Misunderstanding The Prehistoric Southwest: What Happened At Chaco?

BOULDER, Feb. 17 (AScribe Newswire) -- Two University of Colorado at Boulder researchers have developed intriguing theories on the mysterious demise of the Chaco Canyon Pueblo people and the larger Chaco region that governed an area in the Southwest about the size of Ohio before it collapsed about 1125.

Steve Lekson, curator of anthropology at the CU Museum, believes a powerful political system centered at Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico may have kept other Pueblo peoples under its thumb from about 1000 to 1125. As the capital city of a huge region, Chaco became a place to store and exchange commodities, and the elite rulers probably exacted goods and taxes from outlying Chacoan villagers.

Chaco was the first stable settlement in the Southwest, sporting a dozen huge, multistoried sandstone buildings known as "great houses" that surrounded a plaza. It appears that a hundred or so elite people lived in each great house, with another 1,000 or so people living in single-family kivas outside the city center.

Lekson refers to Chaco as "the 800-pound gorilla of Anasazi archaeology" and possibly the major player in Pueblo prehistory. "It was an elite community living in a showy, ceremonial city that ruled a region containing tens of thousands of people."

Roughly 150 Chaco "outliers" up to hundreds of miles distant - including Colorado's famed Mesa Verde - show Chaco's influence, including the construction of multi-storied great houses. One, a site adjacent to the town of Bluff, Utah, that has been studied by Lekson, CU-Boulder anthropology Associate Professor Catherine Cameron and CU students, is one of the farthest northeast "outliers" to Chaco.

"Things started to happen in Chaco in the 9th century," said Lekson. "At that time, small settlements outside the canyon were fighting with each other. With the rise of Chaco, that raiding and feuding ended."

A paper on the subject by Lekson and Cameron was presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Denver Feb. 13 to Feb. 18.

Lekson believes the collapse of Chaco may have begun with a spiritual tug-of-war between the Chaco elite and their followers and a second group lured south by new religious and spiritual beliefs springing up without an oppressive government. Chaco Canyon was always arid, and a drought likely sent the elite and their followers north to Aztec, located on the Animas River.

"I think there may have been some serious policing with 'goon squads' in the Chacoan region about the time the Chaco Empire was collapsing, and some serious slicing and dicing began as local warfare broke out," said Lekson.

"Toward the end, there may have been policing in the Chacoan region in an attempt to maintain order. But when Chaco was collapsing, some serious violence and warfare broke out," he said. "Chaco could no longer control its region."

The Chaco elite ordered the building of a wide path known today as the Great North Road due north about 60 miles to the Aztec Pueblo, a minor blip on the region's radar screen in the Southwest at the time but one that turned into a second major capital beginning about 1110 and lasting until 1275, he said.

A great drought about that time likely caused the center at Aztec to pull up stakes, reverse cosmological direction and make a beeline directly south. While thousands of Aztec people joined western and eastern pueblos, thousands more led by the ruling elite marched nearly 450 miles straight south to build an even bigger city at Paquime in present day Chihuahua, Mexico, that lasted until about 1450.

Lekson calculated Aztec, Chaco and Paquime are off a north-south meridian by only about three miles, explainable by the terrain and technology, which likely included "line-of-sight" travel and stellar navigation, he said. Similar architectural features at all three cities that are found nowhere else bolster Lekson's novel theory, which he calls the "Chaco Meridian."

Continuing research by Professor Cameron and CU students at the Bluff great house in Utah indicates the great house was occupied after the crash of the Chacoan empire and the berms surrounding it were built during the Aztec heydays. "It was an eye-opener because it indicates the berms were built long after Chaco collapsed," Cameron said.

The Bluff people may have "experienced a religious revival," perhaps tied to the growing influence of the Aztec culture centered near present-day Aztec, N.M." she said.

What else do they have the Ostrich Syndrome about?

In this age of political correctness and you have to ask?

I can't watch anything anthropology oriented on TV without seeing thru the revisionist agenda easy...trust me...they hate saying Indians ate each other....they would rather be forced to admit God exists or eat sh*t sandwiches

Now find some more Europeans who dined on one another and they will be lining up for honorary doctorates, prizes, grants and TV shows..maybe even a movie option

Everyone hates unPC Christy Turner:

Did cannibalism Kill Anasazi Civilization?

"But Turner contends that a "band of thugs" - Toltecs, for whom cannibalism was part of religious practice - made their way to Chaco Canyon from central Mexico. These invaders used cannibalism to overwhelm the unsuspecting Anasazi and terrorize the populace into submission over a period of 200 years."

I can only imagine:

Turner speculates that members of a Mexican warrior cult headed north, where they found that killing and eating a few desert-farming Anasazi terrorized everyone else into paying tribute and building monuments to the Mexicans' religion. Eventually, the culture built on cannibalism collapsed–how, Turner does not know–and the Anasazi deserted Chaco Canyon. Today's Pueblo people are Anasazi descendants. Food for thought. Man Corn–named after the Aztec word for a sacred meal of human meat–provoked a firestorm. Critics have charged him with everything from shoddy science to racism. He countered with a widely distributed manuscript–rejected by American Antiquity–denouncing them as "professionally reckless," "politically correct," and "rude."

Turner's proposal that ancient Mexicans invaded from the south has aroused the most derision. "The idea of a [Mexican] goon squad is ridiculous," says Kurt Dongoske, an archaeologist for the Hopi tribe. While remnants of trade with Mexico exist–pottery, copper bells, and macaw skeletons–there's little evidence of Mexicans' living in the area at the time. Turner's theory hangs on one skull found with notched teeth, a practice common in Mexico but rare in the Southwest. "Turner stepped beyond his level of expertise," sniffs Steven LeBlanc, director of collections at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

Some archaeologists and Indians accuse Turner of recklessly ignoring native beliefs. "One of the worst things you can do in Pueblo society is to eat flesh," says Andrew Darling, an archaeologist with the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona. "That's how you become a witch, and the penalty for witches is death." Suspected Pueblo witches were killed and their corpses ravaged to find the so-called evil heart. Darling believes those actions could leave the same bone signature as cannibalism. He says Turner's theory revives racist stereotypes of savage Indians.

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