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Major Debates in Chacoan Archaeology with Paul Reed - S1E3
145 Plays3 years ago
In this episode of Site Bite’s Season 1, we bring on Paul Reed to spar with Rob Weiner over varying interpretations of Chacoan archaeology. Paul starts off by reflecting on his early career working with the Navajo Nation from the late 80’s to early 2000’s and how that has shaped his perspectives on the need for Indigenous collaboration in archaeological research. The major debates we discuss are: the productivity of agriculture, population density, and the role of Great Houses at Chaco. After our professional debate, Paul talks to us about his ongoing activist work with Indigenous Groups, Federal agencies, and archaeological groups on protecting our archaeological heritage, such as Chaco, from energy development projects.
Links
- Benson, Larry V., Deanna N. Grimstead, John R. Stein, David A. Roth, and Terry I. Plowman
- 2019 Prehistoric Chaco Canyon, New Mexico: Importation of Meat and Maize. Journal of Archaeological Science 111:105015. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305440319301025
- Bernardini, Wesley
- 1999 Reassessing the Scale of Social Action at Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Kiva 64(4), 447-470.
- McCool, Jon-Paul P., Samantha G. Fladd, Vernon L. Scarborough, Stephen Plog, Nicholas P. Dunning, Lewis A. Owen, Adam S. Watson, Katelyn J. Bishop, Brooke E. Crowley, Elizabeth A. Haussner, Kenneth B. Tankersley, David Lentz, Christopher Carr, and Jessica L. Thress
- 2018 Soil Analysis in Discussions of Agricultural Feasibility for Ancient Civilizations: A Critical Review and Reanalysis of the Data and Debate from Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. PLoS ONE 13(6): e0198290. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0198290
- Reed, Paul F.
- 2008 Salmon Pueblo as a Ritual and Residential Chacoan Great House. In Chaco’s Northern Prodigies: Salmon, Aztec, and the Ascendancy of the Middle San Juan Region After AD 1100, edited by Paul F. Reed, pp. 42-61. The University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
- Sofaer, Anna (director)
- 1999 The Mystery of Chaco Canyon. Bullfrog Films, Oley, PA. Stream at https://vimeo.com/ondemand/mysteryofchacocanyon
- Stein, John R., and Stephen H. Lekson
- 1992 Anasazi Ritual Landscapes. In Anasazi Regional Organization and the Chaco System, edited by David E. Doyle, pp. 87-100. Maxwell Museum of Anthropology Anthropological Papers 5. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
- Contact For Guest:
- Paul Reed
- Email: [email protected]
Carlton Shield Chief Gover
- Email: [email protected]
- instagram: @pawnee_archaeologist
- Twitter: @PaniArchaeology
- Website: https://www.colorado.edu/anthropology/carlton-gover
Robert Weiner
- [email protected]
- Instagram: @chacoroadsproject
Affiliates
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Transcript
Introduction to the Sight Bites Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome to Season 1, Episode 3 of the Sight Bites Podcast, Canning of Contention, where we go in-depth on prominent archaeological landscapes. I'm your host, Carlton Gover, and I am joined by this season's featured co-host, Robert Weiner.
Guest Introduction: Paul Reed
00:00:27
Speaker
For the topic of this episode, Major Debates in Chaco Archaeology, we have the pleasure of having Paul Reed with us today as our guest. Paul, thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing?
00:00:37
Speaker
Hello Carlton, thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be on with you and Rob today and I'm doing great just waiting for the snow to fall. Well, I hope you get some moisture down there in the southwest. We're so happy to have you with us today Paul.
Paul Reed's Connection to Chaco Canyon
00:00:55
Speaker
I wonder if we could just start off telling us a little bit about your connection to Chaco Canyon both professionally and personally. How did you start working in the southwest?
00:01:04
Speaker
Sure. I've been fortunate to have had a 30 plus year career doing archaeology. I finished a master's degree at New Mexico State University in 1989 and I've been to Chaco a couple of times before that. So yeah, at this point I've been wandering in and around Chaco for about 35 years and
00:01:25
Speaker
In my first professional job, I went to work for Navajo Nation Archaeology Department based in Farmington. And I pretty much with projects for Navajo Nation Archaeology, I worked in every direction around Chaco, doing a variety of water development, home sites, you know, a few other chapter development type projects, tiny bit of oil and gas, but not a whole lot.
00:01:49
Speaker
So, I was fortunate with that work to have this perspective of working directly adjacent to Chaco. And then in 2001, I started work with what was then the Center for Desert Archaeology, now Archaeology Southwest.
00:02:05
Speaker
And I was pretty much assigned as the Chaco scholar at Solomon Ruins, which is a prominent Chaco outlier just a couple miles east of Bloomfield, New Mexico, and a little ways off the North Road. So I've spent almost 20 years now associated with Solomon here and there. I now live north of Towels, so I left Farmington, but still a whole lot of time back and forth to Chaco. And
00:02:30
Speaker
And really, I do tours here and there for friends and archaeological society groups. So I get to go to Chaco four to six times almost every year. So I consider myself a very lucky person. Absolutely. And what got you interested in archaeology to begin with? What was your inspiration for becoming an archaeologist?
Journey into Archaeology
00:02:50
Speaker
And where did you get your training from? And what was that like?
00:02:53
Speaker
Yeah. Well, as a kid growing up, my parents did with me and my brothers what a lot of parents do. You load the kids up and you take these different family trips. And growing up in Denver, Colorado, I was fortunate to be in part of one of the four corner states. So we made numerous trips all over the West, but especially trips around Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah.
00:03:18
Speaker
So, I became interested in the archaeology as a kid, the history, the land, the geography, all those things pretty early on. When I got into high school, I focused mostly on history. There weren't a whole lot of opportunities at my high school in Denver to do anthropology. And then when I went off to college, initially at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, I basically took every anthropology class that I could take.
00:03:46
Speaker
In between my freshman and sophomore years, I did a field school with three of the most prominent researchers working in the Southwest at that point, Fred Plog, Stedman Upham from New Mexico State University, and Linda Cordell from the University of New Mexico at that point. That field school, working for seven weeks at a site called Roe Pueblo, really one of the precursors to the much larger site that developed at Pecos Pueblo.
00:04:14
Speaker
by the late 1300s, early 1400s, that hooked me on archaeology and Southwest archaeology and really Pueblo archaeology in large part, which is what I've mostly done.
Chaco Canyon's Architectural Allure
00:04:25
Speaker
And what was it that drew you to develop such an interest in Chaco Canyon? We've had a variety of people on the show and both on the show and beyond. People are just fascinated by Chaco. So what was it for you that really grabbed you about the archaeology of that time period?
00:04:43
Speaker
You know, I think really probably the same experience, just a lot of people have, you know, folks who may not be researchers or archeologists, just lay people. You go into Chaco and it is amazing to see world-class architecture in a place that, you know, at least today seems pretty isolated.
00:05:03
Speaker
So I think it was for me and some of those early trips to Chaco in the mid 80s, really just going through the Great House sites and starting to get a sense of wonder. And then sort of having my mind fairly quickly go to, how did this place come about? What is it about?
00:05:22
Speaker
Chaco that makes, you know, that made Chaco Chaco. And I think that that really was it for me. And then, you know, working in a number of locales, really primarily in the Chewska Valley, I did a lot of work there when I worked for Navajo Nation.
00:05:38
Speaker
It really gave me an appreciation for how unique the concentration of Great House buildings, Great Kivas, all the small sites, how unique that setting really is. And there are Pueblo sites, of course, in pretty much every direction around Chaco. When we go out east a little, it thins out fairly quickly. But the concentration in Chaco is absolutely tremendous. So I think that's pretty much what led me to have an abiding interest.
00:06:07
Speaker
Excellent.
Collaboration with the Navajo Nation
00:06:08
Speaker
And what time periods are we talking about when you've said that you've worked for the Navajo Nation? Yeah, I really was. Are you talking about chronological years then? Because I started in 1988 and I worked for Navajo until 2001.
00:06:25
Speaker
Then I started my job with Center for Desert Archaeology and Archaeology Southwest. I've really been very fortunate to have had two major employers over a 30-plus year career at this point, with probably a few good years left in me still.
00:06:42
Speaker
Excellent. Now that's fascinating. So you're working for an Indigenous nation in the Southwest. You started in 1989, right before NAGPRA's passed. You've worked with them like during the Kennewick Man controversy and then, you know, Joe Watkins publishing Indigenous archaeology in 2000. So as an employee of the Navajo Nation working on their culture for the cultural division, how has that shaped your perspective in archaeological method and practice?
00:07:11
Speaker
Yeah, I think it was very, very instrumental for me as I look back now over the last three decades. The Navajo Nation really broke a tremendous amount of ground with their cultural program.
00:07:26
Speaker
you know, prior to really the mid-80s, most tribes had work done on their lands by outsiders and by non-indigenous archaeologists, you know, and even with folks trying to do a good job, a lot of that work really didn't take into account the values, the concerns, you know, and especially, you know, the traditional cultural places of each one of those unique groups. So starting to work for Navajo, and it was actually in the summer of 88, so I did kind of a summer
00:07:56
Speaker
you know, a couple of months there before I'd finished the master's really gave me a great appreciation for how an indigenous descendant community can and really to my mind should manage their own heritage. So one of the things is, you know, as I looked back, leaving Navajo to go onto other work, you know, one of the things I was, I'm really proud of is that we were able to employ and train
00:08:21
Speaker
literally hundreds of different Navajo individuals into archaeological jobs that probably wouldn't have been available if the Navajo Nation hadn't supported its own archaeology department and its own historic preservation department at that point.
00:08:37
Speaker
Now, in recent years, the funding has been a little tougher, and they've combined those two departments. So, they now have a heritage and historic preservation department, you know, with about a dozen employees, and they're continuing to do great work. So, for me as a 20-something recent grad,
00:08:54
Speaker
I learned a tremendous amount, not just about the landscapes on the Navajo Nation and the sites that date from as early as 12,000 BCE all the way into the modern era, but also how, again, an indigenous nation should and did, in fact, manage that landscape
00:09:17
Speaker
And really the appreciation for places that, you know, may not qualify under sort of our cultural resource management laws. You know, those laws typically say a site should be either 50 years or 100 years old. And with some work that was done with tribes by the Park Service in the early 90s, you know, a particular bulletin, bulletin 38 came out in 1992. So really right on the heels of Magpra.
00:09:42
Speaker
And it allowed tribes to say, hey, we have these traditional cultural places or properties, TCPs, that are important. And they may not all be 50 years old, but we still need to protect those. So I think the Navajo Nation did an amazing job breaking new ground and really convincing the agencies they dealt with, BIA and BLM, where there were crossover projects. The state historic preservation officer in Santa Fe, the Shippo,
00:10:11
Speaker
I think the Navajo tribe really broke a tremendous amount of ground for other tribes as well in setting up their own program.
00:10:19
Speaker
It's great to hear about your experiences working with them and just how foundational that was for larger efforts across the US between indigenous nations and archaeologists. And we'll get to that later in the episode too with some of your more recent work.
Chaco's Agricultural Potential
00:10:35
Speaker
But for now, maybe we'll turn to some of the big debates in Chaco archaeology. We've had some great conversations over the years. I know I've learned from you and maybe you've learned from me or maybe I've just annoyed you.
00:10:49
Speaker
But I wouldn't use that word, Rob. Definitely not annoyed. I think we've had a great synergy back and forth between us.
00:10:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's awesome. And we really wanted to show on this podcast that the title of this season is Canyon of Contention because there are just so many ideas out there about Chaco and different ways people look at the site. So we wanted to start with talking about the environmental setting. We had Rich Friedman on earlier who was talking about the geology of the area and the soils and the rainfall and the lack of trees.
00:11:27
Speaker
We know other researchers see Chaco as, even though it appears so harsh today, as providing better opportunities for agriculture in the past than many might expect. So tell us your thoughts and the evidence you draw on to talk about maize farming in Chaco.
00:11:46
Speaker
Right. I think this really is and should be the foundation of how we talk about Chaco. For those of us who have spent a lot of time studying the way Pueblo people live, both today historically and in the more remote past,
00:12:03
Speaker
You know, we know that corn is life for Pueblo people and that Pueblo people don't live in places where they can't do corn agriculture. So for me, that sort of simple foundational point takes me then into, you know, the rest of the study of how agriculture, really horticulture unfolded in Chaco.
00:12:27
Speaker
To understand this, we really draw extensively on Gwen Vivian, who really, to my mind, is the dean of Chaco archaeology. Gwen essentially grew up in Chaco. His father, Gordon Vivian, worked for the park service starting in the late 30s and through the 40s and 50s.
00:12:45
Speaker
So Gwen ran around Chaco as a young man, really as a little kid, and then completed both master's and PhD at the University of Arizona with a focus on Chaco. And in his PhD work, which was finished in 1970, Gwen really tried to zero in on how the Chaco agricultural system worked. So he explored ditches and canals, head gates, the extensive runoff system. He's pretty much the one who
00:13:15
Speaker
came to the first systematic understanding of how the Chacoans, the Puebloans living down there, collected water off the north edge of the canyon. And really I think to help explain in large part the setting of the Great House is of course we know the sites are set on the north side of the Chaco Wash, the Chaco Drainage, to face south and take advantage of
00:13:38
Speaker
the solar gain. That's part of what makes Chaco livable in not just the dry summer and the hot summer, but the cold winters. Gwen went beyond that to note that they were collecting water into extensive systems right next to the Great Houses and channeling that water to fields. That would have been, I think, pretty ubiquitous in the floodplain.
00:14:00
Speaker
To cut ahead into more recent studies, Larry Benson from CU and some other folks have talked about the problem of soil salinity in Chaco and really wondered if there was enough arable acreage. What's interesting is that I think Larry's work really sparked a great deal of interest.
00:14:18
Speaker
And so other folks have come along and really dug into that a little more deeply. And one of the papers that was really interesting in this regard is from 2018. And this has a large set of authors. There's like 13 authors. But the lead author is a guy named John Paul McCool, who's a geographer and a GIS expert. And basically, these folks have sort of gone in
00:14:42
Speaker
into greater depth with the work that Larry Benson and folks did, and really shown that the soils were not nearly as saline as Benson's work had showed. And they also looked at other factors, agricultural features, the placement of those. We also have the more recent work
00:15:00
Speaker
work of Chip Wells and Patty Crown working in the mounds in front of Benito and showing a lot of water moved through an irrigation ditch that ran just in front of that on the south side. I think we've got a really good body at this point of agricultural data, information on soils, on waters.
00:15:22
Speaker
And, you know, the other thing that I return to is if you look at excavation reports, and unfortunately this has to be in the modern era, so post 1968, 1970, all the small sites the Chaco Project folks did, you know, at Palo Alto, the one Great House site that they sampled, there is corn ubiquitously. We've got corn in every form. We've got
00:15:45
Speaker
macrofossil corn, we've got pollen corn, we have tassels, we have stock remains, portions of the plants. Chaco had corn in pretty much almost every excavated context. So, my assessment is Chaco wouldn't have become Chaco if corn agriculture wasn't just possible, but also productive enough in that setting. And then we go and we find all the information.
00:16:09
Speaker
Great. Well, we will be back after a short break and talk a little more about questions of agriculture and Chaco population and other major debates. Stay tuned. Welcome back to season one, episode three, the sites bites podcast. Here we are in segment two with Paul Reed. So just to to make sure that I'm following on the same page, based on what you told us in the previous
00:16:35
Speaker
recording. Do you believe, based on the articles that you mentioned in the research, that the area in Chaco Canyon was agriculturally viable and not as saline or unproductive as others might believe? Is that correct? Right. That is. Excellent. Okay. So now it's time for Rob, who has a different stance about what's going on. So Rob, why don't you go ahead and tell us, you know, your views of what's going on in terms of agricultural productivity in the Chaco Canyon area.
00:17:05
Speaker
Great. Well, I would say, of course, some corn could be grown in Chaco. Absolutely. I don't know of anyone who would say, you know, it's a complete lack of agriculture. But on the other side of the debate, people bring up usually the short growing season and the fact that if one were to head out to the margins of the basin along the Juska Mountains or down south in the sort of Red Mesa Valley area,
00:17:34
Speaker
that the growing season would be much longer. I've seen it cited that up to 30 days more frost free for growing maize because Chaco is right there on the edge of the, you get, I think maybe a five day window for the growing season. So that, and with the cold air flowing in from the continental divide.
00:17:55
Speaker
So that's one sort of a factor that people have brought up. The other is that, well, the salinity question is interesting. And as Paul mentioned, there's been a lot more nuanced and detailed scientific research carried out. Some say the soil is too salty. Others say, well, some of these salts are actually healthy for agriculture. Then others say, yes, but there are still just too many of them. And this makes the
00:18:22
Speaker
membranes burst on the maize plants. So I think that is well, yeah, it's way beyond my expertise. But I do know that there's also a lot of clay in the soils of Chaco with the shales underlying the soil there. And that is not usually a conducive environment for maize agriculture. I guess a couple other points I'll bring up that I've learned. One is
00:18:48
Speaker
There was some questioning of some of the agricultural features identified by Vivian, whether, for example, some of the check dams could handle or the head gates could handle the size of runoff that was being calculated or expected for such features to channel. An additional point on some of those was wondering whether they might have been constructed by later Navajo inhabitants of Chaco Canyon. Of course,
00:19:16
Speaker
They may have been old and reused. That's totally a possibility. But the last thing I'll bring up that.
00:19:23
Speaker
Those who see Chaco as less productive site is the fact that historically in the 1700s and the 1800s, there were a handful of Navajo families living in Chaco Canyon prior to it being taken and made a national park. And those families certainly had some cornfields in Chaco. You can see pictures of them. You can see pictures of the piled harvests.
00:19:50
Speaker
All of those families, as documented, had fields elsewhere that they relied on as more productive, especially out towards the Chusca Mountains. And when some of the early US government officials, I guess we can say, were traveling through that region,
00:20:09
Speaker
in the 1800s and in that area west of Chaco, the Chusca region, they described luxuriant, it's a great piece of vocabulary we don't use anymore, look the most luxuriant corn fields in the region and so at least as of a few hundred years ago the
00:20:26
Speaker
What Simpson describes in his journals is that there was corn from the chuscas stretching miles out from the slopes. What many would suggest is that you could grow corn in the side canyons of Chaco.
00:20:41
Speaker
The probably minimum estimate is that that could support about 250 people, but that a lot more food was brought in from outlying regions to support whatever size of population was in Chaco. And on top of that, they would add that of the corn that's been chemically sourced from the canyon, all, I think, but one cob were grown elsewhere, particularly in that Chuska region. So others would argue that
00:21:11
Speaker
While some corn could be grown in Chaco, it appears that more of it was probably being brought in from regions with a longer growing season and more conducive soils for agriculture. Yeah, thank you, Rob. Mr. Reed, do you have anything to add or respond to this idea that
00:21:29
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I think that it's a fairly complicated question, you know, and that the one paper that I cited, those authors certainly don't feel like, you know, they have definitively answered
Debating Chaco's Population
00:21:41
Speaker
it. But I think they make a couple really good points. Number one, the sampling that Larry Benson did for corn was not systematic.
00:21:49
Speaker
He basically grabbed a handful of corn that came mostly from Pueblo Benito and those seem to suggest Tusca Valley origin. So what we need if we're really going to understand corn in Chaco is we need to go through the great houses that have been excavated and we have collections for, and the small house sites, and we need to do systematic sampling. And I think if we did that, we would see a lot more locally grown corn
00:22:16
Speaker
The other thing is, Rob, I think that the side canyons were definitely exploited for corn. But I think one of the things that we really haven't taken into account recently is essentially the Hopi model for growing corn. The Hopi plant, historically, they're having difficulty at this point with climate change and a really dry climate.
00:22:36
Speaker
But they historically planted in 8 to 12 different microenvironments. And they knew that a quarter of those, a third of those, perhaps even half of those, would not produce. But that's why they had a diversity in strategy. So I don't think we have to look at Chaco and say the floodplain was highly productive for corn agriculture every single year. I think that it had floods sometimes that destroyed the corn. Then they had dry years. They didn't have enough winter moisture.
00:23:03
Speaker
But I think we've probably got extensive corn on the mesa tops as well. And you'd mentioned cold air drainage, which is a problem in canyons, as we know. When you get up on top into a dry setting, for sure, you don't have quite the same issues. So I think that we really haven't quite cracked the corn problem. And I hate to use that Billy Cracks corn analogy.
00:23:27
Speaker
I think it actually works here, and I think we really need a serious project on corn that pulls in a variety of specialists and really gets 1,000 or 2,000 or 5,000 cobs looked at, kernels, cobs, the whole mess, whatever we have for the corn.
00:23:47
Speaker
And I agree that the Chewska Valley was an absolute breadbasket for corn. And I don't doubt that some of that was traded in, and that that was part of what people in the Chewska Valley, along with producing pottery, and then allowing access to timber, of course, for those to be cut to build the amazing sites in Chaco. So I think we've got a lot of things going on there. But yeah, the corn evidence for now is
00:24:12
Speaker
doesn't convince me that Chaco is inhabitable. The other problem we have is if we go back in time at about 550 to roughly 700 a little later, we have two very large basket maker three settlements in Chaco. One is on
00:24:27
Speaker
the east side, basically in an elevated setting, a site called Shabikashi that's above the Wajiji Great House. Then out on the west, we have a more dispersed settlement, but over 100 houses there in a several-acre hectare area. We've got hundreds of people in Chaco, thousands probably, low thousands.
00:24:50
Speaker
in the Basket Maker 3 period from 550 to roughly 700 and then going into the next Pueblo 1 period. So Chaco was an attractive destination, a place, well before Chaco became what we think of as Chaco, before they started importing macaws, before they built the facility that's on Fajada Butte, obviously.
00:25:10
Speaker
you know, the three slab or sun dagger site. So Chaco was a place that drew basket maker three corn farmers in the 500s and 600s. So that tells me the agricultural potential is fine for Chaco because otherwise those folks wouldn't have come in. And we really don't have an indication of
00:25:31
Speaker
the buildup in Chaco and the special ceremonial significance, it's hard to assess for those earlier sites. I will certainly agree. But that was already a good place to be a Pueblo corn farmer. So that for me is kind of the clinching point. I'd love to see the corn study done to really further document what we think we know.
00:25:54
Speaker
One area that I know Paul and I agree is that Shavik SGE and 423 are indeed big villages and not accumulations of basket makers over time. So I agree that we have to think about these early sites, pre-Masonry architecture sites, and clearly people were very drawn to Chaco.
00:26:18
Speaker
Certainly, they had to be able to stay alive and grow enough corn there. And I think probably the landscape there with Fahad Abud and the striking canyon walls and that sort of location in the center of the basin was also drawing people, as you mentioned, having some of that
00:26:36
Speaker
Significance for ceremony and worldview that would become so important later on so i think people have heard enough about corn maybe and we can turn to talking about population estimates in choco which for a long time have been.
00:26:51
Speaker
I don't even know if I can say contentious because there's just been minimal discussion of how many people lived in Chaco. So fill us in, Paul, on the most recent thinking and your thinking about how many people lived in Chaco and great houses and small houses.
00:27:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think that really the population discussion goes directly back to the corn discussion. And this is something that the authors of the many authors on the agricultural paper I mentioned, led by McCall, really hit on. If people think there weren't a lot of people in Chaco, then
00:27:30
Speaker
the need to grow corn kind of goes down. If, on the other hand, you do think Chaco had a lot of population, as I do, then you have to be able to support that population, you know, whether you're supplementing, you know, and then for me, the supplementing with goods coming in from the outside is what helped make Chaco work.
00:27:51
Speaker
But it's that whole percentage thing, right? Was it half the corn? Was it a third or a quarter or less? But anyway, to settle on the population, I think Chaco had a healthy population and real people come up with
00:28:06
Speaker
down to a single digit numbers and those aren't very helpful quite honestly. I would put Chaco's population in the thousands and I wouldn't say 20,000 certainly wouldn't say anything beyond that, but I would put Chaco's population in the five ish thousand range and
00:28:22
Speaker
You know, that for me comes from not just looking at the great houses or looking at whether enough corn could be grown, but it's factoring in all the sites in Chaco. Now, a lot of people probably aren't aware, you know, we've got, depending upon how you exactly define a great house, probably 25, maybe 30 great houses in Chaco and all the way through the park. Those are a minor fraction of the total number of sites. Chaco has 3,400 sites.
00:28:52
Speaker
Now, according to a database that I'm working on a different project, about 1,500 of those seem to be historic Navajo sites that date from perhaps as early as 1650, you know, into the more modern era when the monument, the park was established. So if we subtract those 1,500 sites, we end up with just, I don't know, low 2000s for Pueblo sites in Chaco. And of course, a lot of these are what archaeologists call scatters, right? Artifact scatters.
00:29:20
Speaker
pieces of pottery, broken vessels, places where they knocked out a quick arrowhead to go hunting, you know, small camps and other things. But hundreds of those sites in Chaco are small Pueblo sites. And these vary in size between some as small as three, four sites, three, four rooms, all the way up to 100 rooms. That's, I think, the largest small Pueblo, if that isn't
00:29:45
Speaker
too much of an oxymoron. That's not a great house site. It is built on the scale of a small Pueblo, which means the walls are not a meter thick. There may or may not be an attempt to do some kind of veneer patterns. We have some real interesting small sites in Chaco. But most of these, I would say the typical small Pueblo that I think of as a population contributor or population holder,
00:30:08
Speaker
is probably 20 to 25 rims. And there are dozens, low hundreds of these sites. And these have been dated ceramically, mostly. Some have been excavated. So we really have a pretty high quality of data with which to then draw out some more precise population numbers. Now, I am currently in the middle of a study, along with all the other things that keep me off the streets of Taos.
00:30:34
Speaker
to look at those smaller sites, count up those rooms, you know, check for seasonality of sites, be sure we're not looking at something that is a temporary occupation in a place, you know, and try and factor out things that archaeologists are interested in, like field house type settings. These are places where people lived in the warm season and stored corn maybe temporarily and did things. So we don't want those in our estimate.
00:30:57
Speaker
because those are logistically used small sites. So we want a really robust sample of places where the people called home for at least 15, 20 years, whatever duration we might be looking at. Certainly could have been shorter in some places, longer in others. So that's a fairly involved process. But I'm hoping to get through that at some point next year, particularly if I still have a lot of time at home.
00:31:24
Speaker
you know, depending on what the world holds for us in 2021. So yeah, I think population sort of like corn agriculture is something that, like you said, Rob, people have made some assumptions about it, but not many archaeologists or other researchers have zeroed in on it. So despite Chaco being known
00:31:43
Speaker
you know, at least to Euro-Americans since the 1820s and studied perhaps some would say exhaustively in 120 years, that's a study that we still need to complete. And that's something that I know a couple of other researchers are interested in as well. So, I'm optimistic on a scale of a couple of years to have some more interesting data on that. But there were thousands of people in Chaco. That is what
00:32:08
Speaker
what I understand from my time there and my study. Well, all right. We seem to have exhausted our time here in this segment. So join us for segment three of episode three of season one of site bites. We'll be right back with Paul Reed and to hear Rob's perspective on just how many people were at Chaco.
00:32:26
Speaker
Welcome back to site bites episode three of season one. We're still here with Paul Reed. Thankfully he's been a fantastic guest. Now Paul, you stated in that last segment that you think there are at least thousands of people go living at Chaco. And so we wanted to, you know, hear from Rob about, you know, his perspectives and what kind of research is driving his belief as to population.
00:32:48
Speaker
Great. Well, I want to start off by saying I'm really excited about the study you mentioned, Paul, that you're beginning. Working with that data on all these non-Great House sites in Chaco, I agree that that material has been completely overlooked, and especially as members of the public, and even just what we really, most of the scholarship we read on Chaco is Great House-centric.
00:33:14
Speaker
And of course, they're impressive, they're monumental, but there are a lot more sites there. And I'm just so excited you're working on that study with their chronology and the number of rooms to try and get us closer to something really based in the archaeology to think about how many people were living there.
00:33:31
Speaker
Now, to provide a little perspective from the other side, one of the big debates within the population question is, we're great houses, primarily residential or primarily something else. Those who say primarily something else point to the idea that there are not a lot of fire hearts found in them. Of course, others would say,
00:33:54
Speaker
The firehards were on the upper stories that collapsed and maybe they went missed in earlier excavations. Others point to, you know, just the number of rooms that have poor circulation in the great houses. Others would again, you know, say that there was more occupation on the upper stories.
00:34:14
Speaker
The monumental character comes into question is, do people live in monumental buildings or are those reserved for other kinds of activities that don't have large populations? So some would call great houses something like a
00:34:29
Speaker
Steve Lexington, who we'll hear from in a future episode, talks about great houses as palaces. Others call them something like a temple. Others would say, no, you know, those in Pueblo societies today, we don't know of temples or palaces. And so these are something more like large communal dwellings.
00:34:47
Speaker
So there's a big debate there we don't have to go too far into, but I think on the question of the larger population of the canyon, one of the issues people point to is the lack of trees in the canyon today. If you have thousands of people, you're going to need a lot of wood for heating and for cooking.
00:35:04
Speaker
And currently, the landscape is almost treeless and you could go up onto Chakra Mesa or some of the surrounding regions, but that is one area people have pointed to as suggesting a smaller resident population. Another would be, again, looking at the historic Navajo occupation of the canyon, not known to have ever exceeded a few hundred people. And that's not to say that there couldn't have been more in the Chacoan era.
00:35:30
Speaker
but that seems to be the number of people who lived in the canyon historically. So I agree that we just don't know about
00:35:40
Speaker
the population of Chaco. We need more work done on the small sites. And again, you know, there are questions about how many people lived in the great houses themselves. There's questions about the livability of the canyon with the lack of trees. And so I guess the other other piece of evidence people will point to is the small number of
00:36:04
Speaker
burials found in the canyon. Probably only a couple hundred burials have ever been recovered in Chacoan context, much more from the small house sites. The early excavators, Pepper and Judd, who dug in Pueblo Benito, spent time looking for, you know, wondering where are the burials. And they searched in vain for
00:36:28
Speaker
large numbers of human remains and so that's another piece of evidence cited by people who suggest that numbers far fewer than a thousand people lived in Chaco Canyon. So these ideas to sum things up a little bit
00:36:44
Speaker
One popular model that's become much less popular in recent years for a while was that Chaco was a pilgrimage center where you know a sort of small number of ritual specialists lived and people would come from throughout the surrounding region to
00:37:00
Speaker
participate in ceremonies and special undertakings. Now that has come into question in recent years, but others would still say that, you know, only a small group of people lived in Chaco. They were somehow more powerful or more influential within the society and that people were probably coming in from surrounding regions to contribute to building these massive buildings, but not living in the
00:37:25
Speaker
Canyon full-time because again tying back to that question of the agriculture and the trees So that's a little bit from the other side
00:37:35
Speaker
Yeah, thank you for that, Robert. And archaeology in general, trying to figure out population densities and agricultural sustainability of areas is, you know, not just relegated to conversations about Chaco, but across, you know, the globe in general, that these are questions that archaeologists today still struggle to provide interpretations for.
Protecting Chaco Canyon
00:37:54
Speaker
And I want to thank both of you guys for providing that. I don't think many people realize just how, I mean, Canada contention are just like the dialogue that occurs.
00:38:02
Speaker
in archaeology. And so I do want to stress, like, when important, in order to answer these questions, right, we need to protect Chaco and protect that region. And so we kind of wanted to talk with you, Paul, about your efforts, your activism in protecting Chaco against danger towards its existence in contemporary times.
00:38:25
Speaker
Sure. If I might just offer another minor point, which I didn't talk about. Of course. The great house, you know, question of use is a great one. Good, nice little pun there. A great question about great houses. Pueblo Benito, I think, became a dominant ritual space, you know, probably at some point in the 900s. And certainly people had to live there. But I myself would not put hundreds of people necessarily inside Pueblo Benito.
00:38:52
Speaker
Other sites in the canyon are not Benito clones, though, and Chetrow Kettle had hundreds of people, perhaps even a thousand in a single place. The site that I spent a lot of time at, up at Solomon Pueblo, just outside Bloomfield, not too far from Farmington,
00:39:08
Speaker
I did a specific study to look at the use of Chaco floors, and Rob mentioned the apparent lack of hearths and the like, and Solomon had 60 hearths on something like 22 Chaco floors, so it had tons of evidence of habitation on those floors. So, Solomon, I am sure, was both a ritual and a residential center for Chaco and people, and there's really no reason if you're going to come out of Chaco with a good number of people
00:39:36
Speaker
to build a 300-room Pueblo like they did at Solomon and then turn around and build a 450-room one up at the poorly named Aztec ruins, which is, you know, just at another large Chaco Great House. You don't need that many rooms if you're just going to have a small resident population. So that's one of the issues as we look back at the Great Houses and the canyon itself. The other thing is,
00:39:59
Speaker
We have no modern excavation data except that taken out of about 14 rooms at Pueblo Alto in the 70s and 80s. Of course, nobody's advocating digging great houses in Chaco for a variety of reasons, but we really don't have a great deal of data. The most largely excavated site is what I'm trying to say, is at Solomon. There's an outstanding level of data there.
00:40:23
Speaker
So I'd really encourage people who want to understand this residential ritual conundrum, if it is that, to look at those data. Because Solomon was occupied with hundreds of people. The data really sort of speak clearly to us. But yeah, let's make a transition because we can debate these things. And I know that Rob's got a great career ahead of him, and he's going to be debating this with me and plenty of other people in the future. And I hope to get a few more good years in myself
00:40:52
Speaker
But to do that, we need to keep Chaco protected. So one of the things that the organization I work for, Archaeology Southwest, Tucson, Arizona based nonprofit, about 30 plus years old, we jumped into the Chaco question of protection in 2014 when the BLM out of Farmington, the Bureau of Land Management,
00:41:14
Speaker
as the primary land manager decided to modify their long-range plan for the area because of fracking. In 2011 to about early 2014, we had hundreds of wells be sunk into a formation known as the Manko Shale Formation.
00:41:30
Speaker
which was founded with the right technique, which is hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling, to produce hundreds, thousands of barrels. We had that mini-boom, and people got very concerned because a number of leases were offered, oil and gas leases, almost adjacent to Chaco.
00:41:51
Speaker
So a bunch of us got interested in promoting the idea of a 10-mile zone of protection. People call it a buffer zone. I like to call it a cultural protection zone because that's really what we're talking about. So we have succeeded in a relative way for six or seven years.
00:42:08
Speaker
in keeping new leases from being offered within that zone of 10 miles, not just around Chaco, but around a prominent outlier to the southeast at Pueblo Pentado, and then another one to the south at a site called Kenyaw. So that has been put in place pretty much informally by the agencies, and they haven't leased. But BLM and BIA, also part, the Bureau of Indian Affairs is part of an effort
00:42:33
Speaker
they are going to complete a plan early next year, a revision to their plans, and they may well allow, you know, leasing and drilling within a mile or two or three miles of Chaco. So, you know, we've worked with a number of partners. We've partnered with the All Pueblo Council of Governors, which is the 19 New Mexico Pueblos plus Isleta del Sur, which is in Texas. We've partnered with Hopi. We've partnered with Navajo Nation, and then a whole lot of environmental partners.
00:43:02
Speaker
the Wilderness Society, National Parks and Conservation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Conservation Lands Foundation, Pew, who jumped in a few years ago with some funding and some really high quality folks. So we've really had a great team. We have tried to work with a number of different tribes individually. So I've worked with Akama, with Zuni, with Santa Clara, with Tisuke, some work with Laguna, consultations with Hopi.
00:43:30
Speaker
We've really tried to build a very broad coalition to put some additional protection around Chaco. We have a bill that passed the U.S. House last fall and was introduced in the Senate. Unfortunately, with the politics of this year, the Senate bill has not gotten out of committee.
00:43:50
Speaker
But that bill would put in place a version of this 10-mile zone of protection around Chaco. And basically, just to be clear on this protection, because there has been some different information and different media, this bill would withdraw the federal minerals
00:44:05
Speaker
in those zones and wouldn't impact individual Navajo allotment holders or other individuals who might want to lease their lands for drilling. So, it's not complete protection for the area around Chaco, but it would provide quite a bit of protection. The other piece to interject briefly is our State Land Commissioner in New Mexico, Stephanie
00:44:26
Speaker
Marcia Richard was elected two years ago in 2018. She issued an order through her office to withdraw about 77,000 acres of New Mexico state trust lands from oil and gas leasing. And basically, she has committed her office for a five-year period that runs to the end of 2023 to look at other revenue generating mechanisms for those state trust lands around TACO.
00:44:51
Speaker
And of course, our state trust lands in New Mexico, just like in Colorado, I believe, and Arizona, other places, those are used to generate funds for schools. You know, K-12 colleges really across the board. So we need revenue from those lands. We don't need that revenue to threaten our World Heritage Site at Chaco.
00:45:11
Speaker
So sorry, that was kind of a long monologue, but we've had just a great set of partners and a lot of people we're working with on this and keeping our fingers crossed that we can protect this area more permanently.
00:45:22
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. You know, it takes, especially in our field and just in general, we're at the federal level protecting archaeological sites, which has become increasingly more relevant in the past four years that it's necessary. And, you know, like, thank you for doing this work and protecting like a national monument such as this. And during the break in between segment two and segment three, we kind of talked about, are you touched on
00:45:46
Speaker
the need for more science communication, would you like to kind of rehash those ideas and call to action maybe? Sure. You know, this is something that with the advocacy that I started doing for Chaco, you know, I'll be going into the seventh year on this really came my way.
Communicating Science to the Public
00:46:02
Speaker
I didn't necessarily jump into it and deliberately seek it out. But
00:46:07
Speaker
One thing scientists don't tend to do super well, and this is really across most fields, is communicate the importance of their research and their ideas to the public in language that's understandable and really more user-friendly.
00:46:25
Speaker
Partly what allows scientists sometimes, and of course we're in the midst of this pandemic where some of the scientific research hasn't been respected, I think, and we haven't really had quite the embrace of, you know, well, the science says we should do this to help contain this pandemic.
00:46:42
Speaker
And I think that's part of a broader issue. And I don't certainly lay this at the feet of the scientists completely. But, you know, in our field specifically, you know, archaeologists can be very reluctant to do public outreach. They may not have had a lot of training. They may not be used to speaking to the public or to the media. And this is something that I encourage people to do. And especially, again, those coming up in their careers like Rob and, you know, all the wonderful grad students we got in programs across the country.
00:47:12
Speaker
You know, is make context with the media and talk to them about the research that you're doing. You know, put it in words that they can understand. And, you know, I never, for my part, talk about anything being dumbed down. It's more a question of stripping away the jargon and some of the acronyms and saying, you know, like, and what I'm doing for Chaco. Chaco matters because it has the sites of, you know, countless cultural groups over 12,000 years of our history. We need to protect Chaco.
00:47:42
Speaker
You know, so this is something that I think we can all get better at. Thanks, Paul. Yeah, we completely agree. And it's a good moment to mention that Carlton co-hosts a great podcast called A Life in Ruins. It's got some around 30,000 downloads at this point, spreading.
00:47:57
Speaker
You know, science information and archaeology to a larger public and hopefully there will be many more such initiatives to get through to people what we do. And as you said, the sites that we all care about, but often describe only in arcane ways.
00:48:15
Speaker
Speaking of those arcane ways that they're described, we will be uploading or we'll be providing a list of references for people to follow up from this episode. So some of the papers Paul mentioned by McCool and Paul's own work from Solomon Pueblo and stuff from Larry Benson as well. And and some of the other sides of the debate so people can dig into that and formulate their own opinions. Right. Definitely. So with that,
Conclusion and Next Episode Teaser
00:48:43
Speaker
We just interviewed Paul Reed about the perspectives in Chacoan interpretations and the need for more science communication and protection of our archeological heritage. Thank you for listening to the Sight Bites podcast, episode three of season one. Be sure to tune in next time when we're joined by Dr. Steve Lexington, who will talk with us about what happened after Chaco was no longer the center of influence in the pre-Hispanic Four Corners.
00:49:22
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, in the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.