Social Variability in the Chaco System

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Social Variability in the Chaco System
Preliminary Introduction to a dissertation by
Daniel A. Meyer
Dept. of Archaeology
University of Calgary
Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Please do not cite without author's permission

Chaco Canyon has been a powerful draw for both academic archaeologists and the general public in the Southwest U.S. since Europeans were first introduced to the ruins in the nineteenth century. One cannot help but be impressed by the series of large pueblos, roads, and agricultural features in Chaco Canyon and throughout the San Juan Basin in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. With its large scale and fascinating complexity, Chaco continues to be a focus of archaeological investigation, despite already being one of the most researched prehistoric cultural manifestations in the world. It is not only its outward appearance, however, that accounts for Chaco's endurance as a research topic. Although it is nearly impossible to get Chacoan researchers to agree on many issues, most, if not all, agree on this point: the series of great houses and roads comprising the Chaco Phenomenon represent a system of sociopolitical complexity and structure not seen in the ethnographic Pueblo world.

The lack of a clear ethnographic analog among the Pueblos creates a problem for the study of a social phenomenon that is clearly more complex and larger than most prehistoric North American social systems, yet not on the scale of the urban civilizations in Mesoamerica, South America, and the Old World. Being located between the ends of this conceptual continuum creates an enormous conceptual problem for Chacoan studies. Currently, Steve Lekson (1983:193) is probably correct when he characterizes the remains in Chaco as tending towards urbanization, what I would call incipient urbanism, brought on by the classic factors that Childe (1950) mentions such as surplus (Sebastian 1992), manifested in traits such as dense population and public architecture. Few researchers would call downtown Chaco Canyon an urban center, but it clearly has some features associated with states that have large urban centers, while also characterized by features associated with modern Pueblo cultures, which are decidedly non-urban, non-state societies. Chaco Canyon is also associated with a large hinterland and system of related settlements, a feature again most often associated with only the most complex cultural configurations, and never seen before or since in the Anasazi area.

In the rush to classify objects and societies, the Chaco system is often seen as representing a "tribe" or a "chiefdom" following the frameworks of Service (1962) and Fried (1967). These frameworks are at the same time descriptively simple, yet difficult to employ in ethnographic and archaeological cases. Cultures must be slotted into categories of complexity where they only marginally fit. These stages have an associated set of economic, political and kinship characteristics that often do not apply to the cultures placed within them. The great deal of debate that still rages around cultural evolution in general, and especially around concepts such as "chiefdoms," is testimony to that fact. This problem and associated debate has not left Chacoan studies unscathed.

David and Sterner (1995: 11) raise perhaps a more important consideration of this issue in their discussion of cultures in the Mandara mountains of west Africa. By analogy with the Burgess Shale fossil fauna, they argue that a number of extant societies do not lie on the same path of development that has led to the formation of states elsewhere. These societies cannot be placed in the same interpretive frameworks that have been traditionally used, because they are likely "...social coelocanths, relicts of societal plans that are now largely extinct." One can imagine that the present diversity of social paths or forms of social development may not reflect the range of such possibilities that once existed. Applying this to the Chaco system, not only is there no Puebloan analogy for the system, but there may be no ethnographic analogy that can be used to model Chacoan society period.

The implications of these ideas for Chacoan research are far-reaching. For a full understanding of the Chaco system to be reached, the specific nature of social relations in the system must be discovered, rather than assumed following the pigeon-holing of the society into a stage of cultural evolution. Placing Chaco in one of these stages is essentially like putting blinders on our understanding of the Chaco Phenomenon. Future investigations of the Chaco system must not only evaluate older models with new data or approaches, but they must explore new, perhaps never before imagined, social models.

One of the main stumbling blocks to understanding social relations in the Chaco system is the fact that most of the previous research has concentrated on the core of the system, Chaco Canyon. Strides towards understanding the social aspects of Chaco Canyon have been made by researchers such as Sebastian (1992a), but by concentrating on Chaco Canyon itself, most of the system, perhaps covering up to 120,000 square kilometers (Lekson 1992), is left out of the equation. Despite the large population that lived in the canyon, the population that lived outside the canyon in the rest of the San Juan Basin and adjacent areas clearly dwarfed the canyon population. Even if the canyon population dominated the system, ignoring the rest of the system is to ignore most of the system's social relations.

The nature of the social relations in the rest of the system, and how the rest of the system interacted with the canyon, must be known for a complete understanding of the Chaco Phenomenon. For instance, does the postulated hierarchy or social organization that exists in the Chaco Canyon (Vivian 1970a, Grebinger 1973, Altschul 1978, Judge 1979, Schelberg 1992, Sebastian 1992a) extend into the entire San Juan Basin, or do San Juan Basin populations exist more or less independently of the Chaco Canyon social organization? Does the presence of a great house (large, presumably Chaco-related pueblo) and community organization in Colorado or Utah have the same meaning as Pueblo Bonito, Peñasco Blanco, or Kin Kletso in Chaco Canyon? Another important question is, given the social and linguistic diversity seen among modern Pueblos, does the Chaco system represent one unified socio-linguistic group, or a mosaic of distinct societies unified only by an economic, political, or ideological system?

These questions remain largely unanswered, because modern research outside of Chaco Canyon has been mainly in the guise of defining the extent of the system (e.g. Marshall et al. 1979, Powers, Gillespie and Lekson 1983), not in determining its nature or function. Before the early 1980s, most excavators in other parts of the San Juan Basin were not concerned with these questions, because the magnitude of the Chaco system was not fully realized. Recently, a number of researchers have begun to shift the focus of research away from Chaco Canyon and into the more peripheral areas of the San Juan Basin. Although methodologies differ considerably, research in the basin seems to have the common goal of attempting to understand more about the Chaco system by the study of great houses and their communities outside of Chaco Canyon. This dissertation represents one such study, which will examine aspects of social and economic variability and interaction in the Chaco system through a comparison of variability at Chacoan great houses across the San Juan Basin.

This study will investigate aspects of architecture, masonry, settlement pattern, and ceramics at seven great houses in the San Juan Basin. The sites included are: Lowry Ruin and Chimney Rock in Colorado, Twin Angels, Guadalupe, Bis Sa'ani, and Casamero in New Mexico, and Wupatki in Arizona. The sites were chosen based upon the amount of previous research completed there, and the direction and distance from Chaco Canyon. They will hopefully be able to capture a representative cross-section of social and economic variability over the San Juan Basin.

Differences and similarities in settlement pattern and architecture between outlying great houses and core great houses will be used to evaluate differences in community organization, and function of the great houses. Comparison of settlement pattern outside and inside the canyon may indicate differences or similarities in social or political organization across the Chaco system. Also, as settlement patterns and architecture change in the canyon, these changes can be tracked when and if they appear at the non-core great houses, to help determine the impact, nature and pace of change in the system. Size and type of the great houses and the communities (if any) at the great houses may give an indication of the function of the great houses in the settlement system, and may be used to help evaluate models of system-wide settlement hierarchy (e.g. Powers, Gillespie, and Lekson 1983, Schelberg 1984, 1992).

Differences in ceramics between great houses in various parts of the Chaco system will be used to model economic and social relations within the system. A starting point will be the definition of the ceramic catchment area (Kramer 1991) for each great house, which will illustrate the areas with which each great house has direct or indirect economic and presumably social ties. This information will be used to show the level of communication and interaction between various regions of the system and the Chaco core, from region to region within the system, and between these regions and areas outside the Chaco system. This information will be useful in determining the function of the great houses as possible trading nodes, centers of redistribution, or simply population central places, and will also be used to explore the aforementioned settlement hierarchies. The ceramic data should mirror the size hierarchy data produced by previous studies, and any deviations may indicate important functional or social differences between various great houses and regions within the Chaco system.

Despite the myth of uniform ground plan and masonry style perpetuated by Altschul (1978) and others, ground plan and masonry at great houses contains much variability. Following the work of Lechtman (1977), Lemmonier (1986), and Roys (1936), the masonry and architectural elements at the great house sites will be evaluated using the concept of technological style in order to better define social or ethnic variability in the Chaco system. This study will not attempt to debate the cultural association of prehistoric groups in the San Juan Basin with modern groups, but rather will attempt to preliminarily define a level of social variability beyond that of "Chaco" or "Four Corners Anasazi." Since Kluckhohn (1939) and Gladwin (1945) there has been discussion of social variability in the Chaco system, but most of this has been based upon Chaco Canyon. With the exception of Vivian (1990), there has been almost no discussion of social variability in the San Juan Basin as a whole as it relates to Chaco system dynamics.

As stated above, our lack of knowledge of the social variability and relations in the Chaco system has limited our ability to understand the system. Interpreting various models of the development and function of the Chaco system must have at its base an understanding of how different parts of the system interacted. For instance, if Chaco Canyon served as a center of redistribution for the system (Judge 1979), the political and economic specifics would be influenced by the social make-up of the system. Getting diverse socio-linguistic groups to cooperate to buffer against environmental fluctuations would almost certainly be more difficult (even assuming a willingness to cooperate) than unifying one relatively homogeneous group spread over a large area. If the Chaco system represents something more akin to a militaristic state (e.g. Wilcox 1993), the administration of this state would again be more complex and difficult if it were comprised of many different social groups rather than one dispersed cultural unit. Calling Chaco a redistributive chiefdom or a militaristic state is much too simple, because it describes the core of the system, and assigns it a base function, both of which may or may not be demonstrated for the rest of the system. The research described in this dissertation will help establish the nature of interactions within the system as a whole, and thereby help to interpret, and possibly create, models of the Chaco system.

References

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POWERS, ROBERT P., WILLIAM B. GILLESPIE, and STEPHEN H. LEKSON. 1983. The outlier survey: A regional view of settlement in the San Juan Basin. Reports of the Chaco Center, no. 3. Albuquerque: Division of Cultural Research, National Park Service.

ROYS, LAWRENCE. 1936. Lowry Ruin as an introduction to the study of Southwestern masonry, in Lowry Ruin in southwestern Colorado. By Paul S. Martin, Chapter 6. Field Museum of Natural History Anthropological Series Vol. 23, No. 1.

SCHELBERG, JOHN D. 1992. Hierarchical organization as a short-term buffering startegy in Chaco Canyon, in Anasazi regional organization and the Chaco system. Edited by David Doyel, pp. 59-71. Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, Anthropological Papers no. 5.

------1984. Analogy, complexity, and regionally-based perspectives, in Recent research on Chaco prehistory, edited by W. J. Judge and J.D. Schelberg, pp. 37-54. Reports of the Chaco Center no. 8.

SEBASTIAN, LYNNE. 1992a. The Chaco Anasazi: Sociopolitical evolution in the prehistoric Southwest. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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VIVIAN, R. GWINN. 1970a. An inquiry into prehistoric social organization in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, in Reconstructing prehistoric Pueblo society. Edited by W. A. Longacre, pp. 59-83. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

------1990. The Chacoan prehistory of the San Juan Basin. New York: Academic Press.

WILCOX, DAVID R. 1993. The evolution of the Chacoan polity, in The Chimney Rock Archaeological Symposium. Edited by J. McKim Malville and Gary Matlock, pp. 76-90. USDA Forest Service General Technical Report RM-227. Fort Collins: Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station.

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