New thoughts on Chaco Canyon

 

This piece in an anthropology journal, though focused on agriculture at Pueblo Alto, is very interesting in other ways.

The biggie? I'd long ago read Steve Lekson's "The Chaco Meridian," the biggest proponent of a quasi-imperial "Chaco culture," complete with looking at a vast network of roads running as far north as the San Juan, south to somewhere near today's Thoreau, New Mexico, etc.

What if thse weren't roads? What if they were stone watercourses to aid in tricking water to the Chaco complex? Now, Wetherbee Dorshow admits that in some cases, we could have places built as roads where the water-funneling came along for the ride. But, they also say that people like Lekson might be like Percival Lowell and his canals on Mars on how many roads they claim to have found. Dorshow doesn't use that analogy themselves, but it came to my mind.

Per research in the Bluff area by Winston Hurst, some roads in the Chaco area most likely are roads — roads that connected local sites in a 20-30 mile radius. But that still doesn't mean they were built for an "imperial Chaco" development.

Or, we may find the flip side to be true. Additional research may indicate that the "Chaco phenomenon" was exported to places like Cedar Ridge as well as Mesa Verde.

Anyway, I think the "Chaco Meridian" idea springs from an old tussle in Anasazi archaeoastronomy between maximizers and minimizers.

It's also likely that, although they had some influences on each other, Mogollon and Ancestral Puebloan cultures evolved largely independently, and that it was partially if not primarily coincidence that both peaked at about the same time. And, related to that? The Hurst link makes clear that, just in the Four Corners, in the "culmination" period of the 1200s before dispersal of Ancestral Puebloans to Hopi, Rio Grande Valley, etc., that different strategies for defense, etc., were being followed at different sites.

None of this is to say that pre-Columbian American Indians didn't have empires or similar. Look at the Triple Alliance ("Aztec"). On a smaller land scale before them, the Mayans. The Inca in South America. But, archaeologists have to be careful not to read things into the record.

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The second is not limited to Chaco, though that is its focus, but rather to Anasazi culture in general. And, it's that cannibalism-pusher Christy Turner, to be blunt, cheats on some of his own research classifications of some individual sites as surely cannibalistic when they're missing one site criterion from a list of which he says sites much have all criteria to count. Kerriann Marden notes that such is Turner's domination of the discussion that, in the past, even a Kurt Dongoske has felt he had to respond to all of Turner's talking points, rather than questioning his methodology or conclusions.

Beyond that, the piece's focus is that we still probably don't know enough about Chacoan burial practices to say what is typical and what is atypical. Look at the United States, after all. Just 170 years ago, pre-Civil War, embalming was not a deal. Then it was. And today, and even going back about 20 years ago, now, cremation is the most common inhumation practice.