Ch.2: Historic Pueblo Architecture

URBAN GENESIS AT CHACO: Case Study of the Origin of Civilizations. Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6

2.8 Overlapping Worlds and the Concept of Center

The structure of sacred space in and around a pueblo parallels the structure of the functional space. Ortiz' description of Tewa social structure clearly reveals the integral relationship of social order with both spatial and spiritual order (Ortiz 1969:9). The geographical points with which social status is associated are shrines situated at a short distance outside the village, flat-topped hills that lie a little further away, and mountains on the distant horizon (see figure 2.6). Spatial order is therefore concentric, associated with minor local spirits, more powerful spirits associated with the hills, and very powerful spirits associated with the distant mountains (Eggan in Ortiz, 1969:xiii).

Fundamental to the Pueblo point of view is that their settlement is at the Center of the world and of the cosmos. It is the Middle Place, revealed to them by heroic beings as the right and proper place in which to dwell. However, the sacred mountains that bound the world of each pueblo often may lie beyond other nearby pueblos, especially for the Tano and Keres communities clustered along the Rio Grande (see figure 2.3). Meanwhile, the members of various pueblos have had both friendly and hostile relations with each other for centuries. Knowing that members of another pueblo believed their village was the center of the universe, and that the sacred boundaries of their world encompassed one's own, how did the Pueblo reconcile conflicting claims of centrality and territory? Michael Marshall (1991) uses Mircea Eliade's analysis of sacred place-making to explain the Pueblo perspective. Eliade states that

Since the habitation constitutes an imago mundi, it is symbolically situated at the Center of the World. The Multiplicity, or even the infinity, of centers of the world raises no difficulty for religious thought. For it is not a matter of geometrical space, but of an existential and sacred space that has an entirely different structure, that admits an infinite number of breaks and hence is capable of an infinite number of communications with the transcendent (Eliade 1957:57).

The Center was more important to the Pueblo than peripheries. The need to delineate exclusive boundaries on the land only became important to the Pueblo with the establishment of the reservation system by the Americans--the first stage of incorporation of the Pueblo into a State system (Jake White Cloud, personal communication, 1992). Up to that point, usufruct of irrigable fields seems to have been the only land-related cause for conflict among the Pueblo (Mindeleff 1891). For the inhabitant of any given pueblo, the mountains, hills, and shrines are part of the pueblo, part of the community's spiritual extent. The fact that the spiritual dimension of the Pueblo may overlap with the physical location of neighboring Pueblos is irrelevant in the cognitive understanding of one's own location and the nature of spatial order.