Dating the Macaws

Macaw Feathers and Copper Bell on Display at Chaco Visitor Center Museum

One of the most exciting recent developments in the study of Chaco Canyon is the increasing use of scientific analysis of artifacts and other material remains to test and challenge previous theories based more narrowly on traditional archaeology. This includes the use of radiocarbon dating, which is widely used as a basis for developing chronologies in most other parts of the world but has been underused in the Southwest due to the availability of tree-ring dating for chronology building. Particularly with the development of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating, which requires vastly less material than earlier methods, however, it is now possible to gain direct dates on a very wide variety of materials, including many artifact types as well as plants and human and animal bones. This allows an independent check on dating of material by association with tree-ring dated architecture and pottery, which has been the traditional approach. The increasing use of AMS on the museum collections excavated decades ago from Pueblo Bonito, in particular, is starting to lead to some unexpected and surprising conclusions. This work is largely being done by archaeologists associated with the University of Virginia led by Steve Plog, in collaboration with colleagues at many other institutions.

One recent paper, about a year old now, reported some surprising results from the dating of the bones of one of the most distinctive species found at Chaco: scarlet macaws. These birds are not native to anywhere near the Southwest, and they must have been brought up from very far south in Mexico. They are disproportionately found at only a few sites in the Southwest, one of which is Pueblo Bonito. Traditionally it has been thought that the importation of macaws was associated with the “florescence” of Chaco, the roughly 100-year period starting around AD 1040 when most of the monumental great houses in the canyon were built and Chacoan influence is seen over a very large part of the northern Southwest. For this study, the researchers dated 14 macaws from Pueblo Bonito: 11 from Room 38, which had the highest concentration of macaw remains at the site, two from Room 78, and one from Room 71. Both of these latter rooms are in fairly close proximity to Room 38 within the site. They also dated four macaws from Mimbres sites in southwestern New Mexico, another area with a relatively high concentration of these birds that lies between Chaco and Mexico and thus could played a role in their procurement, and two from Grand Gulch in Utah, which is on the far fringes of the ancient Pueblo world and yet has produced a few macaw specimens.

The results were surprising, and they challenge the traditional association of macaws with the Chacoan florescence. Six of the Chaco birds dated to between AD 885 and 990 (all dates given here are at 95% probability), well before the florescence and a time when Chaco would have been much less impressive architecturally. This is, however, a time when population in the canyon was increasing rapidly through immigration from various areas that were affected by the big changes at the end of the Pueblo I period, as we have seen in my recent series of posts on Pueblo I. The authors of this paper don’t mention this population movement specifically, but they do suggest that this indicates that the later period of monumental construction and other signs of sociopolitical complexity was the result of a long period of developing complexity, which fits the demographic evidence pretty well.

Room 38, Pueblo Bonito

Six other birds date between AD 970 and 1035, which would put them shortly before or possibly at the very beginning of the florescence and building boom. This suggests that trade relations with the far south continued beyond the initial period when macaws were introduced to the canyon. The final two date between AD 1015 and 1155, which suggests they probably were procured sometime during (or even shortly after) the period of florescence. Overall the dates suggest that macaws were procured throughout most of the period of Chaco’s rise from the period when Chaco was first rising to regional preeminence in the ninth and tenth centuries until its loss of preeminence (I think “collapse” is too strong a term for this still poorly understood phenomenon) in the twelfth.

One thing you may have noticed about those date ranges, however, is that they all overlap. Given the statistical uncertainty of radiocarbon dates, this means that it’s possible that these dates indicate a continuous process of importation of macaws from Mesoamerica. (There is no evidence for breeding of macaws at Chaco, unlike at the later site of Casas Grandes in northern Chihuahua.) The clustering of sets of dates, however, suggests on the contrary that importation was sporadic, with possibly just three individual procurements of multiple birds at a time. And additional complication is that the shape of the radiocarbon calibration curve differs at different times through this sequence, which can lead to certain time periods being over- or under-represented in series of dates. To test these hypotheses, the authors did some simulation of random dates throughout the period in question and compared the resulting distributions with the actual distribution of macaw dates. The results were that the early cluster of dates did conform to what might be expected from the effects of the shape of the curve, the middle cluster had more dates than would be expected and the late cluster fewer. This suggests that while it is possible that procurement of macaws was a continuous process, it does appear that a larger number of birds were imported in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries than earlier or later. Of course, this is a small sample, and these apparent patterns may change with more data.

As for the non-Chaco macaws, one of the Mimbres ones dated to AD 895 to 1020, straddling the first two clusters of dates at Chaco, while the other three all dated from around AD 1015 to 1155, as did the two Grand Gulch specimens. This suggests that macaws were present earlier at Chaco than in areas to either the north or south, which further suggests that at least initial importation of macaws to Chaco didn’t necessarily depend on Mimbres middlemen. Macaws have also been found at Hohokam sites in southern Arizona that appear to be in earlier contexts than the ones at Chaco, but none of these have yet been directly dated.

Room 33, Pueblo Bonito

While it may appear initially surprising, the early dates for macaws at Chaco do actually fit with increasing evidence from other sources suggesting that the rise of Chaco and its social and economic power significantly predated its “florescence” as seen in monumental architecture. This includes a study from a few years ago, from the same group of Virginia researchers, that dated human remains from Room 33 in Pueblo Bonito, including the two burials that were associated with enormous numbers of valuable grave goods, and found those two burials long predated the Chacoan florescence and may in fact have been contemporary with the earliest construction at the great house in the mid-ninth century or even earlier. (That paper really deserves a post of its own, which I keep meaning to write, but this brief summary will have to do for now.)

Taken in conjunction with the evidence for regional population movement in late Pueblo I, this study provides more support for the idea that the influx of populations into the canyon in the late ninth century, some bringing ideas developed in the earlier short-lived villages to the north in Colorado, set the stage for the development of new ideas about social organization and hierarchy which may have led to new ideologies and the importation of both goods and ideas from areas far away. The fact that macaws would have to have come from the south, where the archaeology of areas immediately adjacent to the Chacoan region is much more poorly known than that of comparable areas to the north, points to the importance of developing a better understanding of those areas. We still know very little about the exact routes of trade connections to the south, even as the importance of those connections becomes increasingly apparent.

Watson, A., Plog, S., Culleton, B., Gilman, P., LeBlanc, S., Whiteley, P., Claramunt, S., & Kennett, D. (2015). Early procurement of scarlet macaws and the emergence of social complexity in Chaco Canyon, NM Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112 (27), 8238-8243 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1509825112

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Foreshadow: Synthesis

Third-Story Walls with Type I Masonry at Una Vida

The final chapter in Crucible of Pueblos offers, in the words of its title, “a synthesis of sorts.” Authored by the noted Chaco specialist John Kantner, it gives a brief chronological overview of the period covered by this book, combining the information from the other chapters to create a picture as complete as possible given current evidence. As Kantner notes several times, current evidence is very sparse for certain regions and periods, and the resulting synthesis is therefore tentative on many issues.

Kantner starts with the period AD 600 to 725, which some but not all of the regional chapters cover. He focuses on the idea that this period was marked by a “Neolithic Demographic Transition” of the sort seen in other parts of the world following the adoption of agriculture. In this case he sees the catalyst for the transition not being the initial introduction of domesticated plants to the northern Southwest, which an increasing body of evidence has shown was actually much earlier, but on the idea that new varieties of maize that were introduced at this time caused a widespread shift to a farming-based lifestyle, whereas earlier cultigens had just been added into a hunting and gathering system as a minor component. This theory has been advanced by several archaeologists in recent years, and it is certainly plausible, but I think the data is still not quite there to establish it firmly. In any case, Kantner sees the immediate result of the shift to intensive agriculture being a sharp increase in population, which led at least in some areas to increases in site size (but only to slightly larger hamlets in most cases), as well as possibly to violence and warfare, as evidenced by an increasing number of stockaded hamlets. Sites were still generally quite small and loosely clustered around a variety of types of public architecture. He claims not to see much evidence of migration between regions during this period, which sounds dubious to me given how much we see later. As he acknowledges, though, the data for this early period is particularly limited, especially for less-researched areas, and it’s hard to draw any firm conclusions.

His next period, AD 725 to 825, definitely does show a lot of migration, and Kantner sees that and increasing settlement aggregation as being the two major processes evidence in the archaeological record. Data gaps are an issue here as well, however, and the details of these processes are much clearer in some regions (especially the Northern San Juan/Mesa Verde area) than others. All this migration and aggregation seems to have led to increasingly ethnically diverse communities, although identifying “ethnicity” in this sort of context is tricky as material culture traits that might be used to identify groups don’t always cluster neatly. Despite this diversity, Kantner sees less evidence in this period for violence than in the previous one, at least until the very end of it when there are some spectacular examples like the apparent massacre at Sacred Ridge, which may have been ethnically motivated. Less spectacularly, the presence of defensive sites in Southeast Utah also seems to increase at the end of this period, again suggesting conflict. Interestingly, though, there seems to be little or no evidence for this sort of conflict further south, although again it’s important to note that southern regions have seen much less research. This period saw possibly the earliest examples of settlements aggregated enough to call “villages,” although Kantner notes that a large portion of the population was still living in dispersed hamlets. The question of why some but not all people chose to begin living in greater proximity is an important one that remains largely unanswered.

The trends of migration and aggregation continue into Kantner’s next period, AD 825 to 880. This is especially apparent in the well-studied Central Mesa Verde region, but it appears to have continued in other areas as well, with a general trend toward settlement in well-watered areas, which may signify another episode of agricultural intensification. This is also suggested by the increased storage capacity of the new villages, some of which might indicate community-level storage of grain. Kantner notes that larger villages might also have been able to mobilize more people for hunting and therefore increased hunting success, a reminder that even a heavily emphasis on agriculture doesn’t necessarily replace all other subsistence pursuits. There also is some evidence for changes in gendered labor at this time, again likely tied to subsistence changes: greater emphasis on stored food, presumably largely in the form of cornmeal/flour, would require more time spent on particular types of processing work. This would potentially include both grinding itself and other tasks required by new ways of preparing food, especially making more pots in which the ground meal would need to be cooked. These are presumed to have been primarily female tasks, so the increased time investment in them may have affected gender roles and relations between the sexes. This is an interesting idea that I think could use more elaboration.

Great Kivas A and Q, Pueblo Bonito

Public architecture continues to be diverse but there are some interesting patterns in what types occur in the new villages, especially between great kivas and what Kantner (among others) calls “oversized pit structures.” He makes some suggestions about correlations between these architectural forms and other factors, such as the idea that great kivas may be associated with periods of social instability and the idea that oversized pit structures were more exclusive than great kivas but the ritual in them may have been more ostentatious, judging by the unusual deposits left behind, such as exotic animal remains and redware pottery. He notes the theory that oversized pit structures and their accompanying U-shaped roomblocks may have been associated with emerging ritual leaders, who may have competed with each other for status and power based on their increased storage capacity, access to game meat, and possibly capacity to control craft activities as well. I think there’s a lot of merit to this idea, although it does still rely quite heavily on data from the well-studied Central Mesa Verde area and new research elsewhere might complicate it.

It’s worth noting again, however, that despite the many very visible and interesting changes resulting from increased aggregation a large portion of the population was still living outside of villages. How these people would have interacted with the villages and how their lives might have differed are under-studied but important questions.

Kantner refers to his next and last period, starting in AD 880, as “the Dawn of Chaco,” which seems reasonable given the emerging picture. The key change at this time is the abandonment of the villages that arose in the previous period and the almost complete abandonment of the Central and Eastern Mesa Verde regions, with their residents apparently moving both west into Utah and south into New Mexico, where some of them very likely contributed to the early development of the regional center at Chaco Canyon. This may have been associated with a period of favorable rainfall in the Chaco area compared to a difficult time in the north, but the climatic details are not yet clear. Kantner notes that recent evidence has suggested that the prior population in the Chaco area was a lot smaller than had once been thought, but he also notes that there definitely was an existing population in and around Chaco, and that some sites like Pueblo Bonito were already established before this migration. This population seems to have had ties to the south and was likely different ethnically from the people moving in from the north. There is some evidence for violence that might have accompanied the initial stages of the migration, but it appears that the groups reached an accommodation of some sort over time that led to the development and florescence of the Chaco Phenomenon over the next three centuries. Kantner suggests that the instability of the early period, and possible inequities between the groups, may have contributed to this process of “social elaboration,” which is another interesting idea meriting further study. There are some clear continuities in architecture between the earlier villages and the communities that developed at Chaco, but the question of what had changed to make Chaco so much more successful and long-lived than the northern villages remains open.

In closing, Kantner reiterates some of the caveats he has mentioned before about interpreting this emerging picture. Why didn’t everyone join villages? This seems like a particularly important question to me, and one that has not received enough attention in the development of aggregation models. It’s a particular problem for models that emphasis “push” factors like the need for defense in an increasingly crowded landscape, though Kantner suggests that this may have been a bigger factor for immigrant groups entering a potentially hostile new area than for the indigenous groups they encountered. He has more discussion of “pull” factors, such as economies of scale for intensified work on activities like farming, hunting, and craft production, but ultimately suggests that a complex combination of pushes and pulls may account for the notable variation in village forms that we see throughout this period. Another important question is why these early villages failed. Kantner suggests changes in the above-mentioned balance of push/pull factors, as well as the possibility that aggregation created its own new problems and stresses on the emerging social systems. Whatever the details, it seems increasingly clear that the lessons from the complicated processes covered by this book formed the basis for the later emergence of Chaco and the immense changes in the Pueblo world that it would entail.

Sign at State of New Mexico Archives Building, Santa Fe, New Mexico

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Foreshadow: Ideology

Chaco Petroglyph Panel Showing Abstract “Blanket” Designs

Chapter 11 of Crucible of Pueblos, by Rich Wilshusen, Scott Ortman, and Ann Phillips, is called “Processions, Leaders, and Gathering Places,” but I think a more concise description of its main concern is ideology. Specifically, this chapter looks at changes in the ideology of leadership, power, and community organization during the Basketmaker III and Pueblo I periods, as seen through the archaeology of public architecture, the portrayal of processions in rock art, and the reconstruction of related vocabulary through comparative linguistics. Due to this innovative interdisciplinary approach, I found this one of the most interesting chapters in the book. Some of the argumentation and conclusions strike me as either weak or overly speculative, but overall this is a fascinating example of how approaches from very different disciplines can be skillfully combined to produce a more complete picture of the past.

The overall argument in the chapter is fairly straightforward. The authors argue that there were a series of shifts in Pueblo society from the Basketmaker III to Pueblo I periods:

• The overall settlement pattern shifted from dispersed hamlets to aggregated villages.
• The locations for occasional ritual gatherings shifted from symbolically important central locations with public architecture to specific locations within villages that in some cases were likely residences of village leaders who exerted control over rituals they hosted.
• The social ties that sustained communities shifted from personal relationships between individuals to symbolic relationships between abstract corporate entities to which individuals belonged.

The authors see all of these shifts as being ultimately driven by the rapid increase in population from an intensification of agriculture (the so-called “Neolithic Demographic Transition”). The actual evidence for this transition, and its relationship to agriculture, seems a bit thin to me, but at least on a theoretical level it makes sense, and there’s certainly no question that populations were increasing rapidly in the Mesa Verde region (to which this chapter, like several others, essentially confines itself due to the scarcity of comparable data for other areas) during the period they discuss.

From archaeology, the most important shift the authors discuss is the well-known change from dispersed settlements during Basketmaker III to aggregated villages in Pueblo I. (Again, we’re essentially just looking at the greater Mesa Verde area here, without any discussion of the possible Basketmaker III villages at Chaco Canyon.) One aspect of the Basketmaker III settlement pattern that is particularly important is the presence of “isolated” public architecture of presumed ritual function, which in some cases took the form of “great kivas” and in other cases took the form of “dance circles,” the main distinction being whether the structure appears to have had a roof. These structures are generally thought to have hosted occasional rituals that brought in people from throughout the surrounding area and helped to integrate them as a social “community.” In addition to the actual rituals performed, about which we know little to nothing, these events would have provided opportunities to trade, share information, and find marriage partners, all important activities to ensuring the success of the community and its members.

As people began to gather in aggregated villages during the Pueblo I period, the nature of public architecture begins to change. Great kivas are still being used in some villages, but less and less over time, and some villages don’t have them at all. Instead, it appears that some of the integrative functions of the great kivas are being taken over by U-shaped roomblocks with associated “oversized pit structures” that have features suggesting ritual use but, importantly, not in the same way as great kivas. The U-shaped roomblocks appear to have been at least partly residential in function, and they may have served as the residences of emerging village leaders who used the plazas they partly enclosed, as well as the oversized pit structures, to host community rituals that served many of the same functions previously served by great kivas. Unlike the great kivas, however, which appear to have been communal sites not associated with any particular members of the community, these structures would have been under the direct control of the families or kin-groups that owned them, who would therefore have the opportunity to amass ever more status, power, and wealth. There have been suggestions, repeated here, that these structures were the forerunners of the later “great houses” at Chaco and its outlier communities, which seems increasingly plausible as more is known about them. (It’s worth noting, however, that great kivas reappear at Chaco as well.)

So far so good, and this is about as far as the archaeology can take us. These ideas are plausible, but they’re not new. Where this chapter goes further than others, however, is in incorporating evidence from rock art as well. The specific focus is on rock art depicting what appear to be ritual processions. The authors analyze two specific panels in detail. One, from Comb Ridge in southern Utah, is thought to date to the Basketmaker III period and to depict the sort of gathering of dispersed communities at a central ritual site that was argued above to have been typical of this period. The other panel is from near Waterflow in northwestern New Mexico, and it is argued to date to later, after the collapse of the Pueblo I villages in the Central Mesa Verde region but before the rise of Chaco to the south. This site is at a key point along what may have been one of the main routes between those two areas, which may be important.

I won’t go into much detail about the analyses of the two panels, interesting though they are. The main points are that the Comb Ridge appears to depict at least two groups approaching a round great kiva or dance circle site from different directions, possibly reflecting the joining of two previously separate communities into one. The focus is on long lines of human figures, some of which have elaborate regalia or carry possible ritual objects, which may indicate that they represent specific individuals. Referring to an earlier study, the authors suggest that the focus on these rituals in Basketmaker III rock art represents a shift in ideology from earlier Basketmaker II art that focused on life-cycle rituals and individualistic shamanism to a more communal type of ritual associated with the central sites.

There is very little rock art associated with the Pueblo I villages, and no known procession scenes at all. The authors don’t discuss this fact in any detail, but it seems significant as evidence for a shift in ideology associated with the new ritual forms they describe as indicated by the architecture. Yet another shift appears to be indicated by the reappearance of procession scenes during the Pueblo I/Pueblo II transition as represented by the Waterflow panel. Here, the procession is primarily of animals rather than people, and they are approaching a square divided into halves and decorated with abstract designs. The whole panel has much more of an abstract feel, and it includes symbols of authority known from later Pueblo religion such as twin mountain lions who appear to be guarding the square. The authors interpret the square as representing the community, with the animals approaching it possibly being symbols of corporate groups like clans that make it up rather than known individuals. Of particular interest, the authors suggest on the basis of other rock art evidence that the symbols on the square actually represent a specific community, as there are apparently other symbols like this with various abstract symbols that may depict community in a sort of “heraldry” comparable to the city glyphs known from Mesoamerica. There are also intriguing petroglyphs of human figures with these squares as heads, possibly indicating village “heads” or chiefs. This system doesn’t appear to continue into later periods, at least in this form, though it may be worth taking another look at distinctive rock art motifs found at later sites to see if there is any continuity in the symbolism. The so-called “blanket” motifs found in rock art at Chaco are similar at least in form.

So the overall picture from the rock art evidence is of a shift from showing communities as consisting of groups of individual people who gather at a central location on certain occasions to more abstract depictions of communities as consisting of social categories, rather than individuals. This may reflect a further step in the development of community ideology after the first, apparently failed, experiments with village living during Pueblo I. The elaborate system that developed subsequently at Chaco may have been yet another step.

Turning to language, this is a particularly interesting part of the chapter for me given my linguistic background. It is based on Ortman’s dissertation, subsequently turned into a book, which considered linguistics along with other lines of evidence to understand the cultural makeup of the Mesa Verde region in the later Pueblo III period. While several languages from different families are spoken by the modern Pueblos, here the discussion is limited to the Kiowa-Tanoan language family, the only family that is both primarily spoken by Puebloan peoples and complex enough in structure to analyze historically in any detail. The analysis is based on what terms for culturally important items and technologies can be reconstructed to different stages of the language, and how the presence or absence of certain terms relates to when they were introduced in the archaeological record. So, for example, the (Puebloan) Tanoan languages share some terms related to agriculture with the (non-Puebloan) Kiowa language, but lack shared terms for such items as pottery, beans, and the bow and arrow. Since these items were introduced to the northern Southwest in the Basketmaker III period, it appears that Kiowa broke off from the other languages no later than Basketmaker II. The subsequent divisions within Tanoan look a lot shakier to me, but if they do hold up they seem to indicate that the Towa language split off during Basketmaker III, which would have left the language ancestral to Tiwa and Tewa as having been spoken during Pueblo I, possibly in some of the early villages of the Mesa Verde region. Tiwa and Tewa are said to have split after Pueblo I, which the authors of this chapter suggest indicates that it was the collapse of those villages that caused the split.

This is an interesting approach to trying to align the linguistic and archaeological records, and I’m glad people are looking at it. It doesn’t seem to add much to the other two lines of evidence in this specific case, however, and there are some potential issues that make it hard to apply in general. For one, it can be hard to tell if the inability to reconstruct a term to a given protolanguage truly indicates that the item it represents was not present during the period when that protolanguage was spoken, especially in a small language like Kiowa-Tanoan. Terms can be lost in daughter languages in many ways, with the ultimate result being the same in the present language as if it had never existed. However, this is a much more productive approach to the problem of correlating linguistics with archaeology than some others that have been tried, like glottochronology, and it’s definitely worth pursuing to see what insights it can provide.

Another problem, however, is that there are several other Pueblo languages not related to Kiowa-Tanoan, and this type of analysis doesn’t, and can’t, say anything about when and where they might have been spoken. A better approach to try to address the diversity of languages among the Pueblos is to look at loanwords, both between different Pueblo languages and between them and non-Pueblo ones, and try to see what can be inferred about when certain items were introduced to speakers of a given language based on that. There have been some studies along these lines that have given some interesting insights and more work would be useful.

Overall, this chapter is a really interesting approach to trying to correlate different types of analyses to complement each other and get a better answer to a specific question about the past than any one type of analysis individually. At the end the authors call for more work like this, and I second that call. The specific conclusions arrived at in this publication may or may not hold up under further study, but the process it demonstrates for getting them will be helpful in moving forward and getting more complete and reliable answers.

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Foreshadow: Women

“Pithouse Life” Sign at Mesa Verde

Chapter 10 of Crucible of Pueblos, by Richard Wilshusen and Elizabeth Perry, looks at the position and roles of women in early Pueblo society, with a particular focus on how those roles seem to have changed with the economic and demographic changes of the late Basketmaker III and early Pueblo I periods that recent research is bringing into focus. It’s a thought-provoking chapter but in some ways rather odd, with many of its most intriguing proposals resting on what seems like fairly thin evidence.

The chapter looks at three main topics: food production, human reproduction, and gender relations in social power. Its overall thesis is that in the northern Southwest between AD 650 and 850 interrelated changes in food production systems and human reproductive rates led to major changes in gender roles, particularly regarding the division of labor between men and women, that may have led to settlement aggregation into villages and to changes in social power related to trade and ritual. The resulting social structure, in place by the end of the Pueblo I period in at least some areas, was the earliest form of the “Pueblo” society as known from modern ethnography, with its strict division of labor by gender and extension of this gendered ideology to many other domains of life.

Of the three main topics, the authors devote the most attention to the first, and it’s here that their arguments are strongest and most clearly supported by the archaeological evidence. The key change in food production during the period in question is the intensification (not introduction) of maize agriculture as the primary subsistence activity, supplemented by the growing of other crops like beans and squash, by the raising of domesticated turkeys, and by hunting and gathering of wild foods. Recent research has clarified the sequence and extent of this change, although a lot of questions still remain.

As the authors note, one of the most puzzling results of research on early agriculture in the northern Southwest is that maize is now clearly established as having been introduced as early as 2000 BC in several widely spaced parts of the Colorado Plateau (including Chaco Canyon), but for hundreds of years it appears to have remained a minor part of the diet of the groups that used it. It was only in the Basketmaker II period, between 300 BC and AD 300, that maize use became widespread, and even then, according to Wilshusen and Perry, local groups varied widely in the contribution of maize to their diets. There may have been a distinction between immigrant groups from the south that had a heavily agricultural subsistence base and local hunter-gatherers who were gradually incorporating some farming into their lifestyles.

This slow and incomplete adoption of agriculture is in contrast to the situation in other parts of the world where agriculture, once introduced, spread rapidly and quickly replaced hunting and gathering. It’s still not clear why, although Wilshusen and Perry note that as a tropical plant originating in Mexico, maize would have been poorly suited for the harsher climate of more northern latitudes, and that it would have taken some time for people to breed hardier varieties. It is also apparent that the variety of maize initially introduced was small and not as obviously superior to local wild plant foods as later varieties, and that it was initially introduced without an accompanying “package” of other domesticated foods, as was the case with agricultural spreads in other areas. Domesticated squash seems to have been introduced not long after maize, but separately, and domesticated turkeys appear to have been introduced from a different direction altogether, although the timing and details of their domestication remain very murky.

Be that as it may, the main point Wilshusen and Perry make in regard to this slow adoption of maize is that it is likely that women, who based on cross-cultural studies of hunter-gatherers tend to be responsible for gathering of plant foods, were involved in the initial use of maize in the northern Southwest. However, this small-scale introduction of a new food, even one associated with a new type of food production, probably wouldn’t have had a major impact on existing gender roles or division of labor. That would come later.

The full “Neolithic package” appears to have arrived in the northern Southwest between AD 300 and 600, with components including a larger, more productive variety of maize known as Harinosa de Ocho; beans, newly introduced from the south; greater use of turkeys for both meat and feathers; and greater investment in facilities for food storage and processing. The greater productivity enabled by these innovations led to rapid population growth and the spread of agricultural groups over the landscape, in striking contrast to the lack of such growth with the initial introduction of maize much earlier. Wilshusen and Perry associate these developments with the transition from Basketmaker II to Basketmaker III, as well as with the major changes in the roles of women that they document.

Additional support for these changes in food production come from complementary changes in storage facilities and grinding tools. As documented in the well-studied Dolores area, the importance of storage seems to have risen over the course of the late Basketmaker III and Pueblo I periods from AD 650 to 875. Storage facilities changed from small pit rooms isolated from the main dwellings to more secure and more solidly built storage rooms directly attached to living rooms and only accessible from them. These typically consisted of two storage rooms at the back of each living room, the beginning of the “suite” layout that would continue to be a key architectural feature into Chacoan times. It is possible that at least initially these paired rooms were used to store two years’ harvests, one in each room, so as to provide a subsistence buffer against drought and other unexpected problems.

There was also a shift over this period in grinding implements from basin metates with one-handed manos to much more efficient trough metates with two-handed manos. Beyond this shift, a greater variety of grinding tools became common over time. Together with the storage data, this indicates an increased importance of grinding as a component of food preparation. In the modern Pueblos grinding is a female-associated activity, part of an overall suite of food-preparation tasks accomplished by women that also includes shucking, shelling, drying, and storing corn. Of these tasks, however, grinding is considered particularly important to the female role, and it is an important part of female puberty ceremonies (of which the Navajo Kinaaldá, of clear Pueblo origin, is probably the best known). Men, on the other hand, are responsible for planting and harvesting the corn, as well as protecting the fields. This seems to be a change from the presumed hunter-gatherer system in which women were generally responsible for gathering plant foods as well as processing them, and Wilshusen and Perry suggest that it may have arisen in early Pueblo times as fields at greater distances from residence locations in villages became increasingly vulnerable to attack by enemies, prompting men’s role as warriors to encompass guarding fields and, in time, tending them as well.

Another important female task in modern Pueblos is making pottery, and this too seems to have become increasingly important with the expansion of agriculture in early Pueblo times. With more use of crops and additional cultigens such as beans, pots would have become more important for food preparation, and with the number of vessels needed and their short use-lives of 1 to 6 years women would have had to be constantly making new ones. (This is of course assuming that most pots for domestic use were made by the family unit itself, which may well be true for this early period but was not necessarily later on.) Based on detailed study of an isolated Pueblo I hamlet in the Central Mesa Verde area, Wilshusen and Perry estimate the following assortment of vessels for a typical household at any given time:

• 2 to 7 small cooking jars
• 1 to 4 medium cooking jars
• 0 to 2 large cooking jars
• 1 bowl
• 0 to 3 ollas for water
• 2 to 3 other vessels
• 10 to 20 sherds from broken pots used as containers or tools

Keeping a household supplied with all these pots would have been a major part of a woman’s domestic labor, in addition to the food processing tasks mentioned above, along with other major responsibilities such as caring for children.

And speaking of children, Wilshusen and Perry go on to discuss human reproduction and the apparent changes in it associated with the other changes they identify. The two main changes they note are shifts in the use of cradleboards and an apparent increase in the societal fertility rate. This part is somewhat less thorough than the food production part of the paper, but it does still identify some intriguing evidence for change.

First, cradleboards. The authors note that study of these items, in which infants were bundled while they were very young,  has been surprisingly limited, despite their relevance to an important event that has long been recognized: the beginning of evidence for “cranial deformation,” or the reshaping of skulls as a result of prolonged contact with certain kinds of cradleboards in infancy. The shift from “undeformed” to “deformed” (the terminology is very problematic, as there is no evidence of health problems from the practice) crania is traditionally associated with the transition from Basketmaker III to Pueblo I, and early in the history of Southwestern archaeology the change in head shape was even taken as evidence for a population replacement. (That was in the early twentieth century when anthropologists put much more emphasis on skull shapes in defining populations than they do now.) It is now generally thought that the distinction is actually due to the use of soft versus hard cradleboards, but recent research that Wilshusen and Perry discuss suggests that both types of cradleboards were present in both Basketmaker and Pueblo times. Thus, the shift in cranial shape is actual due not to a change in the type of cradleboard but in how it was used. The main changes that actually seem to have occurred in the Pueblo I period are:

• Foot rests on cradleboards disappear.
• Hoods become more common.
• Construction is more expedient.

According to Wilshusen and Perry, these changes together indicate that women had less need to move while carrying children in cradleboards, but that they needed more cradleboards overall, possibly indicating that they had more children. This part of the paper does not go into much detail about where these conclusions come from, but the overall conclusions is that this is further evidence that women were more tied to the domestic sphere in Pueblo I, and possibly that they had more children.

On that note, demographic data appear to indicate that the population increases seen in at least some part of the Pueblo world during Pueblo I were due largely to natural increase after initial immigration into new areas. The best data come from the Central Mesa Verde and Eastern Mesa Verde areas, both of which seem to show this pattern. Prehistoric demographics are notoriously hard to reconstruct, but based on the large recent data sets from major excavation projects Wilshusen and Perry propose that a Neolithic Demographic Transition (a major increase in fertility associated with the beginning of intensive agriculture) began in the northern Southwest around AD 300, with major consequences over time for women in particular, given their gender-defined economic roles. This is comparable to evidence seen in other parts of the world with the beginning of agriculture. The key point here for the role of women is that with increasing rates of both childbirth and survival of children beyond infancy, families would have become larger, increasing the amount of domestic labor required of women to maintain their households given the gendered division of labor presumed to have developed. This would be one explanation for the increased importance of food processing mentioned above.

Finally, Wilshusen and Perry talk about exchange and social power. The discussion here is very abbreviated, and relies heavily on references to the next chapter in the book (which is a little odd), but the basic idea is that rock art evidence shows a shift in social power to male leadership of ritual in late Basketmaker III, continuing into Pueblo I. Female economic roles expressed in matrilocal residence may have driven men to make external trade alliances, which over time developed into new ritual systems focused on important lineages within villages rather than large public rituals at central places not necessarily associated with a specific lineage or community. Matrilineal lineages were still important, and the focus of key rituals, but changing gender roles may have involved an increased role for the men of the lineage in certain types of rituals. Burial evidence from Ridges Basin may support some of these ideas, with striking differences in male and female burials, particularly in the types of exotic goods included. Both women and men were buried with exotic items occasionally, but the specific types of items varied, suggesting gendered access to different trade systems. There are also geographic differences within the basin suggesting different community connections and ideological systems. This section is intriguing but very sketchy, even compared to the rest of the paper. More detailed discussion of some of these ideas will have to wait for the next chapter.

Overall, the conclusion of this chapter is that over the course of the early Pueblo period gender roles shifted in a way that evolved into the system(s) that are well known from the modern Pueblos. This may have been a response, in part to the demographic shift resulting from the development of intensive agriculture, with its resulting higher birthrates and changes to the roles of women. Women’s labor was key to this transition, but it’s not clear that it was actually good for women as a class on net. There has been some discussion of the idea of “parallel status hierarchies,” in which men and women had different tasks but both allowed meaningful status through high achievement. However, later evidence from Pueblo sites shows that women were often excluded from access to high-value resources such as meat, and that their graves were generally less elaborate than men’s (a contrast to the Pueblo I situation in at least some areas). It doesn’t appear that many strictly comparable studies of these issues have been done of the Pueblo I period itself, so it’s hard to say how these changes felt for the women who were living through them. The authors of this paper seem to lean toward thinking the changes were not actually beneficial for those women, but the evidence is thin enough that it’s not clear.

Above I have summarized the arguments of this chapter as best I could, but it’s worth noting that the argumentation of the chapter itself is highly abbreviated, and summarizing it has required a lot of assumptions and interpretive leaps. It kind of reads like this paper is an abbreviated version of a longer argument, with some important parts left out. Nevertheless, it raises a lot of interesting questions that have rarely been addressed in Southwestern archaeology, especially regarding the early Pueblo period, and for that alone it is valuable.

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Foreshadow: The Rio Grande

Rio Grande from Coronado State Monument, Bernalillo, New Mexico

Chapter seven of Crucible of Pueblos brings us to the final geographical region covered by the volume: the Rio Grande Valley, at the eastern edge of Pueblo settlement for the period in question. As it happens, I’m currently visiting my mom in Albuquerque, so I’m actually in this region as I write this. (Today also happens to be my birthday; I’m 31.) The chapter is by Steven Lakatos and C. Dean Wilson, and in a lot of ways it echoes an earlier paper by Lakatos about the Rio Grande Developmental Period that I have discussed before. This chapter, however, discusses only the Early Developmental Period, defined as AD 600 to 900, and primarily focuses on the part of the region that the authors called the Middle Rio Grande Valley, defined as lying between the Rio Puerco of the East on the west, the Sandia and Manzano Mountains on the east, the Isleta area on the south, and the La Bajada escarpment on the north. This is because agricultural populations only occupied this restricted area of the region during the Early Developmental, expanding north of La Bajada only after AD 900 when there was a huge increase in regional population at the beginning of the Late Developmental Period.

The key point Lakatos and Wilson make about the Rio Grande is that the Early Developmental period was a time of low population density and gradual growth, with little change in material culture over hundreds of years. This is in striking contrast to the “boom-and-bust” pattern now richly documented for the Mesa Verde region during the contemporaneous Pueblo I period there. The picture of continuity is reminiscent of that proposed by the authors of the previous chapter for the Little Colorado region, but it’s worth noting that the major data gaps that plague the study of that region are less of an issue for the Rio Grande, which has a long history of intensive archaeological research continuing to the present day. Furthermore, Lakatos and Wilson present several lines of evidence supporting their conclusions, which seem pretty solid to me. Based on this evidence, it really does seem like the Early Developmental was a time of low population, slow growth, and cultural continuity.

As Lakatos and Wilson note, this is actually a rather surprising conclusion in the context of many theories about early agricultural societies. Most strikingly, there is no evidence here for a “Neolithic Demographic Transition,” in which the increased productivity of agricultural societies compared to hunter-gatherers leads to massive growth among early agriculturalists, with all sorts of ecological and social consequences. Some have argued that the Mesa Verde boom-and-bust cycle is a result of this process. In the Rio Grande, however, the adoption of agriculture does not seem to have resulted in this sort of population growth. This is definitely not for lack of arable land, as the Rio Grande Valley is one of the richest agricultural areas in the northern Southwest, and it was intensively farmed later in prehistory and into historic times. Rather, Lakatos and Wilson argue that the richness of the Rio Grande environment allowed for a mixed farming-foraging economic pattern with high residential mobility, in contrast to the more agriculture-dependent societies further west. The greater importance of foraging versus farming is supported by evidence from faunal assemblages and wear patterns on human remains, and the mobility by the fact that residential pit structures were rarely remodeled.

In keeping with low density and high mobility, the settlement pattern consisted of scattered hamlets, with only occasional evidence for “communities” of hamlets loosely grouped together with possible communal architecture such as “protokivas” or oversized pit structures. Sites were mainly located along the major rivers of the region: the Rio Grande itself, the Rio Puerco of the East, the Jemez. Architecture consisted of residential pit structures and surrounding activity areas, generally oriented toward the east or southeast (perhaps oriented to the winter solstice).

Rio Grande people also appear to have been in closer contact with remaining hunter-gatherers than populations further west. It’s not clear if Early Developmental populations resulted from the adoption of agriculture by existing hunter-gatherers in the Middle Rio Grande Valley or if there was some migration of already agricultural populations involved, but in any case the areas north of La Bajada and east of the Sandias/Manzanos were definitely still occupied by hunter-gatherers during this period, and it’s clear that there was a lot of contact between the two groups. This may have contributed to the greater importance of foraging to Early Developmental people and their differences from other Pueblo populations.

Sandia Mountains from Tent Rocks National Monument

All that said, the Early Developmental people definitely were part of the Pueblo cultural tradition, and their material culture shows a lot of connections to populations to both the west and south. This is particularly true of pottery, which was dominated by plain gray ware similar to that of late Basketmaker groups on the Colorado Plateau, but with small amounts of a decorated white ware, San Marcial Black-on-white, which shows stylistic influence from Mogollon populations to the south but with technological characteristics more like those of early white wares to the west. Lakatos and Wilson mention one model of Southwestern prehistory under which early “strong patterns” of material culture originated in the San Juan Basin (ancestral to the Chaco system) and in the river valleys of the Mogollon region, with the Middle Rio Grande forming a “weak pattern” with influences from both but in varying combinations.

The clear picture that emerges from this is of a small population of forager-farmers moving around within the Middle Rio Grande area but maintaining their basic cultural features with little to no change for about 300 years, from AD 600 to 900. Then, in a development that is likely very important but poorly understood, there was a massive increase in population at the same time that agricultural groups for the first time began to occupy the higher areas about La Bajada. Lakatos and Wilson note that the timing of this change, while not as precise as might be ideal, seems to correspond closely to the collapse of the late Pueblo I villages in the Mesa Verde region and the major population movements involved with the depopulation of that area, including the apparent influx of people into the Chaco Basin that likely laid the groundwork for the Chaco Phenomenon.

It seems very plausible that the increase in population in the Rio Grande was linked to these developments, though exactly how is unclear. Material culture actually remained fairly stable and consistent with Early Developmental patterns across this transition, although architecture did become more standardized and San Marcial Black-on-white was replaced by Red Mesa Black-on-white as the main decorated ceramic type. The latter change, especially, suggests influence from the west, as Red Mesa is the main decorated type in the Chaco area and other parts of the southern Colorado Plateau during this same period. It’s possible, as Lakatos and Wilson suggest, that the increased population in the Chaco Basin directly spurred Middle Rio Grande populations to move northward, although it’s not clear how exactly this would have worked. Other possibilities are that populations from the intermediate areas, such as the Puerco of the East, began to move eastward in the Rio Grande Valley as a result of the population movements immediately to the west of them, perhaps pushing existing Rio Grande populations north, or that western populations were moving directly to the Northern Rio Grande area above La Bajada, “leap-frogging” existing populations in the Middle Rio Grande.

The fact that material culture continued to show local Rio Grande features throughout the region, however, suggests that some level of assimilation or cultural accommodation between the locals and immigrants was involved, rather than a more directly confrontational situation. It’s noteworthy that Lakatos and Wilson don’t discuss evidence for warfare or defensive features at all, which of course doesn’t mean those things didn’t exist but does suggest that they may have been less prevalent than in some other regions.

Turquoise-Encrusted Cow Skull, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Another thing Lakatos and Wilson don’t discuss, but which seems particularly important to understanding these relationships, is turquoise, specifically that from the well-known mines in the Cerrillos Hills east of the Sandias. Turquoise is of course strongly associated with Chaco, and while not all of the turquoise there has turned out to be from Cerrillos, a substantial portion of it definitely was. Evidence for increased connections between the San Juan Basin and the Rio Grande area at the same time as the rise of Chaco as a regional center is very intriguing in this light. Could increasing demand for turquoise at Chaco have led to the Cerrillos mines being a “pull” factor leading western groups into the Rio Grande Valley? Could the mines have even led local Rio Grande groups, or mixed groups of locals and immigrants, to move further east, across the mountains and even up over La Bajada into the Santa Fe area, which may have become more attractive as increased immigration reduced the supply of land in the Middle Rio Grande? And what about those remnant hunter-gatherer groups east of the Sandias and north of La Bajada? What happened to them? Were they attacked and defeated by the encroaching farmers? Pushed out into areas further north and east? Assimilated into agricultural society, which even in the Late Developmental period had a strong foraging component? There are a lot of questions about this period in this area, and very little evidence on which to base any answers. Lakatos and Wilson recognize this and suggest some research directions that would be helpful in answering the remaining questions, although they don’t point out as many as I have here.

Overall, this is a very informative chapter that brings into the discussion of Pueblo I societies an area that is often left out of these discussions. It’s an area of crucial importance for understanding regional dynamics throughout the northern Southwest, however, so I’m glad it was included in this volume. This chapter concludes the geographical summaries in the book; the remaining chapters cover various thematic topics of interest in understanding the Early Pueblo period as a whole.

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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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Foreshadow: Eastern Mesa Verde

Animas River, Durango, Colorado

The fourth chapter of Crucible of Pueblos discusses the eastern portion of the Mesa Verde region, essentially the northern portion of the watershed of the San Juan River from the La Plata drainage east to the San Juan headwaters. This area has seen less research than some other parts of the Southwest, but several major salvage projects in recent decades have added a lot of data on Pueblo I period settlement in particular. The most important of these has been the Animas-La Plata Project associated with the inundation of Ridges Basin to create Lake Nighthorse south of Durango. These projects haven’t revolutionized our understanding of the Pueblo I period the way the Dolores Project did in the Central Mesa Verde region in the 1980s, but they have added large bodies of systematically collected data to broaden our understanding of the period.

The picture that emerges from this evidence shows the Pueblo I period to have been a dynamic, complex time in this region. Indeed, in some respects “chaotic” might be an appropriate descriptor. Population movement, both within the region and between it and other regions nearby, was frequent, sites were short-lived, and evidence for violence is abundant. The population fluctuated wildly but was never very large compared to other areas, but even this small population seems to have been culturally and perhaps ethnically diverse, which may have contributed to the instability and violence. Some of the earliest aggregated villages in the northern Southwest arose in this region during the eighth century AD, but they all appear to have been highly unstable: none lasted more than a few decades, and most appear to have met violent ends. Perhaps relatedly, these villages never held more than a small portion of the overall regional population, in contrast to early villages in some other regions. By the end of the Pueblo I period around AD 900 most parts of the region were largely depopulated, with the residents apparently moving primarily to the south, where many of them likely ended up at Chaco Canyon and were involved in the rise of the Chaco Phenomenon over the course of the tenth and early eleventh centuries.

The authors of this chapter divide their region into four “districts”: La Plata, Durango, Piedra, and Navajo Reservoir/Fruitland. While showing similarities in material culture suggesting connections with each other, the districts have markedly different demographic trajectories, and it seems clear that there was significant population movement among them over the course of the Pueblo I period.

Despite an earlier Basketmaker II occupation, Basketmaker III period settlement was limited to nonexistent in most of the districts, implying that the Pueblo I occupation was primarily the result of migration into the region. Only the La Plata district shows clear evidence for a small BMIII occupation, and even this is probably too small to account on its own for the larger population in the district during Pueblo I. It appears, then, that beginning in the AD 720s there was a migration of people into the La Plata and Durango districts, probably from the south. Site densities increased markedly around 750, especially around Durango, suggesting a further wave of migration, again from the south. It was at this time that the earliest villages began to develop in these areas, although most of the population continued to live in widely scattered hamlets and individual residences. These villages were short-lived and seem to have collapsed in the early 800s, in some cases with evidence for intense violence including, at Sacred Ridge in Ridges Basin, the earliest evidence for the sort of “extreme processing” (probably including cannibalism) of human remains that would recur periodically in later periods of Pueblo prehistory.

The collapse of the early villages in the Durango district appears to have coincided with a general depopulation of that district, with residents emigrating in multiple directions. Some went west and appear to have contributed to the rise of large villages in the Central Mesa Verde region, particularly in the Dolores area, where one large and well-documented community, Grass Mesa Village, shows evidence in its material culture for strong ties to the east. Other Durango people may have gone south into the Frances Mesa area in the lower Animas River valley, possibly mixing with other groups migrating north at the same time. This occupation was short-lived and may have ended with the people moving north into the Dolores area to join the villages there. Some Durango people may also have gone east to form the first Pueblo I occupation in the Piedra district, although this area has seen less research than others and the picture isn’t as clear. Recent surveys do suggest that the Piedra was somewhat marginal to developments elsewhere in the region during Pueblo I, and that its population was both smaller than had been thought and mostly limited to the late Pueblo I period. The fate of the La Plata population is less clear, but there is a definite decline in site numbers after AD 800 coinciding with an increased number of sites in the Mancos River drainage to the west, suggesting emigration to the west there as well.

Chimney Rock Great House

As it turned out, the Dolores villages weren’t very stable either, and after their collapse in the mid- to late ninth century people seem to have migrated back into the eastern Mesa Verde region. A surge of immigration into the Fruitland/Navajo Reservoir district after about 880 contributed to the highest regional population of the whole Pueblo I period, although it still wasn’t very high (3,000 people at most regionwide, and likely more like 2,000). The Piedra district also saw a considerable increase in population at this time. The Fruitland/Navajo Reservoir occupation was short-lived, with more evidence of violent ends for some village sites, and it seems that most or all of the people moved south, with at least some of them joining the growing communities in and around Chaco Canyon. There may have been some migration south from the Piedra district as well, but it continued to be occupied into the Pueblo II period after 900. The Piedra people seem to have been somewhat isolated from developments elsewhere in the Pueblo world during early Pueblo II, which is unsurprising given that they were left quite isolated geographically by the depopulation of the Animas drainage and Navajo Reservoir area. They don’t seem to have been completely cut off, however, and ongoing contact with Chaco in particular is suggested by the development of the Chimney Rock great house with its remarkable astronomical alignments in the eleventh century.

There are several noteworthy characteristics of this pattern of settlement and migration, which the authors of this chapter point out. One is the obvious importance of population movement, versus natural increase or decrease, in explaining the wild demographic swings both in the region as a whole and among its individual districts during this period. It was a very dynamic period, when people rarely lived in the same place for more than two or three generations. It’s not clear entirely why, but one reason is likely linked to one of the other noteworthy characteristics: widespread violence, including some of the most extreme violent incidents in the whole archaeological record of the Southwest. Interestingly, much of this violence, including the “extreme processing” incident at Sacred Ridge, appears to have been linked to internal conflicts within communities, especially the early villages. This may in turn explain why relatively few people in this region lived in villages, although it still leaves open the question of why anyone did. The authors suggest that one factor may have been the perception of safety in numbers in a chaotic era, although this ultimately proved to be illusory. It’s not clear to what extent warfare between communities was actually occurring, however, and the widespread popularity of a scattered settlement pattern suggests it may not have been that major a concern for most people. On the other hand, palisades around individual residents units are fairly common in the region, so it may be primarily a matter of different strategies for dealing with violence.

One other noteworthy thing about the violence is that the “extreme processing” phenomenon appears to have been exclusive to the eastern Mesa Verde region during this period. This is interesting because in later periods it occurs in other regions, most notably in the Central Mesa Verde region during the mid-twelfth century, where it is possibly associated with the collapse of the Chaco system. There has been much dispute and discussion about the occurrence of cannibalism as part of at least some of these assemblages, which I’ve discussed at length before. The fact that it appears earliest in the eastern Mesa Verde region during Pueblo I, when it appears to be limited to that region, adds an important piece of context for understanding the phenomenon. While the occurrence of ritual cannibalism in Mesoamerica has led some to look there for the roots of cannibalism in the Southwest, there are some important differences in the apparent practices behind the assemblages that make a Mesoamerican source difficult to document, and if the eastern Mesa Verde region was in fact the part of the Southwest where these practices originated that makes the Mesoamerican connection even more tenuous. While the exact connections between specific Basketmaker and Pueblo populations in different areas are hard to pin down, it’s generally thought that the eastern Basketmakers were both ancestral to later Pueblo populations in the same areas and descended from earlier Archaic populations. Importantly, these eastern groups generally show much less evidence for Mesoamerican influence than western groups, among whom “extreme processing” events are both much rarer and, when they do occur, much later than in the east. Obviously it’s not that there was no Mesoamerican influence among eastern groups, since they did have maize agriculture and so forth, but there’s much less evidence for specific, direct influence than in the west. This implies that “extreme processing,” including cannibalism, may actually have been a practice that developed indigenously in the eastern Mesa Verde region and spread to other parts of the northern Southwest as part of the widespread population movements following Pueblo I.

Finally, the violent and chaotic nature of the Pueblo I period in the eastern Mesa Verde region, whatever the underlying reasons for it, adds some context for the attractiveness of new social formations in other regions, such as the Pueblo I villages in the Dolores area and the emerging great-house communities of early Pueblo II in and around Chaco. While the Dolores villages were not ultimately able to deliver the kind of peace and stability that immigrants from the eastern Mesa Verde region may have been looking for, Chaco apparently was. Furthermore, once Chaco rose to regional prominence in the eleventh century it was able to extend that peace and stability over an unprecedentedly large area of the northern Southwest, including the eastern Mesa Verde region itself. Understanding how the system that emerged in Chaco Canyon was able to achieve this remarkable feat when no one had succeeded at anything like it before is one of the most important questions in Southwestern prehistory, and it is still very much an unanswered one. One important piece of the puzzle, however, is clearly the Pueblo I context in the Chaco area itself, and it is to this that we now turn.

Chaco Street in Aztec, New Mexico

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Foreshadow: Southeastern Utah

Utah Welcome Sign

The third chapter of Crucible of Pueblos deals with the western part of the Mesa Verde or Northern San Juan region, which basically corresponds to what is now the southeastern corner of Utah. In this context the area is bounded by Cedar Mesa on the west and the Abajo Mountains on the north, as well as by the borders with Colorado and Arizona on the east and south. This is a fairly standard way to define this area archaeologically except that the western boundary is more restrictive than usual, which appears to mainly be a decision based on the near-total lack of sites dated to the Pueblo I period west of the eastern edge of Cedar Mesa. (There are actually Pueblo sites dating to this period much further west in southwestern Utah and southern Nevada, the so-called “Virgin Anasazi,” but they aren’t included in this book at all for some reason.)

The authors divide their study area into a series of physiographic sub-regions based primarily on elevation, which is a useful way to track changes in occupation patterns over the course of the period they discuss. It’s also a different approach to defining sub-regions than most of the other chapters in the book use. These sub-regions are important because the differences in precipitation and growing season length among them seem to have been important factors behind shifting settlement patterns during the period of interest. These shifts seem to have mainly taken place across the region rather than separately in spatial sub-regions such as drainages, as was the case in some other regions.

One way this region differs from others, and especially from the Central and Eastern Mesa Verde regions, is that there has been a relative lack of large-scale salvage excavation projects to provide large amounts of detailed archaeological data. Instead, most data is from surveys and small-scale excavations, and detailed chronological information in particular is missing for most sites that have been recorded. Rough dating of sites to Pecos Classification period at best based on frequencies of a few ceramic types is the norm here, which limits the comparability of data on trends in settlement over time. Nevertheless, the authors of this chapter do their best to come up with a coherent narrative of settlement during the Basketmaker III and Pueblo I periods in this area, which seems to have been an important one for understanding the cultural development of early farming populations and the origins of aggregated villages.

The most striking pattern in the population dynamics of this region in the Basketmaker III and Pueblo I periods is of apparent cycles of population growth and decline on the scale of decades and of greater magnitude than can be explain by internal demographic processes, implying migration into and out of the region multiple times. Most interestingly, these cycles appear to be largely complementary to similar cycles in other nearby regions, especially the Central Mesa Verde region just to the east. This strongly implies that one of the major factors in population changes in both these regions was movement between them.

To go into greater detail, the story told in this chapter begins in the seventh century AD with the expansion of Basketmaker III populations across the region from the narrow area of Basketmaker II settlement along the San Juan River and its major tributaries. The authors attribute this expansion in part to the introduction of beans and pottery, which freed farming populations from dependence on outcrops of limestone to cook with their corn for nitrogen-fixing purposes. Population spread especially into the upland areas with deep soils well-suited to dry farming. Over the course of the Basketmaker III period scattered hamlets began to consolidate into “proto-villages” with public architecture such as oversized pit structures surrounded by scattered households. The authors note the similarity of this pattern to the later Pueblo II great house communities, which is indeed an interesting parallel.

There appears to have been a regional population decline in the early eighth century, although this may be an artifact of the limited data set and difficulty assigning sites to precise time periods. In any case, there is evidence of a noticeable population increase after AD 750, with several villages of tightly clustered households containing public architecture appearing, along with a considerable number of smaller residential sites and a few sites in highly defensive locations, especially at the western edge of the region near Cedar Mesa. The population increase was accompanied by the introduction of a strikingly different type of pottery, Abajo Red-on-orange, which shows many similarities to pottery from the Mogollon region far to the south and likely reflects long-distance migration of some sort. There were still many continuities in architecture and other aspects of material culture, however, which suggests that these migrants combined with local populations rather than replacing them.

The largest and most famous of the villages that developed during this early Pueblo I period is Alkali Ridge Site 13, excavated by J. O. Brew in the 1940s. This site consisted of a series of long, continuous arcing roomblocks, made up of “room suites” of one “habitation” room backed by two smaller “storage” rooms. This is a pattern that would become standard for Pueblo I villages at a slightly later date, and would endure in various forms for centuries. Site 13 consists of six of these arcs, four of which were excavated by Brew. Three of the arcs excavated by Brew also had oversized pit structures with highly formalized features suggesting possible use as public architecture of some sort.

There were other village-sized sites that were established at this time, although few have been excavated. These are among the earliest sites of this size and level of organization in the northern Southwest, and continuities with later sites in other regions suggest they may have been very influential on later developments.

In addition to the early village sites, defensive sites on high, inaccessible promontories began to appear during the early Pueblo I period. These sites have not been studied in any depth, and little is known about them. Some appear to have evidence of extensive residential populations and/or public architecture, while others don’t. One intriguing pattern is an apparent line of them at the western edge of the region along the eastern margins of Cedar Mesa. This, combined with the lack of Pueblo sites to the west, has suggested to some researchers that there was a buffer area or “no-man’s-land” between the Pueblo population in southeastern Utah and early Fremont populations northwest of the Colorado River during this period. It’s worth noting, however, that there were also a few of these apparent defensive sites well within the Mesa Verdean Pueblo region, including the Fortified Spur site near the Colorado-Utah border, so tensions may have been internal as well as external at this point.

During the middle Pueblo I period from AD 825 to 880 there appears to have been a regional population decline, although again this may be due in part to data gaps. It is noteworthy, however, that this is the period of a major population increase in the Central Mesa Verde region to the east, including the formation of the well-known cluster of aggregated villages in the Dolores River Valley, some of which show some striking similarities to earlier Utah villages such as Site 13. It is reasonable to postulate that a pattern of emigration from southeast Utah into southwest Colorado led to this pattern. Southeast Utah wasn’t completely depopulated, however. In addition to scattered small sites throughout the region, there are a very few larger communities firmly dated to this period, including an intriguing site on Elk Ridge called the Pillars that has extensive evidence for middle Pueblo I residential architecture and some tentative evidence for public architecture as well. There are several other sites in the same general area that have more tentative evidence for occupation during this time, and it seems this may have been one of a handful of population clusters in the region during a time of otherwise low population.

After AD 880 population rapidly increased again, and many large villages were built between this point and AD 950. This was a period of rapid depopulation in the Central Mesa Verde region, again suggesting a complementary pattern of migration between the two regions. Many of these new village sites were in highly defensive locations, including some that were nowhere near the frontiers of the region. There is also an intriguing pattern of continuity in location between these early villages and later Pueblo II great house communities from the eleventh century. This pattern is made even more intriguing by two phenomena:

1. Some of these sites, such as Red Knobs and Nancy Patterson Village, have evidence for masonry roomblocks similar to the “proto-great houses” known from many sites in New Mexico in and around Chaco Canyon during this same time.
2. There seems to have been another depopulation of southeastern Utah around AD 950, implying that population at these sites was not actually continuous despite these similarities.

It has long seemed to me that southeastern Utah is a crucial area for understanding Chaco. There are several lines of evidence suggesting that at least some people living in Chaco Canyon and involved in its rise to regional dominance had strong ties to Utah, and I suspect those ties were more important in the emergence of the Chaco system than has been generally recognized. This chapter adds some much-needed context on the earlier history of Pueblo populations in Utah, and to me it strongly reinforces those ideas about the importance of Utah to Chaco. The exact nature of these relationships and their importance is still unclear, and the relatively sketchy data available make it harder to figure out, but it still definitely seems like there is something important here.

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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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