URBAN GENESIS AT CHACO: Case Study of the Origin of Civilizations. Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Rightly or wrongly, Westerners have assumed that the Chacoans were ancestral to the modern-day Pueblo peoples (see Simpson 1850, Morgan 1877). Southwestern archaeologists have therefore compared Chaco to Historic Pueblo architecture for at least 140 years. This assumption has biased our interpretation of the material remains of precontact Pueblo cultures, in how we frame research questions and in the cultural models we propose to explain the evidence we find (Mindeleff 1891; Nordenskiold 1896; Marshall 1991). Nineteenth-century beliefs in the progress of cultures may have made it difficult for early researchers to guess that the Chaco culture was far more complex that any extant culture in the region.
The outward similarities between the Chaco and Historic Pueblo building traditions are immediately obvious. They all built terraced blocks of flat-roofed rooms arranged around large, formal plazas. The construction details and the overall scale of pueblos and Chacoan great-houses are also similar. But many of these physical similarities are determined by the limited building materials available: stone, adobe mud, brush, and relatively little wood. Furthermore, the compact, fortified appearance of Chacoan great-houses may have been caused by the same problem the Pueblo faced: the need to defend their food stores from raids by either nomads or other settled groups.
Likewise, the thick walls and small portals so characteristic of both Chaco and Historic Pueblo architecture were practical responses to a high desert climate. In the Southwest, the variation in temperature is severe: the diurnal range often exceeds 25ûC, with very cold winter nights (-20 C) and hot summer days (38 C). In this climate thick masonry walls function as thermal masses to regulate indoor temperatures. Roofs are flat, because flat roofs are usable and because even at Taos, in the wettest of the Pueblo regions, flat roofs are sufficient to shed water as long as they are regularly replastered. The combination of masonry walls and flat roofs creates a town form that is characteristically cuboid, with small windows and doors as perforations in massive walls. However, the same architectural features and town forms occur from Morocco all the way to northern China in the old world. Not only are many of these cultures radically different, but similar-looking buildings in different regions have profoundly different functions and meanings to those who made them.
The problem is not only how Chacoan design relates to Puebloan design, but rather how the Chaco culture relates to the Historic Pueblo at all. Attempts to correlate Historic and prehistoric Pueblo cultures are inherently problematic because the Pueblo groups are defined by language and the precontact groups by material artifacts. The village of Hano on Hopi First Mesa provides a cautionary example of why linguistic and material cultures should not be equated. Hano is populated by the descendants of Tanos who fled west from the Rio Grande pueblos in the late seventeenth century, in fear of Spanish reprisals for the Great Pueblo Revolt of 1680. The village of Hano is physically indistinguishable from the Hopi villages around it; the villagers of Hano even build rectangular kivas as do the Hopi, and unlike many of their Tanoan kinsmen. Stan Stubbs, in Bird's Eye View of the Pueblos (1950), noted that
by all indications Hano is a Hopi village in everything except language. The dividing line between Hano and Sichomovi is not apparent to a visitor on First Mesa, the houses forming a continuous string along the narrow mesa top... (Stubbs 1950:99-100)Stubbs therefore relies on the records of Victor and Cosmos Mindeleff to demarcate the boundary between the two villages in the ground plan in his book. An archaeologist coming across a similar situation, with the inhabitants long vanished, would be unlikely to distinguish the presence of two cultural groups at the adjacent sites.
The tendency to draw parallels betweeen Historic and precontact Pueblo cultures has resulted in misleading architectural terms, two of which we need to correct. Great-houses have been called 'pueblos,' 'great pueblos,' 'or Bonitian pueblos' since at least 1848. Each of these terms implies that every great-house is a village, but the planning and construction sequences of these structures indicates that each one was a single building designed for public functions. So a term meaning 'village' has been applied to singular public building type. Not only are great-houses merely components of larger Chacoan communities, but in several instances more than one great-house was built in a community. In contrast, the only types of public architecture among Historic Pueblo are the kiva, the plaza, and small shrines; otherwise their architecture is entirely domestic. Yet in scale and form, whole Historic Pueblos resemble single public buildings of the Chacoans. Meanwhile the humbler Chacoan domestic architecture is often ignored in Historic-Chacoan comparisons, even though it is the true analog of the Historic Pueblo house.
Secondly, the Hopi term kiva (ki-he) is used to refer to the circular structures at Chaco. Strictly speaking, kiva translates simply as 'building' or 'house;' Westerners misapply the term to refer only to the community buildings that the Hopi use for ceremonies and social functions (Whorf 1956:204). Formally, both Hopi kivas and the circular structures at Chaco share a common descent from eighth-century pit-houses and ninth-century pit-structures, discussed in the following chapter. However there are many types of Chacoan 'kiva' which vary in size and building context. Within great-houses, one type is incorporated into the above-ground room-blocks and the other is set into the formal plazas, its roof almost flush with the surrounding surface. The plaza kivas tend to be larger, a few ranging up to eighteen meters (sixty feet) in diameter. There are also 'great kivas' located outside of great-houses, and fourthly, 'domestic' kivas built near Chacoan dwellings that can be smaller than four meters (thirteen feet) in diameter. Meanwhile, Hopi kivas are generally indistinguishable in size and physical context. For the last several centuries Hopi kivas have also been rectangular, although this formal difference from their progenitors may only be the result of attempting to conceal the kivas from Catholic missionaries, by designing them to look like houses. Hopi kivas and Chacoan 'kivas' may share a common ancestry, but their developmental paths are quite distinct. Most importantly, we can only guess at the social role of each of the four different types of Chacoan kiva.
Lastly, the most vexing question about the relationship of the Chaco to the Historic Pueblo: which group is descended from the Chaco culture? Other, less complex Pueblo cultures existed contemporaneously with the Chaco, and many present-day groups are probably descended from them instead. If figures 2.2 and 2.3 are compared, it seems likely that the Tano peoples are descended from the Rio Grande culture, and the Hopi are descended from the Kayenta. Ironically, some of the best architectural and ethnographic studies of any Pueblo group have been done from these two groups, including what I have presented here from Ortiz (the Tewa are part of the Tanoan group) and the studies by Nagata and the Mindeleffs of the Hopi. Yet it is probable that neither the Hopi nor the Tanos are descended from the Chaco at all. Perhaps the Zuñi are Chacoan descendants, but there is some evidence that the Zuñi have resided in the same region for more than a millennium. The Zuñi are also very reluctant to let Westerners investigate their land, so the archaeological evidence from this region is scanty and inconclusive. By an uncertain process of elimination, then, the Keres may be the only descendants of the Chacoans. This hypothesis is also troublesome, because as the Chaco culture collapsed in the middle twelfth century, it seems that much of the population moved north to Mesa Verde, and northeast into the Jemez Mountains. Perhaps the population actually scattered, and was absorbed by all of the surviving groups, leaving no intact, exclusively 'Chacoan' descendants.
On the other hand, the question of descent can be reframed by challenging one of its basic assumptions. Was the Chaco culture homogeneous, or was it perhaps the union of several cultural and linguistic groups? Furthermore, could a process of pan-cultural social and economic integration have been the basis of the Urban Revolution at Chaco? To effect a regional integration across linguistic boundaries would probably require the establishment of a universalist basis of authority and common identity. Universalizing ideas and ideologies are also the bases for non-ascriptive authority: divine kingship, democratic republicanism, and communism are all classic justifications for power which transcends the will of specific communities. Likewise, codified religion and nationalism are the two most common bases of social identity. Of these five universalizing ideologies, divine kingship and codified religion have been used most effectively to unify culturally disparate regions, and these appear to be the bases of power in the earliest known urban societies in other parts of the world.
A polycultural model of the Chaco system also explains the curious nature of the Historic Pueblo culture(s). After the collapse of such a system each of the different groups could go their separate ways. Several centuries later they might have little sense of ever being part of a common system. Yet the evidence of unification would remain, in the cosmology and rituals common to all of the groups.
| Previous | © 2000-3 Pietro Calogero. Based on U.C. Berkeley Planning Master's Thesis, May 1994. | Next |