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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Clothing

Fajada Butte and Yucca from Visitor Center Courtyard

In between a bunch of depressing news about budget cuts, the latest edition of Southwestern Archaeology Today links to a couple of interesting articles with considerable relevance to Chaco.  One is about turkeys; I’ll do a post on it later.  The other is a column by Marc Simmons in the Santa Fe New Mexican on Pueblo clothing and how it has changed over time.

Diorama at Chaco Museum

Interestingly, in my experience visitors to Chaco don’t actually ask about clothing very often.  This may be due to the influence of a diorama in the visitor center museum which seems to answer any questions they might have, since it shows people in the course of various daily activities attired in loincloths and little else, which is pretty common for “Indians” in museum dioramas.  This “all loincloths all the time” interpretation is also common in artists’ renditions of “what life was like” on interpretive signs at many parks.  There aren’t many of these signs at Chaco, but they are quite common at some other parks such as Mesa Verde.  This all has a powerful effect on people’s perceptions, I think, because visual impressions are both stronger and more vivid than anything that can be explained in words.  Indeed, a woman once asked me, referring to the diorama, why the Chacoans had worn anything at all.  To this day I’m not sure what preconceptions she was bringing to the diorama, but clearly its implication that “the Indians” didn’t wear much had led her down that cognitive path.  This strong effect of the visual image is unfortunate, however, because quite a bit is known about how the Chacoans probably dressed, and all the evidence available strongly indicates that the diorama is totally wrong.

"Pithouse Life" Sign at Mesa Verde

But back to Simmons.  He’s one of the most renowned historians of New Mexico, and I’ve mentioned him before for his excellent book on the history of Albuquerque.  His specialty is the Spanish colonial era, so his column on Pueblo clothing draws most of its information from Spanish documents.  Those documents begin with the earliest exploratory expeditions in the sixteenth century, and they are generally thought to be pretty reliable in their descriptions of the people the explorers encountered.   The main thing that impressed those explorers about the Pueblos was how “civilized” they seemed in comparison to the hunter-gatherer groups they had seen further south.  Indeed, the name “Pueblo” itself, deriving originally from these reports, refers to the people’s settlement pattern based on large, permanent towns.

Pueblo Display at Chaco Visitor Center

Similarly, the main comments the chroniclers had about Pueblo clothing were about how substantial it was.  Men typically wore kilts, and women wore a type of dress known as a manta, made out of large square pieces of cloth.  The main material used was cotton, which was grown in the low-lying river valleys, especially in the Rio Abajo region at the southern end of the Pueblo domain, and traded to the villages in areas where cotton can’t be grown.  This cotton was woven into cloth, always by men, and often in ceremonial contexts in kivas or other important spaces.  The Spanish also remarked on the use of tanned buckskin or gamuza as an alternative material for clothes, especially nice during the cold winters.  Another item useful for keeping warm was the rabbit-fur coat, made of strips of rabbit hide woven together by women.  Footwear consisted primarily of leather moccasins known as teguas.

"Ceremonial Chamber" Sign at Mesa Verde Showing Men Weaving in Kiva

This information comes from a few hundred years after the fall of Chaco, of course.  A lot had changed in Pueblo culture during that period, so it would definitely be a mistake to simply project the Spanish reports back in time.  Luckily, we don’t have to.  Due to the good preservation at Chacoan sites, and the even better preservation at the cliff dwellings occupied slightly later, many examples of clothing have survived, though generally only in fragmentary condition.  These materials largely substantiate the Spanish accounts: Cloth is typically made out of cotton (probably underrepresented in the archaeological record because it doesn’t preserve very well), and cloaks made of woven rabbit fur and turkey feathers are common.

Sandals at Chaco Museum

The moccasins and leather garments are not generally found, however.  There is no shortage of footwear, but it takes the form of sandals made of yucca fibers.  These are very common and there are some indications that they may have had ritual importance in addition to their everyday use.  Leather moccasins during this period are rare to nonexistent in the Chacoan area, but common among the Fremont to the north in Utah, and they are even considered a diagnostic feature of the Fremont culture.

Bison Statue in Downtown Colorado Springs, Colorado

At some point between the fall of Chaco and the Spanish entradas, then, leather clothing and footwear seem to have been adopted by the Pueblos.  One theory to explain this, along with various other changes in Pueblo society during this period, links it to increased contact with Plains groups starting in the fourteenth century.  Another theory sees the adoption of leather clothing as associated with a prolonged period of climatic cooling, perhaps associated with the beginning of the Little Ice Age.  These two theories are not mutually exclusive, of course, and I think they actually complement each other nicely.  One proposed way of tying them together is a model in which cooling weather on the southern Plains leads to bison beginning to venture further south than they had before, which leads bison-hunting Plains people to follow them and come into contact with the Pueblos, whose increasingly efficient irrigation agriculture gives them surpluses of crops that they can exchange for meat, hides, and other bison products.  It’s notable that trade networks during this period seem to be oriented along an east-west axis connecting the Pueblos to the Plains, whereas trade during earlier periods seems to have been more north-south and connected to Mesoamerica.

Looking East toward the Great Plains from Las Vegas, New Mexico

Of course, this theory is by no means universally accepted, and there are other ways to interpret the changes in Pueblo material culture during this time.  Still, coming back to clothing specifically, I think all of this shows that the “Diorama Indian” loincloth-based attire has more to do with the preconceptions of the people who made the dioramas than with what people at Chaco and elsewhere actually wore.

Close-Up of Diorama at Chaco Museum

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