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Origins of Chaco - Who were the Chacoans and where did they come from? with Dr. Cathy Cameron - S1E2
194 Plays3 years ago
On the second episode of Site Bite’s Podcast season one, Carlton and Rob talk with Dr. Cathy Cameron about the origins of Chaco. We dive into the contemporary interpretations of where the people came from behind the monumental structures at Chaco as well as what the area was like before Chaco became a center of ritual and political influence. We discuss the broader Chacoan world such as Mesoamerican relations and Chacoan outlying settlements in the Southwest. We conclude this conversation with Dr. Cameron with her research on captive taking in small-scale societies and how that relates to Chacoan population demographics.
Links
- Cameron, Catherine M.
- 2009 Chaco and After in the Northern San Juan: Excavations at the Bluff Great House. The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ.
- 2013 How People Moved among Ancient Societies: Broadening the View. American Anthropologist 115(2):218-231.
- 2016 Captive: How Stolen People Changed the World. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
- Kennett, Douglas J., Stephen Plog, Richard J. George, Brendan J. Culleton, Adam S. Watson, Pontus Skoglund, Nadin Rohland, Swapan Mallick, Kristin Stewardson, Logan Kistler, Steven A. LeBlanc, Peter M. Whiteley, David Reich, and George H. Perry
- 2017 Archaeogenomic Evidence Reveals Prehistoric Matrilineal Dynasty. Nature Communications 8(14115):1-9.
- Mills, Barbara J., Matthew A. Peeples, Leslie D. Aragon, Benjamin A. Bellorado, Jeffery J. Clark, Evan Giomi, and Thomas C. Windes
- 2018 Evaluating Chaco Migration Scenarios using Dynamic Social Network Analysis. Antiquity 92(364):922-939.
- Weiner, Robert S.
- 2015 A Sensory Approach to Exotica, Ritual Practice, and Cosmology at Chaco Canyon. Kiva 81(3): 220-246.
- Contact For Guest:
- Dr. Cathy Cameron
- 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
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome to season one, episode two of the site bites podcast Canyon of contention. We go in depth on prominent archeological landscapes. I'm your host Carlton Gover. And I am joined by this season's featured co-host Robert Weiner. For this topic of this episode origins of Chaco, who were the Chacoans and where did they come from?
Initial Encounters with Chaco Canyon
00:00:33
Speaker
We have the pleasure of having Dr. Kathy Cameron with us as our guests. Dr. Cameron, thank you so much for being with us today. How are you doing?
00:00:41
Speaker
I'm doing well and thank you so much for inviting me. This is going to be great. My favorite topic. Wonderful. Mine too. Imagine that. We're so happy to have you with us, Kathy, and we're wondering if you could start us off with a brief introduction to what is your professional and personal relationship to Chaco Canyon? How'd you get started in Chaco and archaeology?
00:01:04
Speaker
Well, I first visited Chaco Canyon in 1972. I was doing a project down in southeastern New Mexico, and we drove all the way and a bunch of trucks up to Chaco and rode around. We saw sites in Chaco. We saw sites outside of Chaco. I remember somebody getting us up on the Mesa above Pueblo Benito and pointing out at what he said was a prehistoric road. I couldn't really see it, but
00:01:30
Speaker
I remember being very, very impressed with that. Within a couple of years after that, I got a job at Salomon Ruins, which is the Chaco and Great House, and it's north of Chaco. At the time, we didn't know as much as we do now about the Chaco and regional system, but Salomon was a Chaco and Great House, and it was recognized that it did have a Chaco and occupation.
00:01:54
Speaker
I worked in the lithics lab there one summer and then moved down to Portales, New Mexico, where they had their winter labs. I worked for a year on the lithics salmon in Portales. Spring of 1975, I was lucky enough to get a job running the field lab at Chaco Canyon. I started there in May of that year thinking it was just going to be a one-summer
Academic Journey and Field School Experience
00:02:20
Speaker
deal. And I ended up working there for seven years. I took a couple couple years off for working other places. I went to Europe one summer and so on. But actually, that was when I started working for the for the choco project. So yeah, sort of sort of dominated my life after that.
00:02:36
Speaker
Yes, ma'am. Now, what actually introduced you to archaeology as a whole? What inspired you to become an archaeologist, which led to your research in the Southwest? Well, I got my undergraduate degree at Berkeley and really at the time, of course, didn't know much about the Southwest. I took all four subfields at Berkeley, didn't really see archaeology as a especially more interesting than any of the others. But the spring of my senior year, I saw a flyer advertising Berkeley's
00:03:04
Speaker
summer field school and I applied for it and got in. That kind of sealed my interest in archaeology. I worked in Montana actually in Nevada, but I decided that that's what I wanted to do. Rest is history.
Field Lab Management and Lithic Analysis
00:03:17
Speaker
Great. Rest is history and you've certainly revealed to the world a lot of new fascinating information about Chaco. So tell us a little bit about what your focuses have been in Chaco and archaeology.
00:03:32
Speaker
Well, when I got the job running the field lab in Chaco, it was largely because nobody else wanted the job. Everybody wanted to excavate out there. I had bumped into Jim Judge one spring and he had started as the field director there.
00:03:51
Speaker
And I knew him because I'd taken a class from him when I was a graduate student at the University of New Mexico. And he said, well, you know, I'm running this project out in Chaco. How would you like to run the field lab? You know, what I, of course, everyone wants to do out there is excavate, but he was
00:04:07
Speaker
you know, he'd gotten all the excavators he needed. He needed someone to do the field lab. So I did that. It turned out to be wonderful. That sort of set the tone for what I was going to do then, because I ended up managing all the artifacts as they came in, making sure things were cataloged in and so on. And then come fall, I was offered a job in the Chaco Project Labs in Albuquerque. And so I kept on
00:04:33
Speaker
doing artifact-based analysis.
Technological Advancements in Archaeology
00:04:36
Speaker
And we weren't actually told what analyses we had to do. The whole field group came in, and we were all working on the project. But you did what you knew. And since I knew lithic analysis, I got
00:04:52
Speaker
I shouldn't say saddled with, but I took on the lithic analysis for Chaco and did that. And you know, so for the next six years or so, that was the main focus of what I was doing. But you know, there were a bunch of us there, you know, we're all in this sort of tiny little office with little rooms off of it. You know, people doing ceramics, people looking at the wood that was being used in the roof beams, people working with,
00:05:21
Speaker
ornament production and so on, ground stone in the environment. And so we're all, and we spent a lot of time together. So we're all sort of working together trying to get these, these analyses done. It was a very, very exciting time. I think if I had to do it again, I probably wouldn't pick chip stone, but I had fun doing it and ended up really enjoying the process.
00:05:44
Speaker
Excellent. Yeah, I should add right there. One of the things that was new then was XRF analysis, x-ray fluorescence. That was a new type of analysis. People weren't doing much with trace element analysis before that time.
Academic Path and PhD Journey
00:06:00
Speaker
And somebody from Idaho got in touch with me and said, would you like to send in to our XRF lab, the Chaco obsidian? So I did. And that was a whole new experience. Now, what we did back then has now been redone.
00:06:14
Speaker
you know, more correct results and so on. But that was a really interesting part of those early days. Yeah, that's fascinating. Now was that when you were a graduate student or did you take time off in between your undergrad and your graduate career?
00:06:27
Speaker
I got my masters at UNM in 1973 and then I wasn't really sure what I was doing and I got all involved in Chaco. So it wasn't until another decade or so that I went back to the University of Arizona and got a PhD. So yeah, I wasn't in graduate school then, but our offices were housed right above the anthropology department.
Becoming a Professor and Job Market Challenges
00:06:45
Speaker
So there was a lot of interaction.
00:06:47
Speaker
Some of the people that were working there were in graduate school here, there, and everywhere. One guy working at Northwestern and Steve Lexington, he was at UNM. So yeah, I was, but others were. Gotcha. And how did you end up getting a professorship at the University of Colorado Boulder? Oh boy. Well, that's a long story.
00:07:06
Speaker
So that was a long time later. So I finished the Chaco project. I then worked at another big project, the Black Mesa Archaeological Project, and did work for them. In the mid 80s, I decided that
00:07:19
Speaker
I kind of had it with chipstone analysis, which is also what I'd done for Black Mesa, and decided to go back to school. So I applied to the University of Arizona and got in down there. Had a wonderful time there, too. Managed to get my degree done pretty quickly, five years, and then graduated. And then it took me
00:07:38
Speaker
Another five years to actually get a job I was applying all over the places people do, yeah, I finally got one up at
Environment and Community at Chaco Canyon
00:07:45
Speaker
Colorado. In the meanwhile, I worked for the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, which is the main agency that handles all contract archaeology in the U.S. It was a real eye opener for me. I learned a ton, so I was never sorry that I had those years to do something else.
00:08:03
Speaker
And I felt like I could bring that Colorado when I got here because many students go into contract archaeology and I learned a lot about the laws, the regulations, the opportunities for students in contract work and so on. So that was all good. Great. I want to travel back to your time with the Chaco project and in the canyon briefly. In the last episode, Rich was telling us about just what an intense place it is.
00:08:30
Speaker
the climate of Chaco, the heat, the winters, the lack of rain and so forth. So I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about what it what was it like spending so much time in that desert?
00:08:42
Speaker
It was unbelievable. It was just unbelievable. It was hot. It was dry. Sometimes the wind blew. But the overall memories that I have are of standing below a cliff and watching birds fly by. And I could hear their wings flap, watching rain come up in the wash. You wouldn't see rain anywhere in the canyon, but all of a sudden the water would come up because it was raining somewhere else.
Pre-Monumental Era of Chaco
00:09:12
Speaker
At night, the stars were unbelievable. And that was in the days before fracking and oil extraction, you didn't see anything. Maybe there'd be a hogan somewhere where you'd see a light way off in the distance. But by and large, all you saw was stars. And yeah, it was truly, truly a remarkable place. I remember I think it was the first year climbing up to Fahadabut and just being able to look over this grand, grand landscape.
00:09:38
Speaker
We worked up, not the first year, but eventually worked up at Pueblo Alto, which gives you another amazing, amazing view of
00:09:48
Speaker
of this whole part of the world. You know, we saw animals, people would come in and say, oh, I saw a wildcat down by the wash. So it was really just an incredible place. And then of course, the camaraderie we had, we worked with these people in the winter, a bunch of us lived in a big house together, we knew them all really, really well. They were our good friends. In fact, they still are some of our very best friends.
00:10:12
Speaker
So it was an amazing experience, but to be in this place where it's so quiet and so beautiful and so much of the past there. I mean, you can't turn around without seeing some little bit of the past.
Environmental and Historical Influence on Chaco
00:10:26
Speaker
So I guess those are some of my fondest memories of the place.
00:10:30
Speaker
Yes, ma'am. And speaking of the past, since this is an archeology podcast about Chaco, what was the Chaco site in Chaco Canyon like before its era of monumentality that we all associate Chaco with?
00:10:45
Speaker
The big thing to talk about, of course, is the Basket Maker 3 period. Basket Maker 3 was essentially when Chaco took off, and you guys know that there's a huge site, 423, at one end of the canyon, and then Shabikashi Village at the other end of the canyon.
00:11:02
Speaker
really remarkably big sites for the basket maker three period. So we've known about those for a long time. When the survey happened, their Chaco project involved a great big survey of all the sites in the canyon. They discovered that the bottom of the canyon too, their basket makers, three sites all through the canyon. So this was not just some anomaly to have these two big sites. There was a huge basket maker three occupation in Chaco Canyon.
00:11:31
Speaker
And this is Basquaker III is somewhere around AD 500 to 700. So this is what people talk about. And this is sort of where Chaco begins. It had a lot of people for that time in the Southwest. Most other sites, Basquaker III sites are tiny.
00:11:49
Speaker
you know, 10 pit structures or something like that. So this is arguably the beginning of the Chaco world, and I know one of your other questions was, has Chaco Canyon always been occupied? There have been, and actually I checked this little factoid with another Chaco friend, there have been a few Paleo-Indian points found in and around Chaco,
00:12:10
Speaker
but no real evidence of habitation. There is a site called Adelal Cave, which you may know about. It was excavated in the mid-70s, early to mid-70s. The Chaco Project, as a whole, planned to do a big survey. Then they were going to excavate
Architectural Style and Regional Influences
00:12:27
Speaker
sites through time, starting with the very earliest, then moving on through time, and then ending with the Great House.
00:12:33
Speaker
One of the very first ones they dug was a place called the Adalatal Cave, and it was named Adalatal Cave because they found a little wooden adalatal there. They excavated a couple of parts of that cave, and this happens so often in archaeology. It's very sad, but there was a one-page report written on that.
00:12:53
Speaker
Now there's been more. People have gone back to the site over and over again. The most recent report was by Bill Gillespie who went back and looked at the dating again. There are many more dates now because other people have had other materials dated. The initial assumption based on one date was that Adelal Cave was 2000 BC, so very, very early, 4,000 years ago.
00:13:18
Speaker
But when Bill Gillespie looked again at Adelal Cave and looked at those dates in context and looked at these new dates, he argues that actually it's much later than that. It's about 2
Connections with Mesoamerica and Trade
00:13:30
Speaker
,000 years later than that. He dates it to about 300 to 100 BC. So this is sort of basket maker too.
00:13:38
Speaker
Adlal Cave was always called archaic, but it probably wasn't. So we know about this one little bit of Basket Maker 2 and then the explosion in Basket Maker 3 in terms of in terms of chocolate and occupation. Where does the term Basket Maker come from in order to talk about this time period? Well, the earliest archaeologists, some of the earliest archaeologists that worked in the area,
00:14:03
Speaker
Alfred Vincent Kidder did work in the Four Corners area. He's the early archeologist that was dropped off, I can't remember the date, early 1900s, dropped off by his advisor with a friend and the two of them were told to survey the whole area and he was sort of waving his hand at the whole Four Corners. But they did some very interesting work in Northeastern Arizona, Southwestern Colorado, and so on. This is just some of the very, very earliest reports by Kidder and Guernsey.
00:14:33
Speaker
And they found, they actually thought they had two different populations, these early people who had different shaped heads and made mostly baskets and so on. The production of pottery didn't start until basket maker, well,
00:14:49
Speaker
That's not true. There's early pottery, but the really intensive use of pottery is about basket maker three. But there is pottery before that. They were seeing lots of baskets and they just called people basket makers. When you dig in caves and so on, you find perishable materials and you don't when you dig in open sites. These guys were digging in the caves that hadn't really been looted until they got there.
00:15:14
Speaker
Yes, ma'am. Well, that a lot will do for this segment. We'll be right back with segment two of episode two with Dr. Kathy Cameron. So stay tuned after these messages. Welcome back to episode two of season one of the Site Bites podcast. We are here with Dr. Kathy Cameron talking about the origins of Chaco Canyon and the emergence of the monumental developments there.
00:15:37
Speaker
So earlier you mentioned these two very large Basket Maker 3 sites at Shabik SGE and 423. And yet we heard last episode just what a challenging place Chaco Canyon is to live. So I'm wondering your thoughts on why even in these early periods were people drawn to Chaco and to create such large sites?
00:16:03
Speaker
Well, that's, of course, the big question that people have asked ever since I first got to Chaco. And even before that, I'm sure it is very dry. It is arguably a very hard place to grow corn, to make a living. But it also is
00:16:21
Speaker
spectacular in several ways. In this sort of flat basin, it's got a lot of verticality, I guess I'd say, with the big cliff walls. If you've ever been there in Chaco when it rains, you know that huge amounts of water come running off these canyons and there have been arguments that people were channeling that runoff to grow crops.
00:16:45
Speaker
When Chaco first began in the
Migration Theories and Chaco's Rise
00:16:47
Speaker
900s, that was a particularly wet time and it's been argued that the ability to channel runoff when it rained was one thing that made Chaco very, very appealing to farmers.
00:17:00
Speaker
That said, it has to rain in order to be able to use that water or in order to have that water, so it's not a sure thing. Why people came there in the Basket Maker Times? I actually don't know the fine details of the environment during the Basket Maker Times, but my guess would be that
00:17:20
Speaker
It was because of the unusual features of the place, the deep canyon, the high cliffs in this otherwise sort of barren place. I think it was a special place, a ritual place, even back in those early days.
00:17:35
Speaker
That would be my guess about why people initially came there. And it could also have to do with just idiosyncratic historical facts that the people who, you know, important people decided it was an important place and settled down there and then made it an important place. I think we don't
Chaco as a Central Hub
00:17:53
Speaker
often don't take enough account of those path dependent sorts of occurrences where history sort of steps in or individual sort of step in and make a place where it later becomes. So those are just a few ideas. I'm sure you'd get other ideas from other folks.
00:18:10
Speaker
It's an absolutely fascinating question, and thanks for sharing some of the different perspectives. I would agree with you that just experientially Chaco is such a striking place, as you said, with the high cliffs. And you mentioned in the earlier segment climbing up Fahadabut, which just, if you approach the canyon from the south or other directions as well, it's this singular towering landform that I imagine would call people in.
Role of Captives in Chacoan Society
00:18:40
Speaker
And of course, from a top there, one could observe astronomical cycles. You could observe astronomical cycles from anywhere in the basin, but that becomes important later in Chaco. So it seems like this, as you said, this sort of life of big gatherings and ritual and the importance of landscape was established from this early period. And I think, yeah, we'll continue asking that question because there are no clear answers. And I love, too, you pointed out that
00:19:08
Speaker
could be something as simple as something happened that we will never have any record of, an important event, and that established Chaco as the place to be for a long time into the future. So let's transition to thinking about what Chaco became after these initial Basket Maker 3 developments.
00:19:29
Speaker
Tell us about the earliest masonry constructions and hints of what Chaco was like before the Great Houses were truly monumental, so say the Pueblo I period. There isn't actually a tent of Pueblo I around Chaco. If you look at Pueblo Benito, I mean, there is early development underneath Pueblo Benito that would be very good to know more about. We know a little bit about it. There also is, you know,
00:19:58
Speaker
early development sort of evidence of people living there. I don't know if you'd call them pit houses, but little structures underneath Pueblo Alto as well. So people were there, maybe coming in for the earliest construction. But the interesting part about the early construction of Great Houses, Pueblo Benito is a classic example, or Unavida, or Piñasco Blanco.
00:20:23
Speaker
They begin looking very much like a like a Pueblo one pit structure or a Uno Pueblo. So they've, they're, they're the sort of semicircular structures and the typical Uno Pueblo is a semicircular circle of rooms.
00:20:39
Speaker
And in front of that is a pit structure or two or three. And in front of that is a trash mound and they all face sort of Southeast. So this is a pattern that goes all through the Pueblo One period, especially up in Southwest Colorado and Southeastern Utah and so on. So this is a pattern that is very obvious early on. It's what Bill Light calls the San Juan pattern. You get down to Chaco Canyon
00:21:08
Speaker
and you see these things and it's like they've been blown up. Pueblo Benito was multi-storied even in the early days. There are arguments about when multi-story construction happened or started to happen. There are some evidence from colleagues over in Utah that it was happening early there too.
00:21:30
Speaker
They're beginning to make these things that aren't just little accretional buildings with rooms added on on either end in a semi-circular pattern, but they're actually thinking it through ahead of time and creating this design
Great Houses: Architecture and Cultural Role
00:21:46
Speaker
structure, but much more elaborate, much more beautifully built, much more carefully built, multi-stories, big roof beams, and so on. That starts in
00:21:56
Speaker
in what is the nucleus of Pueblo Bonito, and then all the other grand construction is added onto that. So I think that's how it started. And again, everyone wants to know why it started.
00:22:10
Speaker
And we're also seeing interesting hints from these early periods of the emergence of something like inequality or important peoples. Tell us a little bit about the so-called high status burials found in Pueblo
Dr. Cameron's Legacy in Chacoan Archaeology
00:22:25
Speaker
Benito and also the early evidence for Macaws coming in from the south.
00:22:31
Speaker
Yeah, well, that's very interesting too. There are, notably, this is something that's much discussed, notably, two men buried deep in the center of Pueblo Benito, and they have been argued by some people to be Chaco's kings. Other people would say they are
00:22:49
Speaker
ritually important, but they were buried with just all the wealth in the world, you know, ropes of turquoise beads and beautifully formed projectile points and, you know, ornaments and objects and just all kinds of things buried with these guys. So they were they were clearly very, very, very important people. They were buried under a set of planks sort of almost
00:23:13
Speaker
almost in a wooden casket sort of thing. And on top of those planks were placed other bodies, almost like they had retainers. So this is what's been argued and they were thought to be sort of central to Chaco. Well, a few years ago, Jung Coltrane from
00:23:32
Speaker
I can't remember if she's University of Utah or Utah State, managed to get dates on these bodies from the American Museum of Natural History. She got a few dates and then Steve Plog followed up, he's at the University of Virginia, and he got more dates on these human remains. Come to find out, very surprisingly, they were some of the earliest things that ever happened at Pueblo Bonito. They came from the mid-800s.
00:24:00
Speaker
Suppose it's even possible that they didn't die at Perdido or in Chaco, that they died somewhere else and the bodies were brought in. Venerated ancestors that were brought to help start this new place. Now, the question of
00:24:15
Speaker
the access to these burials and the question of how they managed to be dated when there was no tribal cults consultation is a pretty awkward story and so much concern about that. I don't think that would happen again at this point in time, but it did give us some information about when and where these burials came from.
00:24:38
Speaker
So it really does change how we think about Pueblo Bonita, the most important site in Chaco Canyon. It was perhaps important enough for venerated ancestors to be placed in the very center as Bonita was being built. So that's an exciting new way of thinking about it rather than thinking about people who maybe ruled over Chaco and then the king dies and you bury him in a back room.
00:25:07
Speaker
I agree, it's absolutely changed our thinking about the early periods in Chaco Canyon. And I think it's really, you know, the work with the two individuals buried in, this is room 33, is it brings people back into the past a little bit. So often I think when we're talking about ancient
00:25:28
Speaker
Chaco or North America in general, we sort of hear about agriculture and pottery and this and that, but not so often individuals. And as you were saying, Professor Cameron, these are clearly important people. They were treated with great reverence and
00:25:44
Speaker
We can begin, you know, we're never going to know, but we can begin to wonder things. As you were saying, historically, what what did these people do? There's a story. They were important. The past was filled with events and not just sort of rainfall and processes. So I agree with you that that it's really, really interesting and it changes what we thought we knew about these early periods in Chaco.
00:26:12
Speaker
Along with the dating of the human remains in the last few years, another initiative was to date some of the macaws that were placed in Pueblo Bonito, close to the room with the high status burials.
00:26:30
Speaker
That raises the larger issue of how much influence might have come to Chaco from Mesoamerica. So one of the ideas for a long time, right, has been that you have this sudden explosion of monumentality in Chaco. Where did it come from? Many people have been inclined to look to the south. So tell us a little bit about those ideas of possible connections with Mesoamerica in the rise of Chaco.
00:26:55
Speaker
Yeah, so that has been a suggestion. Again, ever since I started working in Chaco, there were people that believe that Chaco was a product of Mesoamerican intruders. That has been pretty much negated at this point. But there's no doubt that there was connection between Chaco Canyon and Mesoamerica. They're the macaws, for example.
00:27:22
Speaker
You could argue that the macaws came from Pacchime, which has a very clear macaw breeding area, and that is just over the border in Mexico. But clearly, people knew about what was going on in the big... Chacoan people knew what was going on in the big centers in Mesoamerica. They had copper bells from west Mexico. Patty Crown showed that they had cacao, and this is something that grows in tropical areas of Mesoamerica.
00:27:50
Speaker
Macaws, you know, were bred in Takime, but they weren't native to that area. They're native much further south. So Chaco was the beneficiary of all this stuff that was coming up to the canyon from Mesoamerica.
00:28:07
Speaker
And they were clearly making the most of it. I mean, having these unbelievably colorful birds must have been something that was just a showstopper for the most powerful people in Chaco. You know, it's not something that everyone had. It was something that these people had and they could make incredible things out of the Macaw feathers.
00:28:28
Speaker
The cacao was a ritual drink in Mesoamerica, but apparently it got up to Chaco, and people drank it out of the same similar sorts of ritual, of cylinder vessels that they, as they did in Mesoamerica. So this is all, you know,
00:28:47
Speaker
clear evidence of connections back and forth. What was going down into Mesoamerica? That's a good question, and people have suggested it was turquoise, although there are turquoise resources in Mexico as well, or Mesoamerica, but there certainly was a lot of turquoise being
00:29:05
Speaker
mined and produced in the Southwest. So turquoise has been suggested as one thing that's going the other way. But obviously, it wasn't people from Mesoamerica coming up and building these great houses. They look like the Pueblo one, Unipueblos that Pueblo people had been building for centuries. And so, you know, they continued that tradition. It wasn't something that was imported from Mesoamerica, but there was connection. People did know about each other.
00:29:35
Speaker
Clearly, the Mesoamerican, the material culture was just dazzling to people, both Steve Lexington, who will be on a later episode, and I as well have written on the power of those objects to compel people in the Chaco era and sort of give a glimpse of this, you know, maybe part of the ritual life of what drew people there. So we understand, as you shared, that it's not
00:30:04
Speaker
you know, Toltecs or Mayas or something marching up and building these early great houses. Instead, the most recent thinking would suggest that there's maybe influence from north up in Colorado or south towards the Zuni Mountains. So could you briefly tell us about the ideas of migration coming from sort of the margins of the San Juan Basin as perhaps leading to this first growth of monumentality in Chaco?
00:30:34
Speaker
Sure. I think, you know, for the last, oh gosh, I don't know, 30 years or so, we've really been looking north for the origins of Chaco. And I think there's a lot of good, strong evidence up there. In fact, the earlier Chaco and archaeologists, and I don't mean way early, I'm talking about 1970s, they talked about Mesa Verde people and Chaco people. And they thought that in the mid 1100s that Chaco people had been sort of
00:31:03
Speaker
pushed out or taken over by Mesa Verde people. And I've written an article where I just think that's kind of silly. I think that these were all part of one large population that moved through the landscape.
00:31:16
Speaker
But clearly there were lots of people in the Southwest Colorado and Southeastern Utah in the P1 period, Basque finger three and P1. And then all of a sudden there weren't. That population dropped pretty significantly in that time period. And at the same time, population rose significantly dramatically in Chaco Canyon. So you have basically demographic evidence that there were people
00:31:47
Speaker
leaving the four corners and moving down into Chaco. Rich Wilshusen has also argued that he can see evidence of people moving down from those northern areas. And then finally, there's sites like McPhee Village in southwestern Colorado that looks very much like an early Chaco and Great House. So there's all sorts of lines of evidence that people move from the north into Chaco. And
00:32:12
Speaker
and it's very strong. Influenced to the South, there's been the recent network analysis by Barbara Mills at the University of Arizona, and Matt Peoples at Arizona State University, that this network analysis does show connections to the South during the height of the chocolate era when chocolate was forming. That's one line of evidence. There's another study being done by the laboratory treatment research in Arizona, University of Arizona,
00:32:42
Speaker
And they found roof beams in Chaco Canyon that they source to the south. So roof beams are coming in from the south. When I did lithic analysis for Chaco Canyon, there's a whole bunch of material we used to call yellow brown spotted shirt. It's got a source in the Zuni Mountains to the south of Chaco.
00:33:01
Speaker
And so there's quite a bit of evidence of connections to the South. I think the evidence from the North is stronger at this point, but I'd love to know more. I think there'll be more research on this. It could be that people came from both directions, that they came from the North at some points in time and from the South at other points in time.
00:33:20
Speaker
Again, yeah, looking for more research on that question. Yes, ma'am. Well, it's time for us to move on to the next segment. So stay tuned. We'll be right back with Dr. Kathy Cameron. Welcome back to episode two of season one of site bites podcast. We are still here with Dr. Kathy Cameron recently retired from the University of Colorado Boulder department of anthropology. So Dr. Cameron, we do want to give kind of a, you know, an introduction to
00:33:44
Speaker
You have done some work with a Chaco outlier. Maybe that's not the right term to use outlier in Utah called the bluff site. Do you tell us how you got on that project? And you know, what were your interpretations of what was going on at that site?
00:33:58
Speaker
Well yeah, I started that project right when I started working at the University of Colorado in 1995-96. The department wanted a field school and we had a friend who was actually a Mesoamerican archaeologist and he'd been invited to work at this site which is actually owned by a small town, a town of bluff. He didn't really want to do it and didn't have time to do it so he offered it to me.
00:34:23
Speaker
And so that became the University of Colorado field school for the late 90s and early 2000s. So we worked on it for six seasons. The Bluff Grade House found out a ton about it. And yes, an outlying site, that's exactly what I'd call it. It's a pretty remarkable place, as many chocolate sites are. It's up on a
00:34:45
Speaker
on a terrace above the San Juan River, you know, you can see for a long way from the Great House. We excavated, you know, with field schools you don't do a ton, but we actually in those six seasons we got quite a bit done. We did a little bit in the, quite a bit in the Great House, a little bit in the Great Kiva, and then Great Houses not only have Great Houses and Great Kivas, but they often have
00:35:09
Speaker
earthen berms that surround them. And this one, the Bluff Great House had a terrace that went right up to the back wall of the Great House, so we excavated there too. It has prehistoric roads running both north and south out of the Great House, or actually northwest and southeast out of the Great House. So there is lots to do there, really a remarkable place. One of the things, I could talk for hours about Bluff, but I'll just say one of the most interesting things we discovered
00:35:38
Speaker
And this was the last year of excavation. We put a trench through that terrace and against the back wall. We put that trench right up to the back wall. We found a whole other set of single story rooms we didn't know existed.
00:35:54
Speaker
And then we also found the fallen back wall of the great house. And it is arguably four stories tall, which is remarkable. I mean, there are two-story great houses. There's Pueblo Benito that has five stories, but almost no great houses outside of Chaco have more than two. Solomon Ruins may have three, but we've got a four-story great house we think there. So it's a very, very remarkable place.
00:36:20
Speaker
The Bluff Great House project was finished in the early 2000s, and then we spent a lot of time doing analysis, of course, and write up and published a final volume on the Great House in 2009. At the same time that was going on, we were kind of doing two projects. I was working at the Bluff Great House, but we were also contracted by the Bureau of Land Management to do work in Comewash. Comewash is west of Bluff and north of Bluff, so it's another canyon
00:36:51
Speaker
that's a north-south canyon that goes into the San Juan River. So we moved north. You go up to Blanding, Utah, and then go west, and you find Colm Wash. It's an absolutely remarkable place, beautiful place. BLM needed survey and some test excavations to understand an area that was around a campground and that was being very heavily impacted by tourism.
00:37:14
Speaker
We worked there for three seasons and did some test excavations in small sites that surrounded a great house, but it wasn't a choco-era great house. It was a post-choco-era great house. It was after choco had ended, but it still had the pattern which somebody's probably mentioned in these talks. I haven't said it yet, but great houses are big community source of structures that have small sites around them, and that's where most people live.
00:37:43
Speaker
That same pattern was found, we found at the Comb Wash Great House. We did a considerable amount of excavation at the Comb Wash Great House, and then some excavation at the small sites surrounding it. I was the PI for that project, but actually it was run expertly by a guy named Winston Hurst, who's a local archeologist in Blanding, Utah. He's lived there all his life. He knows every square inch of Comb Wash.
00:38:11
Speaker
and he did an absolutely beautiful job with it. He's been cranking out reports ever since then. He did a survey around the campground site. He did another huge survey of a big chunk of comb wash and the next wash over butler wash. Those reports are still coming out. He and I have just started working on trying to finalize that testing report. He's written the report on it, all the analyses have been done.
00:38:40
Speaker
I'd like to get it into publication, get it somewhere where it's easily accessible to the rest of the world. So that's what we're working on now in terms of bluff and comb. But there's a lot to know outside of Chaco, a lot to know. I mean, Chaco was a large region, some people say, the size of Indiana.
00:39:02
Speaker
huge, huge place with these great houses and great house communities scattered all over it. And what we know a lot about Chaco Canyon, we know an awful lot about Chaco Canyon, but we know far, far less about the communities outside of it, the great houses and the communities outside of it. So
00:39:20
Speaker
I'm, in addition to getting this, you know, report written with Winston, he and I are also authors. He's the lead author. I'm the trailing author on a paper that studies great houses in the frontier of the Chaco world. And this is an edited volume that's hopefully going to come out soon. And, you know, it has Chaco scholars looking at the frontier in all kinds of places, you know, southwest, east, and so on.
00:39:49
Speaker
looking at where the boundaries were of the Chacoan world and what those boundaries look like. We're doing one that, largely Winston is doing this paper that looks at the Northwestern boundary of the Chaco world. It's interesting how if you map out great houses, how you can see where that boundary lies because they stop and then there's something else beyond it, which in Utah is Fremont.
00:40:15
Speaker
So that's going on. I think that that is, to my mind, that's probably where the where the work on Chaco needs to go. We know a lot about about the Great Houses in the canyon. We know a lot about the canyon. We know far less about this larger community or larger region of Chaco communities. Some people say it was very, very connected.
00:40:37
Speaker
Some people say it was just people emulating what was going on in Chaco. So there's a lot of disagreements, surprising amount of disagreement after all these years of study of Chaco. One of the most exciting things I think is going on right now is Rob Weiner's study of Chaco and Rhodes. I think that's gonna take us a long way to understanding what this whole system meant and how it was connected and so on. I don't know, that guy's kind of sketchy.
00:41:07
Speaker
Well, thank you for saying that. Yeah, I think on the subject of roads and of bluff, part of what has always interested me so much about your work up there is that you found this prototypical Chacoan landscape so far from the canyon, as you mentioned, these earthworks surrounding the Great House, roads coming in and out. And where I spend more time along the to the west of Chaco near the Chusca Mountains and to the south,
00:41:34
Speaker
You walk up to a Chacoan great house and it's the exact same pattern. So, of course, in the next episode, we'll get a little bit more into these debates. But to me, that speaks to a united ideal and probably a united political system where you can be up at Bluff or down south near, you know, Pruitt, New Mexico. And the layout of the sites is exactly the same with roads and earthworks and so forth. So
00:42:03
Speaker
Very exciting, very exciting. We wanted to ask about some other recent work you've been doing on the subject of captives, which of course goes well beyond Chaco, but may also relate in interesting ways to Chaco and archaeology. So please tell us a little bit about what got you interested to think about captives in ancient times.
00:42:26
Speaker
Okay, so I will have to edit myself because this is a topic I love talking about, so I'll try and keep it shortish. I have always been interested in cultural transmission, how ideas and ways of doing cultural practices are transmitted from one group to another. So I was just a
00:42:48
Speaker
a little sketch of how I actually started on this. I was standing in a small mom and pop museum in, I think it was Yuma, Arizona, and I saw a picture of a white woman who'd been captured by Native Americans, and her face was tattooed.
00:43:03
Speaker
And I was thinking, you know, gosh, yeah, surely she had to learn all these new cultural traditions that went with the people she was now living with. But what might she have taught them? So, you know, I thought, wow, this could be a really interesting line of research. I got an opportunity to
00:43:24
Speaker
through the University of Utah Press to edit a book and on any topic I wanted to. And I thought, well, why not this? And that sort of started the whole thing. And I've been at it ever since it's been about 15 years now. So I have discovered that more fair rating captive taking is common.
00:43:45
Speaker
in small-scale societies and I didn't try and look at states, just small-scale societies around the world and through time. And I think we really do ourselves a disservice if we think that social boundaries
00:43:58
Speaker
you know, ethnic boundaries, whatever you want to call them, are fixed because I think there are constantly people moving across and taking their ideas with them. So I began looking at that. I did a global study of captive taking. I looked at small scale societies in every continent and many islands, you know, wrote books and articles and so on about that. So very, very excited about it, very interested in it.
00:44:23
Speaker
It does, or I've tried to talk about it with regard to Chaco a little bit. I did an article for the American anthropologist in 2013.
00:44:34
Speaker
And the main point of the article was more about migration, about how people move through the landscape in ways that we just don't often think of. I mean, people don't decide, oh, I think I see a nicer environment down yonder. I think I'll go to that nicer environment. No, sometimes they are grabbed and dragged to somewhere they never wanted to go to live with people that they had no interest in.
00:45:02
Speaker
And oftentimes, these are women and children. So they are they are dragged away. Sometimes whole groups of people are, you know, in get get in a fight with their neighbors or getting in some sort of bad way and have to relocate immediately.
00:45:17
Speaker
They don't pick the very best place to go. They go wherever anyone will take them in. So I think this happened a lot more in the past than we ever give credit for. We spend a lot of time looking at the environment and why people would move here and there. But I think it's quite different than that. So that's what I was saying in this article. And as an example, I decided to look a little bit, this is very tentative,
00:45:40
Speaker
what could have been going on in Chaco Canyon. Now, one of the key factors about captive taking is that these women and children, mostly, and sometimes men, end up with the wealthiest people in the society, the most powerful people. So they are controlled by powerful people. They are the lowliest of the low, but they're controlled by the highest of the high. Chaco was
00:46:05
Speaker
for a time the highest of the high, so why wouldn't there be captives there? So I decided to look at it. Before I had even done that, Tim Kohler from Washington State University and one of his students did a big study where they got published accounts of human remains and they looked at them, these are from all over the Northern Southwest, they looked at all these human remains for gender. What, you know, what was the gender of these people?
00:46:31
Speaker
And, you know, where did they come from? So they sort of plotted human remains across the northern southwest. They found, you know, normally you'd expect a gender balance of 50-50, half men, half women. They found far more women than men in the area around Chaco. They suggest that this could be a result of raiding for women, women being taken into Chaco Canyon as captives.
00:46:56
Speaker
Now, admittedly, they found an even stronger result, that same pattern, but stronger in the area around Aztec ruins to the north. So Aztec ruins had a later occupation, it had Chacoan occupation and then a later one as well. But the pattern was stronger around Aztec than it was around Chaco. But they suggested that it could have been because of raiding for women, these powerful people in Chaco pulling in captives.
00:47:24
Speaker
So there's that bit of information. There's a bioarchaeologist named Ryan Herrod, who studied human remains from the area from Chaco Canyon in the area around Chaco. And he found a group of abused women at the site of Kinby Neola, which is just outside Chaco Canyon. And again, he suggested that these could have been captive women.
00:47:45
Speaker
So there were those bits of information that I had to go on. It's not easy to see captives in the archaeological record, and I think we're only at the very beginning of that process. I hope that it'll become more common. But at any rate, with those bits of information, I suggested that some of the labor at the Great Houses could have been done by captives, could have been captive labor that the powerful people in Chaco brought in. I couldn't say it was all captive labor. I couldn't even say how much it was.
00:48:14
Speaker
it's really, really, really hard to, to, you know, see a building and say, yes, it was built, but who did it? You know, that's a that's a tricky thing. But it certainly is not beyond the realm of possibility, giving what we know about ethno historically about about captive taking. And given what we know about powerful people controlling captives that that that could have been what happened in Chaco. So so that's what I suggested. And yeah,
00:48:41
Speaker
at some point, love to hear what people think about that. I didn't get much response to that suggestion. I don't know if people agree or don't agree. Excellent. Well, to wrap this episode up, Dr. Cameron, what do you think your legacy is in Chacoan archaeology? What do you think your major contributions have been to the Southwest?
00:49:02
Speaker
Well, if any, I did do a lot with the Chaco and Chipstone. Like I say, that got a little old after a while. I think the Bluff work, I guess I'd point to. There aren't other great houses that have been completely written up, and Bluff has been. So we learned a lot about Bluff, and we learned a lot about an outlying great house.
00:49:26
Speaker
So I think outline great houses are really, really, really important. I think we need to know more about them. And I think where people probably are going to go next, or at least, you know, where I would go next, if I was doing more work, would be to these community sites. You know, how do the community sites relate to the great houses outside Chaco Canyon? And so, yeah, you know, I hope I made some contributions there. Maybe one of these days I'll make more. Who knows?
00:49:54
Speaker
Yes, ma'am, I'm sure you have had quite the influence. I do remember your retirement party last fall, which I think was like the last time our anthropology department had an event before COVID hit. So definitely something that continues to stick in my mind. But with that, everyone, we just interviewed Dr. Kathy Cameron about the origins of Chaco and its influence across the Southwest.
00:50:20
Speaker
Thank you for listening to the Site Bytes podcast, episode two of season one. Be sure to tune in next time when we are joined by Paul Reed for a debate, perhaps heated, over big issues in Chaco archeology.
00:50:45
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.