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. But still not an "imperium."

Update: See near the end of this piece for arguments on how roads have been overinterpreted by the likes of Lekson, even if not watercourses. 

As Vivian’s review of Chaco roads research indicates, however, this interpretation was based on out-of-date and incomplete data (Vivian, 1997a,b). Both he (Vivian, 1997a) and Roney (1992) note that only three roads can be shown to extend outside the Chaco core area: the Great North Road, the South Road, and the Coyote Canyon Road. Thus the roads are neither a network nor are they regional in scale, because most extend away from Chacoan great houses and other community features in short segments.

The piece goes on to note many of the shorter roads may have had cosmological or ritual significance. That could tie them back to Chaco as a great religious center, but not more than that.

And, with both of the above two links, the idea of a Chacoan "imperium" just falls apart. It could have been a trade center as well as a cultural and religious center. I think most scholars simply don't take into account how hard it would be to maintain an empire without beasts of burden, especially rideable ones, and without wheeled vehicles. Look how relatively small the Maya and Mexica were. Even the Inca world was more confederation than empire until the last couple of decades before the Spanish arrived, and at least they and earlier groupings in that portion of South America had the llama as domesticate beast of burden.

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.