Archaeologists: Conservative state began at Chaco Canyon
A thousand years ago, area saw start of a social movement that spread
During the eighth century, a new kind of civilization arose in New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon. It started a social movement that swept across what is now the U.S. Southwest, transforming people’s beliefs about how to live, worship and farm.
For the next six centuries, Ancestral Puebloan peoples built their communities in imitation of the ones at Chaco, celebrating its culture. But as generations passed, that culture became a rigid tradition, representing a history that some people wanted to escape. As the 14th century drew to a close, the entire Chaco population abandoned the canyon, never to return.
For archaeologists, the Chaco phenomenon offers a chance to understand the rise and fall of a cultural ideal.
Visitors to Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico can wonder at the remains of 12 “great houses.” These dwellings contain hundreds of rooms, sometimes towering five stories high.
One hundred miles to the north, in what is now Mesa Verde National Park, people shaped their settlements to resemble those at Chaco Canyon. Perhaps the most famous is called Cliff Palace. It’s a great house designed to fit snugly in the crevasse beneath a bulging, rocky overhang. It’s an architectural marvel of perfectly interconnected forms, where square walls meet soaring curves of wind-carved stone.
People in smaller Puebloan villages imitated the Chaco style too. Even when they didn’t have the resources to construct great houses, they always recreated the most striking part of greathouse architecture: round, subterranean ceremonial rooms known as great kivas.
It seemed that everyone wanted to live like they did in Chaco Canyon. And then times changed. University of Arizona anthropologist Katherine Dungan calls it “Chaco conservatism.” She means that people were conserving older styles, but she’s talking about cultural conservatism, too. “You have people who are replicating and repeating an ancient tradition,” she said.
Over the next few centuries, united by Chaco religion and trade, far-flung villages came into contact with one another and people moved freely between them. Dungan noted that migration was always a pattern among the Ancestral Pueblo, but during the 1000s it reached a fever pitch.
As the population grew, people cleared nearby forests to plant corn. Chacoans belatedly realized that the forests were home to the deer whose meat and hides they prized. Just as the deer supply began to dwindle, a drought hit in the 1100s, devastating crops.
For the next couple of generations, we see skeletal remains marked by violent death throughout the Pueblo world. Bones show signs of blunt-force trauma, mutilation and burning, while mass graves suggest massacres.
What happened in the Southwest after the height of Chaco’s influence is remembered by the Pueblo tribes living in the region today. Alfonso Ortiz, an anthropologist from the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo tribe, recorded many traditions of his own people in his book The Tewa World. He writes that elders had “detailed knowledge” of a Chacoinfluenced region to the north where he speculates the tribe may have originated. The Tewa origin story describes a series of difficult migrations, as does the origin story of the Hopi, another Puebloan tribe. It’s possible that modern tribes may be recalling their migration away from the unstable world that Chaco made.
Today, Puebloan tribal lands form a vast and distant semicircle around the empty places that were once at the center of the Pueblo world. Pueblo tribes continued to thrive long after Chaco’s abandonment — indeed, they went on to lead a successful revolt against colonial occupation in 1680. But it’s possible they did it by leaving Chaco’s political system behind. We can see traces of what helped them survive in hybrid kivas that honored ancestral traditions but thrived on changes brought by diverse groups.
By learning to communicate in new ways, they built a culture that survived.