Ch.6: Chaco and Urban Genesis

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

6.3 Setting Precedent: 900-960

The two critical factors necessary for the creation of an urban society are social stratification and the institutionalization of political aurhority (Adams 1966:10). At Chaco, these two changes in social structure apparently occurred about 100 years apart.

Lynn Sebastian (1992) argues that the use of two different agricultural strategies led to social stratification by ad 900. As mentioned in chapter two, dependence on agriculture in the Southwest has always been a hazardous prospect. One risk-reducing strategy is to plant many different fields, in the expectation that microclimatic variation would cause only a few to be productive in any given year. The other strategy is to concentrate effort on intensively farming a few sites, ensuring their productivity through the construction of check dams, catchment berms, and irrigation works. The former system is land-extensive, but not very laborious; the latter system is much more labor intensive. Recent studies indicate that flash floods increased in the Chaco region during the eighth through twelfth centuries, favoring the latter system (Science 1993). Assuming that different groups controlled different fields more suitable to either one technique or the other, Sebastian argues that the intensive farmers would have employed the dry farmers in exchange for food, thus establishing social inequality.

Sebastian explains the large-scale additions to the original three great-houses as the products of three different 'Big Man' leaderships in steady succession. In this model, an individual or family of intensive farmers gained extraordinary social prestige for 'generously' providing food in exchange for labor to others who were famished. To affirm their prestige, the new leaders expended social capital in the construction of much larger houses for themselves.

Big Man leaderships are usually short-lived and limited in geographical scope. The rise of individual, charismatic leaders almost by definition precludes the establishment of a mechanism for the regular transmission of political power. However the experience of social inequality under a series of Big Man leaderships may have created the social preconditions necessary for the consolidation of legitimated, non-ascriptive political leadership. I propose two models, either or both of which could have led to the formation of a stable political system.