaker III settlement (before AD 600) is concentrated around Petrified Forest at the western end of the valley, where there are large pithouse sites that seem to mainly consist of repeated seasonal occupation. Population increased dramatically in this area in early Pueblo I and continued growing more slowly through Pueblo II, with occupation largely by scattered individual households and small hamlets. Throughout the valley mobility seems to have been frequent and perhaps seasonal, with a wide variety of site sizes and types that makes the settlement pattern hard to determine. There are a few larger sites that may have been comparable to the early villages further north, but even these are diverse in size and structure and it’s not clear how many of them were actually permanent aggregated communities as opposed to sites occupied seasonally over the course of many years. Some of those sites that have been dated show continuity between Pueblo I and Pueblo II, in striking contrast to the depopulation of the Mesa Verde region at the end of Pueblo I. This suggests that the Little Colorado really did have a different history and that the appearance of continuity is not just due to limited data.

The authors include the Zuni and Acoma areas as a single subregion, divided into three “districts”: Lower Zuni, Upper Zuni, and Acoma. The Lower Zuni and Upper Zuni are those parts of the Zuni River valley downstream and upstream of the modern Pueblo of Zuni respectively. There has been a lot of survey in the Upper Zuni district in recent years, but much less in the Lower Zuni and Acoma districts. This is unfortunate for understanding the Early Pueblo period, when the Lower Zuni was the main area of settlement. This is probably linked to its proximity to the Puerco (of which the Zuni is a tributary), given the extensive occupation there described above. There were small populations in the Upper Zuni and Acoma districts during Pueblo I that expanded rapidly in Pueblo II. Large settlements were rare throughout the subregion during Pueblo I except in the Hardscrabble Wash and Jaralosa Draw areas of the Lower Zuni district. Hardscrabble Wash includes the important but poorly understood site of Kiatuthlanna, excavated by Frank H. H. Roberts in the 1920s, and there are a couple of large settlements along Jaralosa Draw showing continuity between Pueblo I and Pueblo II.

Northeastern Arizona, considered as a single subregion here despite its size and diversity, had only a small and scattered occupation during Pueblo I, in contrast to marked increases in population after AD 1000 in several parts of it. Despite its small size, the early occupation in some parts of this subregion such as Black Mesa shows evidence for substantial storage implying year-round sedentism, in contrast to the apparent mobility in the more densely populated Puerco Valley. It’s worth noting that Black Mesa is one of the areas with very early evidence for maize agriculture. Despite the low overall population, there were some large and apparently permanent sites during Pueblo I, some of which, especially on the Defiance Plateau, continued to be occupied into Pueblo II when they began to include great houses and other Chacoan features.

The final subregion is the Mogollon Rim Margins at the southern edge of the region. This area forms the boundary between the Anasazi and Mogollon culture areas as traditionally defined by archaeologists. It was relatively sparsely populated during Pueblo I, but some areas saw a substantial increase in population around AD 850. There were some large sites, but as in other subregions they are hard to interpret and it’s not clear how many of them were permanent villages rather than long-term seasonal occupations. As might be expected, many sites in this subregion show mixed pottery assemblages of “Anasazi” gray wares and “Mogollon” brown wares, but what this means in terms of population movements and contacts is hard to say given the sparse data available.

Turning to bigger questions, the authors make an attempt at reconstructing population dynamics but it is very tentative given the limited data. What it does seem to show is that the Puerco and Lower Zuni areas were important population centers throughout the Early Pueblo period, with the Defiance Plateau becoming an additional center late in the period. A more scattered but persistent population elsewhere in the region supplemented these centers throughout the period.

Public architecture mainly involved great kivas, which existed in this region throughout the Early Pueblo period and were often associated with larger settlements with large amounts of storage capacity, implying a role as community centers for a large area. There were also a few isolated great kivas without associated settlements, which are hard to interpret. Several of the communities with early great kivas also had later Chacoan great houses, another piece of evidence for the persistence of these places as important centers. Interestingly, the general pattern in this region is of continuity between Pueblo I and Pueblo II, with an abrupt break and change in settlement patterns (though not a regional depopulation) at the end of Pueblo II associated with the decline of Chaco. This contrasts with the Mesa Verde region, where there was an abrupt break and regional depopulation at the end of Pueblo I, a repopulation late in Pueblo II associated with Chacoan influence, and continuity between the Pueblo II occupation and later Pueblo III communities before the total and permanent depopulation of the region at the end of Pueblo III. It’s not clear what this implies about the culture history of the two regions, but it certainly is interesting.

There seems to be little evidence for violence in the Little Colorado region during the Early Pueblo period, again in contrast to the Mesa Verde region, although it’s worth noting that the available data is much more limited. Still, the generally small size of sites and lack of defensive settings or defensive features like stockades does suggest that, for whatever reason, things were generally more peaceful here.

Cultural diversity and migration have long been topics of interest in this region due to its position across traditional boundaries, but the authors argue that some lines of evidence that have been used in the past to assess cultural differences and connections, especially ceramic styles and pit structure architecture, could use a fresh look in the light of new theoretical approaches and the much larger dataset available from salvage projects. Again, the need for a new emphasis on synthesis and a broader perspective in understanding this region becomes apparent.

Overall, this was one of the most informative chapters in the book for me. This region is very important for understanding the rise of Chaco, given the apparent southern connections of some of the migrants who contributed to its rise, but it has remained much less understood than the well-studied areas to the north that contributed other migrants. This chapter shows clearly how much less is known but also how much potential there is to know more, and hopefully it will spur further investigations of these important issues.

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Foreshadow: Central Mesa Verde

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.

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Foreshadow: Introduction

McPhee Reservoir, Dolores, Colorado

A few years ago I did a series of posts called “Aftermath” that consisted of short commentaries on the chapters in The Prehistoric Pueblo World, a volume edited by Michael Adler that synthesized information on the archaeology of the Pueblo III period (AD 1150 to 1350) in various regions of the Southwest. This period postdated the decline of Chaco Canyon as a major regional center, and understanding it is important for understanding the relationship between Chaco and the modern Pueblos, as well as for understanding some aspects of Chaco itself.

Another period that is of perhaps even greater interest for understanding Chaco is the Pueblo I period (generally defined as AD 750 to 900, but see below), which immediately predates Chaco’s rise to regional dominance. I was therefore pleased to see the publication in 2o12 of Crucible of Pueblos: The Early Pueblo Period in the Northern Southwest, a volume synthesizing information on the Pueblo I period along the same lines as Adler’s effort for Pueblo III. It’s edited by Rich Wilshusen, Gregson Schachner, and James Allison, all of whom have made important recent contributions to understanding of this under-researched period. I’m just now getting around to reading it, and I decided to do a similar series of posts commenting on the chapters as I read them. I’m entitling the series “Foreshadow” to indicate the way developments during this period seem to, well, foreshadow later developments at and involving Chaco.

This post addresses the introduction, which is by the three editors of the volume along with Kellam Throgmorton, who is not otherwise a familiar name (at least to me) but who is thanked in the acknowledgments for his work “reimagining” this chapter. He was apparently a graduate student at the University of Colorado at the time, and has since graduated and is now “doing contract archaeology work in New Mexico.” The introduction as it stands is very engaging and readable, so if that was Throgmorton’s doing I can see why the volume editors took care to thank him specifically.

This introductory chapter is primarily a history of archaeological research on the Pueblo I period in the Southwest, but it also situates that history in the context of archaeological understanding of that period and how it relates to others, which has changed markedly over time. It also explains the reasoning for this volume’s use of “Early Pueblo” rather than “Pueblo I” to describe the period of interest, which is defined more broadly than Pueblo I has traditionally been. As with so much else in Southwestern archaeology, the issues here go back to the classification developed at the first Pecos Conference in 1927. As this chapter makes clear, this was initially primarily a developmental sequence rather than a chronological one, and the Pueblo I period in particular has been misunderstood on this account. This volume therefore uses a more general “Early Pueblo” period of circa AD 650 to 950 to frame the developments in the regions it discusses, which covers the various definitions that have been used for Pueblo I in different areas, as well as parts of Basketmaker III in some because of the importance of immediately preceding events for understanding Pueblo I.

The bulk of this chapter relates the history of understanding of the Pueblo I period by archaeologists. This history follows the familiar sequence of culture history/classification followed by processualism/environmental determinism followed by post-processualism/neohistoricism, but with an emphasis on how the Pueblo I period tended to be subsumed by larger theoretical constructs until the rise of large cultural resource management projects in the 1970s and 1980s massively increased the data available and forced a reevaluation of the period. The most influential of these efforts was the Dolores Project, which happened to occur in an area that was one of the most important centers of Pueblo I village development. The massive scale of this project, the largest ever in the US at the time, led to a much more detailed understanding of the Pueblo I period and the recognition that, rather than a brief interlude in the sequence of development from small hamlets to large pueblos, this was a time of rapid formation of the first major agricultural villages in the northern Southwest, followed by their equally rapid dissolution and a massive outmigration of people from the region. The precision of tree-ring dating allowed for very fine-grained understanding of the chronology, and the results of the project showed a level of dynamism in population movement and culture change that was totally unexpected and hard to fit in the gradual progression paradigm underlying the traditional Pecos classification.

Furthermore, certain aspects of the short-lived Dolores villages were strikingly reminiscent of the well-known Chacoan communities that emerged to the south shortly afterward, which led to the increasingly accepted idea that the formation and dissolution of villages during Pueblo I in the Dolores area were events that directly influenced the rise of Chaco. Indeed, it is now considered quite likely that many of the people who were involved in the development of early great houses at Chaco had moved there from Dolores.

So that’s the main message in this chapter, which also serves as an introduction to the volume itself and the other chapters in it. The next few chapters cover the specifics of settlement patterns in several parts of the northern Southwest, including not just the Mesa Verde region (the focus of most Pueblo I research so far) but also Chaco and its surroundings as well as areas further south and east. The latter two areas are often not addressed very well in research on this period, so I’m very interested in seeing the information on them presented here. The next few chapters cover a few broad thematic issues of interest for understanding this period across all the regions, then there are concluding chapters by Steve Lekson and John Kantner putting all this in a larger perspective. Overall this seems like a well-designed and desperately needed synthesis of an important but poorly understood period in Southwestern prehistory, and I’m eager to dive into the details.

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Ram Mesa: A Reasonable Case for Witchcraft Execution without Cannibalism

Looking South from Kin Ya'a

One of the most notable examples of an assemblage of highly mutilated human remains from the Southwest being attributed to witchcraft execution rather than cannibalism, in accordance with J. Andrew Darling’s theory discussed in the previous post, is Ram Mesa, southwest of Chaco Canyon near Gallup, NM.  This site was excavated by the University of New Mexico as a salvage project, and the relevant assemblage was reported by Marsha Ogilvie and Charles Hilton in 2000.

The Ram Mesa assemblage, consisting of 13 individuals, is pretty similar to many other assemblages in the Southwest attributed to cannibalism, but Ogilvie and Hilton make a plausible case that while the remains are clearly highly “processed” there isn’t a whole lot tying this dismemberment and mutilation to actual consumption of the remains.  Few of the bones showed any evidence of burning, a condition which applies to several other cases of alleged cannibalism as well.  The few cut marks, which were mostly found on children’s skulls and lower jaws, weren’t particularly indicative of the removal of large muscles that might be expected if consumption were the object.  On the other hand, however, relatively few of the bone fragments were sufficiently large to be identified to body part, and any diagnostic evidence from these tiny fragments was clearly destroyed by the thoroughness of the processing.  It’s not clear, therefore, how representative the larger fragments with surviving evidence of burning and cutting are of the entire assemblage.  The most I would say about this site is that the evidence is not sufficient to make a positive diagnosis of cannibalism, and other explanations are therefore plausible.

However, as I noted before in discussing Darling’s arguments, witchcraft execution and cannibalism are not necessarily mutually exclusive.  Indeed, the execution of suspected witches may well have involved some level of cannibalism among some Southwestern groups in prehistoric times, thought there is certainly no evidence that it did in historic times as documented by ethnographers.  There are some other oddities about the Ram Mesa site that suggest that it might not be expected to pattern with the majority of the suspected cannibalism assemblages, so it is certainly possible that it represents a variation on the same behavior that may not have included cannibalism.

For one thing, this is an odd place for one of these assemblages.  Although some early excavations at Chaco Canyon and in northern Arizona have been proposed as showing evidence of cannibalism, the vast majority of the well-documented cases are in southwestern Colorado, especially around the modern town of Cortez.  This includes the Cowboy Wash site, the site with the best evidence for cannibalism of any of them.  Given the known cultural differences between prehistoric populations at the northern and southern edges of the San Juan Basin (the San Juan and Cibola Anasazi, respectively), it’s quite possible that the cultural activities resulting in similar assemblages in these two areas may have been somewhat different, with the San Juan groups practicing cannibalism and the Cibola groups not.

Furthermore, there may be differences in the dating of the sites.  Most of the well-documented Cortez-area sites date to right around AD 1150, and they may all represent part of a single event at that time, which was in the midst of a severe drought when social structures were likely under extreme stress.  The Ram Mesa site is dated by six radiocarbon dates to a period that Ogilvie and Hilton describe as “AD 978 to 1161.”  They do clarify that these are calibrated dates, which is helpful, but it would have been better if they had shown the ranges for the individual dates, as well as the materials that were dated, which would give a better idea of the most likely dating for the human remains.  On the assumption that the remains date to the latest period of occupation, which seems plausible based on comparison to similar assemblages elsewhere, this puts the latest date at 1161, which is interestingly close to the dates for the similar Cortez sites.  Due to the lack of information of the dates, however, it’s not clear is this is an intercept (i.e., most likely) date or the late end of a range; if the latter, it’s possible that the assemblage dates to somewhat earlier than the Cortez sites.  In that case it would not be part of the same phenomenon, whatever that was, and the postulated lack of cannibalism may be related to that.

In any case, this site definitely seems to have been within the Chacoan sphere of influence, which makes the interpretation of the remains there important for understanding the relationship of alleged cannibalistic events to the rise and fall of Chaco.  Christy Turner has famously argued that they represent the expansion of the Chacoan system and the use of brutal force by the rulers of Chaco (hypothesized on very dubious evidence to be Toltec immigrants from central Mexico) to ensure that outlying communities were incorporated into the system and supplied tribute to the canyon.  This idea is pretty implausible based on the evidence from the Cortez area, where most of the assemblages date to the period of Chaco’s decline rather than its rise.  If Ram Mesa dates to the same period it would support that evidence, whereas if it dates to earlier it could conceivably either support Turner’s ideas or point to a different interpretation, perhaps having something to do with the well-known fact that the outlying Chacoan communities to the south of Chaco seem to have been abandoned beginning much earlier than those in other directions.  There are a lot of outlying Chacoan great houses in this area, including Casamero and Kin Ya’a, but they seem to have rather different histories than those to the north, such as Aztec Ruins and Yellow Jacket.

Like most research related to Chaco, this paper ultimately raises more questions than it answers.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, however, especially when it comes to a topic as controversial and poorly understood as these assemblages suggesting cannibalism.

Ogilvie, M., & Hilton, C. (2000). Ritualized violence in the prehistoric American Southwest International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 10 (1), 27-48 DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1099-1212(200001/02)10:13.0.CO;2-M

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Chaco Preservation Crew Makes the News

Chaco Preservation Crew Repairing Masonry at the Fort Site

Today’s Albuquerque Journal has an article, originally published in the Gallup Independent, about the Chaco preservation crew and their work maintaining the various sites in the park.  The article focuses specifically on recent work they’ve done at Pueblo Pintado.  I don’t have a whole lot to add, but it’s an interesting account that addresses some of the complications of doing this sort of work for traditional Navajos, who have a strong taboo against even visiting Anasazi sites.  The article says that the crew deals with this in part by conducting prophylactic ceremonies before starting work on the sites, which I hadn’t known.  These ceremonies are apparently led by Harold Suina, a member of the crew who is from Cochiti Pueblo and is not Navajo (although I believe his wife is, and they live near Chaco in an area inhabited almost entirely by Navajos).  The article doesn’t say this, but I suspect that Harold’s role is particularly important since Pueblos like Cochiti have different attitudes toward the sites at Chaco than Navajos do, so he may not feel as uncomfortable dealing with them as the other members of the crew, all of whom are Navajo, do.  Not all of the Navajo members of the crew are traditional, however; some are Christian, as are many Navajos in the Chaco area, and they may not have the same qualms about their work that their more traditional colleagues have.

Anyway, it’s an interesting article, and it’s nice to see the preservation crew getting some media attention.  They do crucial work for the park, but it rarely gets noticed by either visitors or the many people who have written books and articles about Chaco over the years.  When I was doing tours I would usually do a fairly detailed description of the preservation work early on in the tour, both because people often want to know how much of what they see at the sites is reconstructed (at Chaco, very little, unlike at many other parks) and because I wanted them to appreciate how much work it is to maintain the sites and why it is therefore important for them as visitors to treat them respectfully and minimize the amount of damage they cause.  Hopefully this article will serve a similar function for a wider audience.

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