Unearthing (Chaco) Canyon's Clues

CHACO CANYON, N.M. - As Rich Friedman twists the handle of the T-shaped auger, the steel blades bite into loamy brown soil in a field where scientists suspect Anasazi farmers grew corn 1,000 years ago.

Friedman is part of a Boulder-led research team that collected 60 soil samples around the Chaco basin this month in an ongoing effort to determine where the Anasazi grew all the corn they would have needed to feed the thousands who periodically gathered in the canyon.

In a paper published last October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists matched the chemical fingerprint of seven ancient corn cobs found in Chaco's Pueblo Bonito to soils far from the canyon.

They concluded that the Anasazi, also known as the Ancestral Puebloans, hauled corn on their backs more than 50 miles to feed canyon dwellers.

That result is overturning the long-held belief that the Chacoans were agriculturally self-sufficient, growing everything they needed within the canyon through the clever use of captured and diverted surface runoff.

The findings also reinforce the view that Chaco was the ceremonial, administrative and economic center of a vast region spanning northwestern New Mexico's San Juan Basin.

"We continually underestimate the ability of these people to organize themselves on huge scales without the aid of modern technology," said University of Colorado archaeologist Linda Cordell, one of the authors of last fall's paper.

"That corn didn't just walk there all by itself," Cordell said. "People brought it there. That means they were organized on a regional scale that hasn't been seen in the San Juan Basin for hundreds and hundreds of years."

It now appears that during its heyday in the mid-1000s, Chaco Canyon was as dependent on outside supplies as an Antarctic base, said John Stein, an archaeologist with the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department.

Chaco was sustained by shipments of timber, pottery, stone and food carried in from the edges of the San Juan Basin. It also took in trade goods from Mexico, including copper bells, macaws and seashells from the Gulf of California.

Stein and the other corn project researchers are now expanding their investigation, which began three years ago. They're collecting new soil samples in and around Chaco Canyon, looking for likely Anasazi farming sites.

They plan to chemically analyze 20 to 40 more corn cobs collected by archaeologists decades ago inside the multistory sandstone "great houses" Chacoans built between A.D. 850 and 1150.

Then they'll try to match the cobs to sites throughout the arid, high-desert basin to determine where the corn was grown.

"A lot of ink has been spilled over the issue of farming in Chaco, but practically no systematic work has been done. We're trying to rectify that," Stein said recently, as the caravaning scientists pulled their pickups alongside Kin Kliz- hin, a great house seven miles southwest of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park visitor center.

The dark brown sandstone blocks of Kin Klizhin's 30-foot tower kiva loomed over the treeless landscape like a Scottish castle as the researchers traversed a flower-strewn field to collect bags of dirt for analysis back in a Boulder lab.

"It's been repeated over and over in textbooks that Chaco was some kind of breadbasket, and it's been held up as an example of making the desert bloom," Stein said.

"But this whole romantic idea that this was just a bunch of happy campers living in a utopia is not the case," he said.

"This place was a sorcerer's nest, an evil place," said Stein, whose views about Chaco reflect Navajo clan beliefs.

"And the soils here just suck pond water. It is patently obvious to me that they were not farming (all their corn) in Chaco Canyon," he said.

The Anasazi built 14 multistory great houses in Chaco Canyon. The structures averaged more than 200 rooms apiece and were up to four stories tall.

The purpose of the Chaco great houses has been debated for more than a century. One idea is that they were the sites of ritual feasts that pilgrims traveled from afar to attend.

During those events, Chaco Canyon's population may have swelled to 7,000 or more, Cordell said.

Paltry precipitation, a short growing season and unreliable flows in the Chaco Wash made canyon corn production precarious.

Even so, until the 1970s most archaeologists believed the Chacoans grew all their crops there, said Cordell, author of the textbook Archaeology of the Southwest, and director of the University of Colorado Museum.

That idea was supported by the findings of R. Gwinn Vivian, an Arizona archaeologist who uncovered an extensive system of dams, canals, ditches and walls used to channel Chaco runoff to farming terraces, garden plots and fields.

But in the 1970s, aerial photography and satellite images began to reveal the extent of the prehistoric road network that links Chaco Canyon to outlying communities across the San Juan Basin and beyond.

More than 400 miles of ancient roadways have been identified. They tie the core area around Pueblo Bonito to more than 150 other great houses in a region the size of West Virginia.

It became clear that the Chaco Canyon great houses were once the hub of the San Juan Basin. The roads were spokes connecting that hub to the outlying communities.

More recent studies have shown that the Anasazi used the roads to haul roof timbers to Chaco - without the help of draft animals or the wheel - from the base of the Chuska Mountains, 50 miles to the west. Clay pots and chert, a fine-grained rock used to make projectile points, also were imported from the area.

She approached researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey in Boulder about three years ago. Geochemist Larry Benson suggested using isotopic ratios of the element strontium to trace ancient corn cobs to the soils where they were grown.

The researchers analyzed the chemical content of seven prehistoric corn cobs collected at Pueblo Bonito by archaeologist George Pepper between 1886 and 1899. The 3- to 5-inch cobs had been in storage at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Centuries ago, when the plants that produced those cobs grew, their roots took up strontium from the soil. The ratio of the various forms, or isotopes, of strontium in the cobs provides a chemical fingerprint that can be used to find their source soils, Benson said.

The researchers collected soil and water samples from likely agricultural sites in and around Chaco Canyon. The strontium ratios in the Pueblo Bonito cobs matched soils from the base of the Chuskas and from the San Juan and Animas river flood plains 56 miles to the north.

"I think it's extremely valuable information," said archaeologist Steve Lekson, curator of anthropology at the University of Colorado.

"Chert and obsidian and finished pots in bulk - hundreds of thousands of pots - were coming into Chaco. And we knew they were bringing in timbers from the Chuskas," said Lekson, who is not involved with the corn research.

"But this is the first time that we can prove it was happening with corn as well," he said. "It puts the nails in the coffin of self-sufficiency, and it opens the door to another idea."

That other idea is the notion that Chaco Canyon served as a "corn bank" that distributed maize throughout the San Juan Basin in the 1000s. Surplus corn was brought to the central hub from fields on the edges of the basin, then redistributed to struggling farmers in other areas, according to the model first proposed by archaeologist James Judge in 1976.

"There were episodes in the past when there were people out there who were calling the shots and organizing things at Chaco - political leaders who lived in nice houses," Lekson said.

"Maybe the great houses were warehouses, residences and administrative offices," said Lekson, author of The Chaco Meridian.

According to some Navajo clan traditions, they included a ruthless ruler known as the Gambler, who gained control of people by defeating them in various games of chance.

"The Navajo will tell you it was a powerful place ruled by a man who misused his power for black magic," Stein said.

"This place was in the service of the devil," he said. "It was like (the Nazi concentration camp) Auschwitz."

According to some of the Navajo stories, the Gambler enslaved the people he outwitted and forced them to build the Chaco great houses. The Gambler claimed one of the sandstone structures, Pueblo Alto, as his home.

Then the large, circular ceremonial rooms within the great houses, known as great kivas, were razed "so that the power they created couldn't be abused" ever again, Stein said.

Various ceremonial secrets were bestowed on a handful of medicine men, who were then sent away from Chaco "in a deliberate diaspora to break up that power so it couldn't be drawn together again in one place," Stein said.

The building boom in Chaco Canyon ended in the mid-1100s and the region's population center shifted northward.

By 1300, Chaco Canyon and most of the northern Southwest had been abandoned by the Anasazi. Drought may have contributed to the abandonments.

• History: Inhabited Chaco Canyon A.D. 850-1250. Built area into a trading hub 1020-1120. Migrated to new areas 1100-1200.

• What they built: Canyon inhabitants were skilled masons and built multistory stone houses with hundreds of rooms oriented to solar, lunar and the four cardinal directions; also built roads between great houses.

• Culture: Included astronomical markers and water-control devices in great houses. May have used great houses as public ceremonial and trading centers. Made distinctive black-on-white Cibola pottery. Treasured turquoise for jewelry and trade.

• Anasazi or Ancient Puebloan?: Anasazi is a Navajo word for "enemy ancestors," a name Anglo explorers and archaeologists gave to prehistoric peoples of the Four Corners region. Some American Indians find Anasazi offensive and prefer Ancestral Puebloan or Ancient Puebloan.

No, that is a formation behind White Mesa Mt. which is near
Montezuma Creek, Utah. There is a small collection of houses on the north side of the mountain ( which is really a mesa).

"I don't believe this pic is Chaco Canyon."

Maybe not. I stole it from Razorback_Bert on another thread, lol.

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Good pictures of Pueblo Bonito. The four corners area is a delight for anyone with interest in this sort of thing. The Pueblo's of today are clearly tied to these ancient towns. I have been through the area a number of times including one trip up Canyon de Chelly when it was still posible to hike solo through the monument.

Chaco Canyon seems to have had different phases, moving from self-sufficient communities to to an administratine and religious center dependent on the surrounding pueblos (ie: Aztec) Anyone who can make the trip should, visiting the surrounding sites and at least Zuni Pueblo. IMO it is rivaled only by the Mound Builders in USA cultures.

"Interesting. I did an internet search and found the reviews of this book are all over the place. Sounds very interesting"

Here's a book review of The Zuni Enigma

I visited Chaco during a drought, when fires were prohibited. A thunderstorm blew our tent down, so I ended up cooking dinner in the rain with a propane burner. Worst of both worlds.

At the time, the rangers were sticking with the local agriculture story, but it seemed far fetched to me, both from the perspective of the soil quality and precipitation.

If they were hauling so much stuff from the Chuskas, I would think they were major slaveholders.

Circular structures give you greater area to perimeter than do squares. Thus a circular structre needs much less building material than a square one would. It's not as easy to stack boxes in, however.

29 posted on 05/17/2004 9:34:09 AM PDT by Doctor Stochastic (Vegetabilisch = chaotisch is der Charakter der Modernen. - Friedrich Schlegel)

The circular structures are remarkably round. Most of the rooms are rectangular, so perhaps the round rooms had a special purpose.

31 posted on 11/14/2010 6:25:45 PM PST by SunkenCiv (The 2nd Amendment follows right behind the 1st because some people are hard of hearing.)

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