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What is Chaco? Location, Features, and Chronology with Rich Friedman - S1E1
191 Plays3 years ago
On the first episode of Site Bite’s Podcast season one, Carlton and Rob talk with Rich Friedman about the landscape and chronology of the famed Chaco Canyon archaeological site. We start off by getting Rich’s background in geology and how that education propelled him into Chacoan archaeology. We go in-depth about his work using emerging technologies and how those tools have allowed archaeologists to expand our understanding of the region’s environment and human behavior in and around Chaco Canyon.
Links
- Clark, Jeffery J., and Barbara J. Mills (eds.)
- 2018 Chacoan Archaeology at the 21st Century. Archaeology Southwest Magazine 32(2-3).
- Friedman, Richard A., Anna Sofaer, and Robert S. Weiner
- 2017 Remote Sensing of Chaco Roads Revisited: Lidar Documentation of the Great North Road, Pueblo Alto Landscape, and Aztec Airport Mesa Road. Advances in Archaeological Practice 5(4):365-381.
- Friedman, Richard A., Anna Sofaer, and Robert S. Weiner
- 2021 (in press) Chaco’s Greater Landscape Revealed and Re-Created with New Technologies. In The Greater Chaco Landscape: Ancestors, Scholarship, and Advocacy, edited by Ruth M. Van Dyke and Carrie C. Heitman. University Press of Colorado, Boulder.
- Lekson, Steven H. (ed.)
- 2006 The Archaeology of Chaco Canyon: An Eleventh-Century Pueblo Regional Center. School for Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe, NM.
- Lekson,Stephen H., Thomas C. Windes, John R. Stein and W. James Judge
- 1988 The Chaco Canyon Community. Scientific American 259(1):100-109.
- Mills, Barbara J.
- 2002 Recent Research on Chaco: Changing Views on Economy, Ritual, and Society. Journal of Archaeological Research 10(1):65-117.
- Stein, John, Richard Friedman, Taft Blackhorse, and Richard Loose
- 2007 Revisiting Downtown Chaco. In The Architecture of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, edited by Stephen H. Lekson, pp. 199-224. The University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
- Contact For Guest:
- Rich Friedman
- 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
Welcome to the Archaeology Podcast Network
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Introducing 'Canyon of Contention'
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome to Season 1, Episode 1 of the Sight Bites Podcast, Canyon of Contention, where we go in-depth on prominent archaeological landscapes. I am your host, Carlton Gover, and I am joined by this season's featured co-host, Robert Weiner.
Meet the Hosts and Guest
00:00:26
Speaker
For the topic of this episode, what is Chaco, location, features, and chronology, we have the pleasure of having Rich Friedman with us as our guest this morning.
00:00:35
Speaker
Thank you so much for being on, Rich. It is a pleasure to have you. How are you doing?
First Impressions of Chaco Canyon
00:00:39
Speaker
I'm doing great. It's another wonderful day. Beautiful. Well, Rich, we're so happy to have you here with us and to talk about a place you and I both love so much, Chaco Canyon. So we were wondering if we could start off with you just introducing yourself a little bit and telling us
00:00:56
Speaker
What is your connection to Chaco Canyon both professionally and personally? How did you get introduced to archaeology of that region and what does it mean to you? That's a long question. Well, of course, my name is Rich Friedman. Chaco, my first time to Chaco was on the mid 1980s.
00:01:19
Speaker
And I went there in a VW bus. So that gives you an idea how long ago it was. That was with my sister and brother-in-law. They lived in Tohatchee, which is on the Navajo reservation. And I went down for a visit, and we went out to Chaco. And to say I was impressed is kind of an understatement.
00:01:41
Speaker
And fast forward about four years, five years later, I ended up in Chaco, or not in Chaco, in Tohatchee myself.
From Geology to Archaeology
00:01:50
Speaker
That just kind of sealed the deal for me. We're going to be in New Mexico for just a few years. I grew up in Colorado and ended up in Tohatchee, which there's
00:02:00
Speaker
cultural resources all you know all over the place the Chaco greater Chaco and world is that that's right in it we went out to Chaco again and you know I saw the exhibit there on the roads and I thought oh roads I can find those because my my background is actually in geology so I started looking for roads and I was finding roads in great houses
00:02:23
Speaker
in the Tehachie area and one thing led to another. I finally ended up meeting John Stein, which he's pretty big in Chaco and we're pretty big in roads as well. And after a few years, we ended up
Chaco Canyon's Regional Influence
00:02:37
Speaker
working professionally together, and I've spent a lot more time in Chaco than I ever thought I would, but it is truly a fascinating place, not only Chaco itself, but the greater Chacoan world, and to me that's really
00:02:54
Speaker
The most impressive part of Chaco is this larger region that everything moved in lockstep with Chaco. I mean, when one thing changes in Chaco, it's changing everywhere. Of course, it could be. It's changing somewhere else. And the reflection is you see it in Chaco as well.
00:03:14
Speaker
You've got this huge region, depending on who you talk to, you know, it's from, I don't know, 70 to 90,000 square miles. And it's just this huge region where everybody's doing the same thing at the same time. It started off with the roads and around Tahachie and just
00:03:32
Speaker
grew to where I actually got to work in Chaco a lot and outside of Chaco too.
Balancing Geology and Archaeology
00:03:39
Speaker
So working inside and outside, inside the park itself and then in the greater Chaco region really gave me a different perspective on Chaco than had I just worked in one place or the other.
00:03:52
Speaker
Excellent. So did visiting Chaco during this experience that you just talked about, was that your first introduction to archeology or had you already been an undergraduate or gotten a couple degrees in anthropology prior to this experience? Like what inspired you to pursue a career in archeology?
00:04:08
Speaker
Oh, yeah, yeah, that's a good one. So growing up, I was always interested in archaeology. I think the way Winston Hurst, who's an archaeologist in Blanding, Utah, one of the top archaeologists in southeastern Utah, the way he puts it, he says, you know, archaeology, you don't choose to go into archaeology. It just kind of does itself to you. And that's kind of what happened with me when I went to
00:04:36
Speaker
college. I was interested in archaeology, but at that time, which was, you know, the mid-70s, mid to late 70s, if you didn't get a job, you know, as a
00:04:47
Speaker
as a professor at a university or college, then you didn't get paid very much. And I like to eat, so I thought, I'll do something different. And I ended up getting a degree in geology. I was still really interested in archaeology. And after I got out of college, my first geology job was actually doing geothermal work, looking for geothermal resources in Nevada.
00:05:13
Speaker
And we're doing what's called geothermal gradient holes. So I was out there permitting site locations, getting site locations permitted. And one thing led to another again. And pretty soon the company I was working for realized I knew the archaeology probably as well as the archaeologists that were going out there. And for them, the big thing was I could go out and I could
00:05:41
Speaker
stake a hole where they wanted to put in a drill site and actually look for archaeology ahead of putting the stake in the ground and marking where we were going to drill and also figure out if there was a clear access to that location. So I was doing pre-clearance clearance work so that when we did hire the archaeologist to come in and do the clearance work, they didn't find anything.
GIS and Digital Tech in Chaco Studies
00:06:06
Speaker
So that was my first
00:06:08
Speaker
I guess you could call that professional archaeology. I say in interest some people would call it an obsession of mine. When I moved to New Mexico, it was so readily accessible that I ended up doing archaeology. A lot of it was because I ended up in GIS, geographic information systems.
00:06:32
Speaker
had the capability and access to resources with GIS, which this was early on in GIS when not many people had it. I could use that in archaeology and do things that, you know, especially when you're working with a big region or big sites like you've got with Chaco, these huge buildings or this large region. The GIS just works so much better than
00:06:57
Speaker
Prior to that, everything was done in the analog world on paper maps. It really gave us the chance, us meaning John Stein and Taff Blackhorse and I, a chance to do things that hadn't been done before in ways that hadn't been done before. One thing led to another.
00:07:18
Speaker
And yeah, I don't have a degree in archaeology. It's in geology. And I do use those skills a lot in archaeology, though. That helps a lot understanding what should be natural and what is cultural. So yeah, that's how I ended up in archaeology.
00:07:34
Speaker
And I think that's a testament to the interdisciplinary nature of archaeology, right? That you back in the day, not so long ago that megafauna were roaming around New Mexico, but maybe back in the days of the 70s that you were able to use your experience as a geologist to provide different frameworks and methods for expanding archaeological knowledge. And that's just fascinating and a testament to some of these early endeavors that were pursued.
00:08:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's definitely an interdisciplinary science where the more people you've got with varied skill sets, quite often the better you can do with any sort of project in archaeology because it does take those different skill sets.
00:08:19
Speaker
One of the things that has been so awesome working with Rich over the years is that he was way ahead of the curve with a lot of the digital technologies that today are taken for granted. So as he was mentioning earlier, I mean, using GIS, could we say before it was cool? And I mean, Rich pioneered a LiDAR study of Chaco back in 2010, way before it was all over national geographic. And maybe you guys were even using it before that. I don't know.
00:08:47
Speaker
So, with these digital technologies, what has been the benefit of bringing them to archaeology? What was it like at that time when these weren't common technologies? What was the real benefit of bringing GIS and more digital methods to the field of Chacoan archaeology?
Environmental Challenges of Chaco Canyon
00:09:05
Speaker
One of the biggest benefits was to be able to combine new work with old work, primarily maps, but also taking tabular textual data and transposing that into databases.
00:09:20
Speaker
within the GIS so that you could begin to look at associations and see the big picture. So prior to that, everything in the analog world, you might have some aerial photos that say 1 to 40,000 scale, some at 1 to 20 and some at 1 to 8.
00:09:40
Speaker
And none of them were at the same scale, so working on those aerial photos at the same time was really difficult, where with the GIS, we were able to scan them and then geo-reference them, and then have them all in the same spatial framework, and you could begin to work through the different years of aerial photos to look for roads, for instance. So it really made it,
00:10:07
Speaker
much easier to to pick up on things that maybe otherwise were a bit too subtle plus you know once it's in the digital environment you can enhance the the photos so you can make them lighter darker you can
00:10:20
Speaker
You can do histogram stretches on them. You can do all sorts of fun things that then begin to show you what you hadn't seen before. And it was in 1994 I was able to participate with NASA and the Getty Conservation Institute on a pilot program or a pilot project in Chaco Canyon showing the value of these new
00:10:46
Speaker
digital technologies for cultural resource documentation and management. So we were able to get some airborne multispectral data of Chaco, which data of that resolution at that time was pretty rare. It was three meter and yeah, three meter data was what it was flown in a Learjet. But, you know, for 94, that was huge. You just didn't find multispectral data, anything under
00:11:14
Speaker
10 meter or 30 meter resolution at that time. So 3 meter resolution was pretty amazing. And that allowed us to work with the multispectral data and kind of figure out what was going on with that. Would it work or would it not work? So that was a huge plus. And so working on it early, it was just
00:11:36
Speaker
it gave us a chance to see how digital technologies would help and they really, they allow you to put together a
Cultural and Architectural Evolution
00:11:45
Speaker
big picture from pieces here and there. Let's talk a little more about that big picture. So tell us a little bit about, you know, we've heard now about Chaco and a little bit of its location in your previous work, but let's
00:11:59
Speaker
Let's hear about what is Chaco and where is it located and tell us a little bit of background about this site you've worked on for so many years. And as you've showed me, Chaco is not just the canyon. Yeah, what is Chaco? Chaco is...
00:12:16
Speaker
Well, most people think of it as the canyon, as the park, and it has a fairly narrow time span. What most people think is that narrow time span. When you begin to look at Chaco in this greater Chaco region, you see things you see in Chaco. You see the great houses.
00:12:39
Speaker
But you see the roads as well, and you see that the roads begin actually a lot earlier than what we think of as the Great Houses. It looks like the roads are beginning somewhere around 600 AD, give or take.
00:12:56
Speaker
50 to 100 years. And they show up about the same time you see the first form of public architecture in this greater Chaco region, which you see in Chaco too, which is the great Kiva or in Basket Maker three times, that would be the great pit structure. So you've got this prototypical public architecture or a building or a structure that is larger than what is expected for a normal domestic
00:13:26
Speaker
Structure and then you've got roads going to that and and that just continues to develop through time and It's it kind of you see this scenario where things are I don't like to use the word evolved because it that place is a stigma on us that you know
00:13:45
Speaker
people are learning to do something and they're improving. It's not really an evolution. It's more at a change through time. I think there are definite conscious choices. We aren't going to live in this pit house anymore.
00:14:03
Speaker
build these structures behind it or we aren't going to make just pit houses we're going to make structures behind it and then well we're going to make even bigger structures we aren't going to do this waddle and daub thing anymore we're going to we're going to do masonry and this plays out through the entire region and it it looks very conscious in in the way it's done because if it wasn't it
00:14:26
Speaker
a conscious cultural choice, it would be you'd see a definite lag of a significant period. Once you get to the outer reaches, you know, wherever it starts, say this one thing starts in Chaco and going from Guadalupe to Masonry, then you'd see it in Western Arizona, I mean, Eastern Arizona. What?
00:14:49
Speaker
maybe 50 years later, so you'd see an obvious change there, a separation in time, and you don't see that obvious change. So it looks like throughout this entire region, the people of Chaco, of this greater Chacoan world, are doing the same thing at the same time. And you see that with the pottery styles. You can tell where different pieces of pottery come from, but the styles typically are very similar. Sometimes there's a slight stylistic change where elements are bolder or
00:15:19
Speaker
or narrower, finer work, but the general style is all the same. And again, that changes throughout the region at the same time. And if it was just people doing, you know, things on an evolutionary basis, then you'd see that evolve at different locations, at different times, instead of everybody throughout this entire region going, okay, it's time to make chocolate black on white.
00:15:45
Speaker
and everybody does it. So Chaco itself is this larger system, some sort of, it's a cultural identity, could be different language groups, different cultural background groups, you know, coming together to create this thing that we look at as Chaco as a whole, and they're doing the same thing at the same time. So they have a identity that's the same throughout this entire region.
00:16:12
Speaker
And they're playing it out from at least late basket maker three, probably earlier than that, all the way through to the end of Pueblo three or the 1300s. So it's several hundred years of people doing the same thing over this whole region. And you see some ebbs and flows along the, I typically call it the frontier where, you know, you're on the edge of this greater chocolate world and things will be a little,
00:16:42
Speaker
Less rigid in those areas, but once you get more toward the interior, you know 50
00:16:50
Speaker
miles or so from that furthest frontier, everything's going to look pretty much exactly the same throughout the entire region.
Chronology and Significance of Chaco Structures
00:16:58
Speaker
Well, excellent. Well, we're going to take this time for me and Rob to make a stylistic change to get ready for segment two. We'll be right back with Rich Friedman. Welcome back to episode one of the Site Bytes podcast. We're here with Rich Friedman. Rich, can you tell us a little bit about the environmental setting of Chaco and what it's like in the surrounding region?
00:17:19
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Chaco is in the San Juan Basin. It's very close to the structural center of the San Juan Basin. And it's also kind of in the place you really wouldn't want to be to live. I mean, the Chaco itself is a pretty harsh environment. The temperature swings, I mean, in the summertime,
00:17:42
Speaker
it can easily get over 100 degrees quite often up in the mid to upper 90s for long periods of time. But in the winters, it can drop down to below 40, below zero. So it's a challenging environment definitely as far as its climate goes because it's getting drainage off the
00:18:07
Speaker
continental divide Meaning the air the cold air kind of settles down in the valley or the canyon there and so you get Huge and it's 40 degree temperature chain changes in a day are common So if it's if it's 60 during the day, it's gonna it will drop below freezing at night which creates a difficult situation for for agriculture because
00:18:35
Speaker
you have a very short growing season, even though it seems like it should be longer. It's really very short because of these huge temperature fluctuations the canyon gets. The soils there are pretty unfriendly to high agricultural production, mainly because there's a lot of salts and a lot of clay in the soils.
00:18:57
Speaker
That's because of the geology of Chaco. It's sitting in the cretaceous sandstone and those shales create badlands. Most of your badlands you see around
00:19:15
Speaker
which are, you know, they're just, they're huge large expanses of shale exposure. So underneath the sandstone in Chaco Canyon is this shale that is not very good at growing things. And that's kind of true of the whole center of the basin where it's not real good. Now there are little microclimates where you can grow things and you can grow
00:19:36
Speaker
grow things really well. And the side canyons, the little tributaries to the Chaco, are typically areas where you can grow pretty well. You're getting water that isn't quite so high in salt, doing better as far as salt and
00:19:54
Speaker
easier to control than the Chaco. When the Chaco flows, controlling it would be really difficult. So the side canyons really look like places where people could live. And then you get out on the periphery of the San Juan Basin. So you're up against the Chuscas to the
00:20:11
Speaker
to the west, things look really good. You actually have streams that are water. Now they're pretty dry, but 30 years ago, you had streams that were actually perennial. They'd flow year-round coming out of the cheese, because they didn't go far out into the valley. They'd dry out. But you did get water for most of the year. There's a stream there that flows
00:20:37
Speaker
Most of the year it might dry up just before the monsoon season hits in, you know, in July, August, but it flows most of the year. And the same with the Captain Tom wash up by Newcomb. It's a nasty wash, so you've got these washes coming off the juice because they're flowing year-round.
00:20:56
Speaker
And subsequently, you've got modern-day agriculture that we're pretty sure was the same thing going on a thousand years ago. You had a lot of agriculture in those areas because there's just more water available and it's a better area to live. And the temperature is much different there. You don't get the
00:21:16
Speaker
big temperature swings along the Chuska slope or down along Lobo Mesa that you get in the canyon itself. The temperature swings are slightly lower, you don't get as cold, you don't get quite as hot. It's just the environment is more suitable to living and growing agriculture there.
The Enigma of Chaco's Purpose
00:21:36
Speaker
I first noticed these differences when I was living in in Tohechi on the reservation, on the Abhoa reservation. I was working in Gallup
00:21:45
Speaker
And Gallup is very similar to Chaco in its setting. It gets cold air drainage off of the continental divide to the east, just like Chaco does. And it has virtually the same temperature every day and the same temperature swings. And when I was living in Tahachie and commuting to Gallup to work, I saw this difference here where, you know, it'd be nice in Tahach. There might be,
00:22:14
Speaker
some rain or light snow in Tahachie. By the time I got to Gallop, there being six inches to a foot of snow, it was just a totally different environment. Then when I lived there, I realized what was going on. It had these huge temperature swings that changed what the environment was like. In that valley that Gallop's in, the Rio Parco Valley,
00:22:36
Speaker
you saw the same thing that you do in Chaco, there was not a lot of agricultural production in that drainage itself, that main drainage. The little tributaries off of it, yeah, you get a lot of agricultural production. It's very similar in the environment there, and Chaco is just
00:22:56
Speaker
When I think of Chaco, it's not the place I would think to go have a great civilization. It's a harsh environment. It's a difficult environment. And you go 40 miles away from Chaco in any direction, and you've got a much better environment to live in. So that's probably one of the big things is why did they even select Chaco to build the center of this greater cultural influence throughout the Four Corners area. And there are no trees in Chaco.
00:23:25
Speaker
It's not just the lack of rainfall and the qualities of the soil. Tell us about the lack of trees and not only for heating, but for construction too. Yeah, the trees in Chaco just, they don't exist. And again, that's for something, you know, a location in its geologic and environmental setting. No trees is what you would expect.
00:23:48
Speaker
Shale isn't isn't really good for growing big trees. Most of the trees in Chaco grow up where it's sand year long. The cliffs are on top of the the maces there and you don't get ponderosa pine, which you see a lot of ponderosa pine in
00:24:05
Speaker
in the buildings or larger pinyon pine, that doesn't exist. You get junipers, some pinyon but a lot of juniper and nothing down in the valley. So the construction timbers, for a long time there's a big debate that there might be some remnant Pleistocene forest in Chaco which
00:24:27
Speaker
looking at it you know with my geologist eyes that's like no that that probably never happened and more recently it's been proven that you know that most of the timber in chaco like almost all of it came from outside the canyon at least 40 miles some of it 60 65 miles away so they are hauling the the timber for construction of chaco into chaco and then
00:24:52
Speaker
with this lack of wood in Chaco. When you look at population estimates, you have to also look at the availability of fuel for priors for heating and cooking. And again, because
00:25:05
Speaker
Most of the available wood that is there today is up on the mesas. You're going to be happy hiking up on top of the mesas to get wood for everyday living. If you just say one tree per person per year,
00:25:22
Speaker
for heating and cooking, which is, I think that's an ultra conservative estimate. 3,000 people in the canyon, you'd have to have 3,000 trees a year. And 3,000 trees a year for over 100 years is a lot of trees, 300,000 trees. So when you begin to look at that and look at the environment of Chaco itself, you see these big buildings, you begin to go, well,
00:25:50
Speaker
and very few fire hearts in the big buildings. At least to me, it becomes apparent that these large buildings are not huge apartment complexes. They're huge temples, palaces. They're places where important people live because there is some living going on there, but not where everybody did. So then we go back to playing the game of monumental architecture.
00:26:18
Speaker
And then we've got monumental architecture in an area that really isn't easily inhabitable, which makes Chaco even more interesting,
Mapping Chaco with Digital Tools
00:26:27
Speaker
I think. And that's part of what draws people to Chaco, is this mystery of it's in this harsh environment, yet you have this monumental architecture sitting in the middle of a harsh environment. So that's one of the big draws to Chaco, I think.
00:26:41
Speaker
So you've touched on a couple other subjects already, including architecture and some of these features. Could you give us like a brief, you know, overview of the site construction of Chaco? What periods do we first see some settlement? Like are people in here, you know, during Clovis and we can see like continual occupation up till today, basically just through chronology. How do we see Chaco change over time? Yeah. So the first,
00:27:08
Speaker
As far as I know, the first inhabitation in Chaco is during the Archaic. We haven't found any paleo sites in Chaco, although there are paleo sites in the San Juan Basin, so probably are there. There are Archaic sites, and they'd be
00:27:27
Speaker
mid to late arcades six to four thousand years BCE. We do get those. They're primarily cave sites. You go just north of Chaco, you get a lot of sites in sand dunes that are north of Chaco. We've got Bahata and
00:27:46
Speaker
There are some pinto basins, so we are getting into paleo. I've seen pinto basin sites in Chaco. You really begin to see more evidence of use of Chaco.
00:28:03
Speaker
in late basket maker two into basket maker three. So that's, and depending on who you talk to, basket maker three will be around, you know, five to 700 AD. It might be 350 to seven, 750. It changes depending on who's citing it. But you can think generally five to 700 is basket maker three. And that's when the predominant
00:28:32
Speaker
domestic structure living site is a pit house. Normally, it's a fairly shallow pit house, but as you get closer to the 700s, they tend to drop or get deeper, so you do get some pretty deep
00:28:49
Speaker
pit houses post-680. And then you go to P1, or Pueblo 1, which is 7-750-ish to 9-950, depending on who you talk to. And during that time frame, you still have the pit structure, the pit house, only now
00:29:09
Speaker
It may be what we're calling in later times the Kiva. It may still be a domestic structure. It looks like it probably is still a domestic structure, so people are still living in the pit house, but you've got a typically a row of rooms, a series of above grade rooms behind that pit structure, and the construction of those rooms is usually a mud adobe wood construction that's known as wadam daub where
00:29:38
Speaker
It's not really masonry stacked up. You've just got kind of like a wood fence with adobe plastered on it and then a roof on top of that. So it's a pretty rudimentary structure as you get.
00:29:50
Speaker
Mid P1 is when you start seeing more masonry elements so you'll get single course masonry walls where you've got just rocks stacked on top of each other and still kind of doing the waddle and dob thing. You'll have quite often wood posts in those walls to make them a little sturdier. By around 25 to 850 you start seeing, in Chaco itself, that's when Pueblo Bonito, the first
00:30:18
Speaker
official, which recognizes being Pueblo Benito now, structure shows up there. And that's the first multi-story structure in Chaco Canyon. Well, Pueblo Benito, Unavida, Penasco Blanco are believed to be the early structures. So around, before we're out of this P1 period, we've got these structures that have single-course masonry, sometimes double-course, and are
00:30:43
Speaker
at one to two stories in height, so we've got multiple stories. Then as you go on, from nine
00:30:53
Speaker
1,100 to 1,100, 1,150 is P2, or that's kind of the fluorescence of Chaco. That's the classic Chaco period that everybody thinks of. That's when the great houses get really big. So during that time is when you get all the massive construction in Chaco, and most of it's toward the end of that time. So in the 1,100 to around 1,115, 1,120 is when you get all the massive building in Chaco.
00:31:21
Speaker
And those are really big structures, really big walls. Typically they're core veneer walls, which means you've got this.
00:31:30
Speaker
inner core in the wall that's kind of a rubble mortar mix and then this nicely built veneer on the outside that makes the wall look really nice and is you know typically that's what we think of when we think of Chaco is this core veneer masonry some of these walls you know at the base of the walls they can be three three and a half feet thick and they go up well the tallest one is around 40 feet so
00:31:58
Speaker
You've got these structures that are just huge toward the end of the period early on in the 800s. In Bonito, the rooms are around two meters tall. And by the time you get to the end of the building, the big construction stages in Bonito, you're looking at rooms that are a little bit under
00:32:23
Speaker
four meters tall, so about 12 feet. So they're getting really tall. Again, that's another thing that we're thinking. That's more a monumental type architecture. That's not something that your average subsistence farmer is going to build a room that's 20, 25 feet by 20 feet by 12 feet tall. That's
00:32:44
Speaker
That's way beyond what your average subsistence farmer would ever need. And so you've got hundreds of rooms that size in Chaco. So that's why we think this period is when you're building all the big monumental architecture in Chaco. Then 11 to 1300, which is P3, or 1150 to 13,
00:33:07
Speaker
You don't see the massive building in Chaco anymore. It pretty much dies off. There's still people there. Occupation is still pretty good. You just don't see these big construction stages in Chaco. The big construction during that time period happens throughout the larger region. You get some really big structures. At Chaco it seems like the
00:33:31
Speaker
the big construction there is stopped, but the use of Chaco hasn't stopped. So if we're using construction as a proxy for habitation, then nobody's living there, but people are living there. It's just for some reason, the big construction has stopped then and it's happening elsewhere throughout this region where we're getting buildings the same size as Pueblo Bonito being built outside of Chaco.
00:33:57
Speaker
Well, excellent. Thank you for that brief overview, Rich. And with that, the chronology for this segment has ended.
Future of Chaco Research and Legacy
00:34:03
Speaker
So we're going to move on to the next period of this podcast right after this. Welcome back to episode one of the site bites podcast. This is Rob Weiner. We are talking with Rich Friedman. Rich, we want to hear about some of your recent work in Chaco. Tell us about mapping Pueblo Veneto and how that led to the model that people can see in the visitor center.
00:34:22
Speaker
Oh yeah, mapping Pueblo Bonito was, well, it's something I've been doing for years. I have several different iterations of the map, but the most recent one, the park needed a model for the new museum exhibit, which is a model of Pueblo Bonito, and they wanted it circa 1940 before threatening rock fell and took, you know, part of Bonito out.
00:34:48
Speaker
fell on top of part of Puerto Lovenido. So they wanted to be able to show the walls, the way they looked, the heights of the walls in ruin, not a reconstruction of the site, the way it looked when people were there before it started to fall down, but the way it looked in 41 as an excavated ruin.
00:35:07
Speaker
So I went out with well a pair of I used two two different poles one was a 16 foot pole the other was a 23 foot pole with cameras mounted on this pole and you used photogrammetry Which is the measurement of of things through photos so I used a new structure from motion type of photogrammetry with literally thousands of photos that I took
00:35:32
Speaker
with these cameras on these poles of Pueblo Benito to recreate a model, a 3D model, and a new map of Pueblo Benito. That map had the elevations of the walls every six inches. Think of an elevation contour map only just on the walls so that
00:35:53
Speaker
The contractor who built the model could create an accurate model of the way Pueblo Benito looked in 1941. I used technology for that. If you've ever been there or you look at some of the photos, it's a big site. It's about three acres. I mapped that all by myself with the cameras and GPS. I used GPS to get accurate survey grade GPS to get accurate positioning on everything.
00:36:22
Speaker
and created a 3D model to do that. So yeah, technology is, that's the case of without using photogrammetry, there's no way one person could have mapped that. I think I spent six days in the field doing that. One person could never have done that in six days. A group of three people, a survey crew couldn't do that in six days. That would be months of work. So technology is really a,
00:36:50
Speaker
It's a great thing and something that I think for archeology, we're only hitting the tip of the iceberg on what it's going to do for us. Absolutely fantastic, Rich. Yeah. To everybody listening, if you haven't been to the visitor center at Chaco, I highly recommend checking out this model because it is awesome.
00:37:07
Speaker
I also want to say I love the image of you out there with the 16 foot pole and tourists walking through the site and say, what is this guy doing? Love it. So tell us a little bit about use of LIDAR. You were really ahead of the curve using that technology. So how have you used LIDAR in research on Chaco Canyon and Chaco and roads and what has it taught you? What has it revealed?
00:37:31
Speaker
Oh yeah, LIDAR is, when it comes to roads, LIDAR is really an extremely valuable tool, or invaluable tool. I first used it in
00:37:43
Speaker
Oh gosh, was it 2001? Yeah, 2001 was the first time I used Lidar and Chaco. We got Lidar flown of... Well, the real target was Pueblo del Arroyo and Alto were two of the targets in Pinasco Blanco. We wanted to see several things. Part of it was erosion mapping and part of it was to look at what we could do with the roads. That's why we did Pueblo Alto.
00:38:10
Speaker
And just like we expected, the road showed up real clearly. And this is when LIDAR was still a pretty new technology. It had come out in the mid-1990s.
00:38:22
Speaker
and getting real real high resolution data was pretty tough but the roads even even at that time with that data showed up real clearly. Then you know fast forward to 2007 got some more lidar not of Chaco but the greater Chaco region up near Farmington in the Farmington area. Aztec ruins was a part of that big data acquisition and we could see the the north road going out of Aztec ruins just clear as a bell which
00:38:51
Speaker
It was one of those things that for years was kind of controversial because it didn't really show up super clear on any aerial photography, except for the 1930s aerial photography, which we didn't have access to until recently. And the LIDAR, it just showed that road up clear as a bell, and another road called the ISA Aztec Airport Road, which is
00:39:13
Speaker
a 20 meter wide road going up toward the Aztec airport that it's hard to see today it was clear in 1919 but the lidar makes it you can you can measure the new profiles on it so lidar is a huge huge
00:39:29
Speaker
thing with roads because they are these linear features that go across the landscape. Think of them kind of like a linear trough and you can use in the computer environment, we can make the sun come up and go down anywhere we want.
00:39:46
Speaker
So we can make the sun come up, say, in the north and just barely shed light on your lidar image, your 3D image, and it will create this shadow enhancement of a linear feature running east-west. So lidar is really a good thing to use with roads because they're pretty subtle anyway. And when you can shadow enhance that linear
00:40:11
Speaker
expression or topographic expression on the surface of the earth. It really helps identify where roads are. Yeah, it's been, I know, incredibly helpful in the collaborations we've had together to use LIDAR and see new roads and to create a measurement of them too. And as
00:40:28
Speaker
the fact that they're going away, we have a digital record of as they exist now, which is just a really great asset. Rich, I also want to ask you about the 3D modeling you've done of some of the Chaco and Great Houses, which again is unique, I would say within Chaco research, Chaco studies. Why do you think it's important to see the buildings in 3D?
00:40:52
Speaker
I think seeing the buildings in 3D and scaled buildings accurate as we can make them based on the archaeological record, it helps us understand, number one, what they look like. Number two, just how big they are.
00:41:12
Speaker
And number three, it gives us an experience that we can't have in the real world. So the virtual world gives us this experience of what these buildings might have felt like at the time they were fully constructed and what it might have felt like being there. It's been an interest of mine because in my mind, when I look at the buildings, I extrude them, but
00:41:37
Speaker
conveying that to somebody else has always been difficult, where if you can put it into the 3D environment and make these virtual reconstructions, then other people can see the same thing that you're seeing in your mind. Plus, sometimes by going through this process of reconstructing them, you see things that you didn't see before, or things look
00:42:00
Speaker
different than you thought they did. So it really is, I think, a real valuable exercise to go through to help understand not only what the building looked like, but how it was constructed and how it may have felt to be there at the time. Excellent. Now, for the close of this, to sum all this episode up, what do you hope your legacy is going to be in terms of Chacoan archaeology and research?
00:42:29
Speaker
Oh, that's, what do I hope my legacy will be? Well, I hope that people can see that I did contribute something to our greater understanding of what Chaco is, and that, although, you know, I do often provide some interpretation of the data, I think what I want to be able to do is convey
00:42:56
Speaker
information to people so that they can make their own independent evaluation of Chaco and come up with their own conclusions. And if my legacy is just that I helped push the digital envelope on Chaco to understand and see Chaco better, put all this data that is Chaco because it is so big and it's so massive, not only the canyon itself, but this larger region.
Reflecting on Chaco's Significance
00:43:24
Speaker
into a context to where it can be dealt with and understood at this large scale. And if my name is associated with that in any way, I think that would be an amazing legacy. Well, I have no doubt your name will be associated with that and that for years to come, people will be looking at
00:43:44
Speaker
your models and work with LIDAR as revealing an unknown extent and an, I mean, both an unknown extent and an previously unknown degree of detail from the Chaco world. So thank you for all you do, Rich. Where do you see Chaco research going? What do you think are the big remaining questions and what sort of work do you see as important to the field moving forward?
00:44:14
Speaker
Hmm, where is it going? Well, there are a lot of questions. There are probably more questions than there are answers when it comes to Chaco. I think, you know, we're beginning to see
00:44:28
Speaker
more use of digital technologies, of GIS, of remote sensing, helping to understand Chaco, helping to document. So I think that's one thing that we're going to see in the future that will probably help us understand Chaco much better is the use of technologies, mainly because it's such a big area.
00:44:52
Speaker
I think the biggest questions still remaining, and there's still questions, is how many people lived in Chaco? How was it organized? And who was there? And those are questions that, in some cases, I think are
00:45:10
Speaker
are probably easy answers as far as who is there. I don't know that that's an easy answer at all other than I think all the current indigenous peoples in the greater Four Corners region were all participating in Chaco in some greater way. And maybe at some point we can understand a little bit better how that happened, how that
00:45:35
Speaker
participation with all these different groups happened. I think continued investigations into known oral histories is probably a real good thing because there is a really, really valuable record on Chaco itself in the oral histories.
00:45:56
Speaker
Of course, some of that isn't necessarily accessible to the average person because it's oral histories that only the Native Americans know. But there are still, there are a lot of written histories that I think we can glean a lot of information from. If we get past this idea of their, you know, like the office room or where things change once
00:46:19
Speaker
we all begin to understand how important the accuracy of these histories are to Native Americans. And I think we'll begin to be able to understand the stories that they've told us. I think something else you've really helped me to understand, as you covered extensively in this episode, is that Chaco is not just the canyon. And for what, I guess about a century now, a little over a century, we've had
00:46:47
Speaker
excavations in the canyon, visitors, you know, visit the great houses in the national park of Chaco Culture National Historical Park, but really there's
00:46:59
Speaker
150, maybe 200 Chaco related sites across this huge area, the size of Ohio, all across the four corners. And as you mentioned, that's all moving in unison with one another. The pottery styles change together. The architecture changes together. And that is a big cultural system. That is a big deal. And so to add to your thoughts,
00:47:24
Speaker
I also see Chaco research in the upcoming years, beginning to look beyond just what's in the canyon and ask, what are these outliers? How are they related to what's happening in the center? Is this a united sort of something like an empire civilization or?
00:47:43
Speaker
Or are these people, you know, the other ideas people are emulating? So I think really beginning to see the bigger picture, see that Chaco is not just the canyon is going to be an important step moving forward. And there's always new information. As you said, there's always new technologies. So there's a lot to look forward to. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah. The greater world is
00:48:07
Speaker
Chaco itself is really cool. That greater world, when you begin to look at the greater world, it makes Chaco so much more than what it is when you just look at Chaco. Hopefully, the greater world of Chaco will become a bigger focus. I was really lucky.
00:48:30
Speaker
I kind of, you know, it's a chronology thing, the chronology of archaeology in the Southwest. So I got to work with a lot of people who worked at the Chaco Center, which was, you know, at UNM in Albuquerque. And so I've worked with what they called at the time, you know, the Chaco insiders, the people who worked in the canyon. And I've worked with the Chaco outsiders, the people who worked outside the canyon. And I've worked both places. So I've been able to see this
00:48:59
Speaker
kind of this bigger, chalk-on world. So yeah, if we can improve the visibility of that greater chalk-on world and understand that better, I think that will be huge.
00:49:11
Speaker
Great, well, thank you so much for being with us, Rich. We've just interviewed Rich Friedman about background information on Chaco Canyon and its greater world, and he shared with us about his work utilizing emerging digital technologies. Thank you so much for listening to Site Bites episode one of season one, and be sure to tune in next when we are joined by Dr. Kathy Cameron, and we talk about the origins of Chaco. What would draw people to this harsh Canyon to build on such a grandiose scale?
00:49:43
Speaker
you
00:49:51
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.