Authors: Kent Flannery,Joyce Marcus
The settlements in Chaco Canyon included many small hamlets that probably housed no more than one clan each. In addition, there were nine large, multiclan villages. Each hamlet had only one kiva, while the larger villages had many, reinforcing the likelihood that each clan maintained its own ritual building(s). Some of the larger villages had two clear divisions, suggesting that clans may have been grouped into opposing moieties. Large villages with this dual organization occasionally had ritual buildings 34 to 63 feet in diameter. These so-called Great Kivas may have been the scene of rituals that united all the clans within a moiety.
Let us now take an “outsiders’ view” of Pueblo Bonito, which covered several acres and was four stories high, consisting of 650 stone masonry rooms with different functions. The village was shaped like a half moon, with its convex side presenting blank walls to the outside world. In the interior of the half moon lay a great open plaza divided into two sections, each with its Great Kiva. Scattered throughout the site were 36 smaller kivas, perhaps one or two per clan.
Archaeologists estimate that the walls of each room at Pueblo Bonito required 44 tons of sandstone blocks. Taken together, the roof beams and wooden floors of the nine largest villages in Chaco Canyon reflected the felling of 200,000 pine trees, sometimes from forests 70 miles away.
There are hints that the corn grown in the canyon itself would have been insufficient to feed the labor force that had built Pueblo Bonito. Chemical isotope analysis of ancient corn from the site shows that some of it was grown in regions where the groundwater had different chemicals from those of Chaco Canyon. For example, some corn from Pueblo Bonito came from the Chuska Mountains, 50 miles downstream, while other cobs came from the floodplain of the San Juan and the Animas Rivers, 55 miles to the north.
Because the large villages of Chaco Canyon were drawing on the resources of an area greater than 35,000 square miles, archaeologists were not surprised when they began finding ancient roads. Not only did these roads connect villages within the canyon, some even extended more than 60 miles outside. As archaeologists began to trace these roads, however, they found that many led nowhere. Some followed absolutely straight sight lines, even if it meant cutting steps in stone cliffs rather than following natural contours. Many archaeologists now believe that the roads were ritual, part of a sacred landscape in which cosmological landmarks were connected to centers of human occupation.
Roads and earthworks, even large ones, are well within the capacity of societies where leadership is based on achievement. But there are hints that the society of Pueblo Bonito might have had a higher degree of social inequality than the historic Southwestern Pueblos. Unfortunately, some of the evidence was recovered more than 100 years ago by avocational archaeologists who lacked many of today’s excavation skills. Plog is currently compiling and reanalyzing the data from a century of work at Pueblo Bonito, allowing us to draw on his insights.
In 1896 George H. Pepper excavated burials in several rooms at Pueblo Bonito. He found 14 burials in Room 33, two of which had been placed below an unusual wooden floor. These two burials were accompanied by hundreds of turquoise pendants, thousands of turquoise beads, a conch shell trumpet, more than 40 shell bracelets, and a cylindrical basket covered with a turquoise mosaic. The 12 burials above the wooden floor were accompanied by turquoise and shell beads, bracelets, pendants, seven large wooden flutes, and dozens of wooden ceremonial staffs. In nearby rooms Pepper found burials wrapped in colored feather robes.
While the burials found by Pepper were unique, smaller amounts of valuables were found elsewhere at Pueblo Bonito. Archaeologist James Judge describes the craftsmen of Chaco Canyon as having played “an increasingly dominant role” in the processing of turquoise into ornaments for the region. The turquoise came from the Cerrillos mines near Guadalupe, New Mexico, 60 miles to the southeast. Only a mile from the mines were small villages with Chaco-style pottery, possibly places supplying the Pueblo Bonito craftsmen with raw material. Pueblo Bonito also had access to unusual amounts of other valuable items, such as copper bells, chocolate, and scarlet macaw feathers from Mexico, shell trumpets from the Gulf of California, obsidian from Jemez, New Mexico, and quantities of mica and selenite ore.
What level of social inequality was required to produce a village like Pueblo Bonito? Let us refer back to the early villages of Peru and the Near East. Pueblo Bonito’s architecture was no more impressive than that of Ain Ghazal or Jericho, and Ain Ghazal covered at least ten times the area of Pueblo Bonito. The kivas of Chaco Canyon were no more spectacular than the ritual buildings of Göbekli Tepe, Nevali Çori, or Çayönü, and the irrigation canals were no longer than those of Archaic Peru.
Pueblo Bonito has evidence for two opposing moieties, each with its Great Kiva, and for the division of each moiety into a number of clans, each maintaining one or two smaller kivas. Such evidence alone, as we will see in later chapters, does not imply that leadership had become hereditary. Later in this chapter we will examine a Hopi society where one clan “owned” the most important rituals and monopolized the office of village leader. Such ritual preeminence, under the right circumstances, might enable one segment of society to accumulate shell valuables and macaw feathers.
Plog points to the luxury goods found by Pepper as potential evidence for the emergence of a Chacoan elite. This seems plausible for the huge quantities of turquoise, but the shell trumpets, flutes, and ceremonial staffs look more like items of ritual authority. Whatever the case, any emerging social inequality in Chaco Canyon was in remission 900 years ago.
Some archaeologists have attributed the decline of Chacoan society to a deteriorating climate. An analysis of growth rings in tree trunks from archaeological sites suggests that the period
A.D.
1050 to 1130, when Pueblo Bonito peaked in importance, was rainier than average. The period
A.D.
1130 to 1180, when Pueblo Bonito declined, was drier.
We do not dispute the climatic data. We are simply unwilling to put all the burden of explanation on the environment. Later in this book we will examine several Asian societies that created hereditary inequality, only to overthrow it periodically and return to a more egalitarian way of life. In none of these Asian cases was a drought to blame. What happened was that a long-standing desire for equal treatment, found in most of the societies we have examined so far, periodically overcame hereditary privilege. It is possible that similar processes were at work in the U.S. Southwest.
AN OVERVIEW OF THE EASTERN AND WESTERN PUEBLOS
When Spanish colonists arrived in the Southwest, they found Pueblo communities from the Upper Río Grande in the east to the Colorado River in the west. Some villages greeted the Spaniards with a hail of rocks and arrows. In other cases people abandoned their homes and took refuge in remote areas.
Despite the outward similarity of many Pueblo communities, these societies were the product of very different ethnic groups and language families. The Hopi spoke a language of the Uto-Aztecan family, making them distant relatives of both the Ute and the Aztec. The Tewa spoke a language of the Kiowa-Tanoan family, making them linguistic relatives of some Plains Indian groups. The people of Acoma and Cochiti spoke Keresan languages. The language of the Zuni was like no other.
All Pueblo societies combined (1) a system by which talented individuals could rise to positions of respect, and (2) a series of built-in safeguards that prevented hereditary inequality from developing. Anthropologists, however, have called attention to some basic differences between the Eastern Pueblos (central and eastern New Mexico) and the Western Pueblos (Arizona and western New Mexico). The Western Pueblos, where the clan was the key unit, did not display much centralized social control of labor. The Eastern Pueblos, where a system of opposing moieties provided a lot of the social structure, had a stronger centralized control of labor.
Anthropologist Edward Dozier (himself a Tewa speaker from the village of Santa Clara, New Mexico) offered an explanation for this difference. He pointed out that most Western Pueblos relied on rainfall or floodwater farming, labor for which could be handled at the level of the extended family, lineage, or clan. The Eastern Pueblos relied on systems of canal irrigation, whose creation and maintenance might have required a more formal control of labor.
Many Western Pueblo peoples, including the Hopi, Zuni, and Acoma, claimed descent through the mother’s line (matriliny). Many Eastern Pueblo peoples, including the Tewa, Tiwa, and Keres, either claimed descent through the father’s line (patriliny) or considered both lines equal. Other differences between the Eastern and Western Pueblos, pointed out by anthropologist Fred Eggan, were as follows.
Like the Angami Naga, the Tewa could achieve respect by working their way up through a series of increasingly prestigious ritual societies. In order to prevent one group from becoming a permanent ritual elite, the Tewa broke the village into two divisions named for their culture heroes, the Summer People and the Winter People. Each division had its own headman and ritual assistants, and each was allowed to run the village for half a year. The Tewa did not reckon descent rigidly through either parent’s line, and people were not required to marry outside their own clan. Instead, everyone had a major group of relatives called the
matu’i,
radiating out from all four sets of great-grandparents.
For most Western Pueblos, on the other hand, mother-daughter and sister-sister ties formed the core of social groupings. Often the bonds of brother and sister were so strong that a husband felt like the proverbial third wheel. Divorce was not uncommon. The woman owned the house, and the crops stored there were in her care. For the Zuni the matrilineal family was the most important unit; for the Hopi that role was assumed by the clan, which held all ritual knowledge in trust.
The lineages within each Western Pueblo clan varied in prestige, and within each village one clan tended to be ritually prominent. The specific clan that stood out, however, varied from village to village. What prevented a permanent elite from emerging was the fact that the clans, the secret ritual societies, and the managers of the kivas had such independent constituencies that, in effect, power was shared. It is also worth noting that until Euro-American colonists began to suppress raiding, each village had its traditional enemies, and one path to renown was to become a war leader.
All Pueblo villages had kivas, that distinctly Southwestern venue for ritual performance. Kivas remained semi-subterranean not only because they were modeled on an ancient house type but also because of the cosmological premise that human beings first reached the surface of the earth by emerging from the underworld. While the kivas of Acoma and many Eastern Pueblos, like those of Pueblo Bonito, were circular, the kivas of Western Pueblos, like those of the Hopi and Zuni, were rectangular. Kivas shared many of the features of men’s houses, such as sitting benches, sunken floors, and sacred hearths. Pueblo society, however, did not display as much separation of men’s and women’s ritual as we saw in New Guinea.
The walls of some Zuni kivas were painted with murals of deer, birds, and other creatures, the two-dimensional counterparts of Göbekli Tepe’s carved pillars. The superimposed levels of some Hopi kivas recapitulated the stages through which early humans ascended from the underworld to the surface of the earth. The Acoma people envisioned their ancestors using a primordial kiva whose components were the sun, moon, Milky Way, and rainbow. Many Western Pueblo kivas were entered by dancers disguised as ancestors or supernaturals, called
shalako
by the Zuni and
katcina
by the Hopi.
In the pages that follow we look at two of the best-known Pueblo societies, one from the east and one from the west. The lesson they teach us is that regardless of how many immigrants it absorbed, which gender its clans emphasized, and what its ancestors were called, an autonomous village society, run by ritual specialists, could limit inequality but still provide gifted people with a path to leadership and respect.
MADE PEOPLE AND DRY FOOD PEOPLE: THE TEWA OF SAN JUAN PUEBLO
Long, long ago, at a time when death was still unknown, humans and animals and supernatural beings all lived together. Their home was in the underworld beneath the waters of Sandy Place Lake, far to the north of Santa Fe.
Among the supernatural beings were two mothers of the future Tewa: their summer mother, Blue Corn Woman, and their winter mother, White Corn Woman. These two mothers sent a man out to find a route to the surface of the earth, but he found only haze and mist because the world was still moist and unripe. Finally, after searching in all four of the great World Directions, the man came to a place where some animals gave him a bow, arrows, and clothing. He returned to the underworld as Mountain Lion, the hunt leader. Mountain Lion appointed two men to be Summer and Winter leaders of the Tewa. He and they were now the first three
patowa,
or Made People, those who had become fully Tewa.
Next the people of the underworld sent out six pairs of brothers to explore the earth. Blue Man went to the north, Yellow Man to the west, Red Man to the south, White Man to the east, Dark Man to the zenith, and All-Colors Man to the rainbow. They all returned to the lake, but from that point on, each world direction would be associated with the color of the man who had traveled to it.
The Tewa then tried again to emerge from the lake but were still not fully formed. They returned from their attempt, however, transformed into Warm Clowns, Cold Clowns, Scalp Leaders, and members of the
kwiyoh,
or Women’s Ritual Society. Fully Tewa at last, they emerged from the lake and traveled south. Along the way the Winter People survived by hunting, and the Summer People lived by growing corn and harvesting wild plants. They eventually founded the six Tewa-speaking villages of northern New Mexico.