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Article Excerpt
Duff, Andrew I. 2002. Western Pueblo Identities. Regional Interaction, Migration, and Transformation. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Redman, Charles L. 1999. Human Impact on Ancient Environments. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Rice, Glen E., and Steven E. LeBlanc, eds. 2001. Deadly Landscapes: Case Studies in Prehitoric Southwestern Warfare. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Turner, Christy G., and Jacqueline A. Turner. 1999. Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Varien, Mark D., and Richard H. Wilshusen, eds. 2002 Seeking the Center Place: Archaeology and Ancient Communities in the Mesa Verde Region. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
The Pueblo Southwest has been the focus of vast archaeological research as well as persistent pot-hunting by enthusiasts for more than a century. By the 1940s visitors at fireside lectures in Mesa Verde National Park learned of the great Pueblo conundrum, to wit the thirteenth-century abandonment of Mesa Verde's many spectacular village sites, wedged into alcoves beneath great sandstone ledges high above valley floors. The abandonment was forced, visitors were told, either by a severe protracted drought or by an unusual run of late spring freezes that caused crops to fail. Yet visitors were also told that the positioning of the villages and the structures that characterized them indicated that defense from possible attack was likely a significant factor in site selection and development. It was averred that someone or some groups, unspecified, were hostile and posed danger for residents of Mesa Verde's villages.
From the 1970s and continuing through the present, archaeologists at several universities have cast spotlights on the Pueblo Southwest while seeking to solve the puzzle of the abandonment of the grand pueblos and the hundreds of satellite hamlets that dotted the sagebrush prairies, cliffs, and canyons of the vast area from the Little Colorado River drainage on the south to the northernmost reaches of the San Juan River drainage from A.D. 900 to 1280. As inquiry has flourished, such sociological questions as "what is a community, "how were communities connected internally and externally," and "how was power centralized within communities," have exercised archaeologists as they seek to account for how ancient Puebloan sites came to be as they were in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, and what factors caused the hundreds of sites to be abandoned.
Whereas my principal interests in this article are the social inferences (political, economic, ceremonial, and religious) that have been drawn to account for the changes that occurred in those societies, another question that has perplexed ethnologists for more than a century and that interests me here is the relation between these societies and Tanoan, Eastern Keresan, Western Keresan, Zuni, and Hopi pueblos as found by Europeans in the sixteenth century and as documented by American ethnologists in the last hundred-plus years. (1) Surely, whatever is found by archaeologists must be squared with what is known of the subsequent Puebloans. Indeed, my principal comment on the books under review is that their successors will do well to be more attentive to the finds of Pueblo ethnology. More library digging will improve our grasp of what the archaeologists have dug from the ground.
The books advance some empirically warranted and some vulnerable hypotheses about settlement patterns; village structures; and economic, social, political, religious, and ceremonial organizations to account for how and why the Pueblo communities of the Colorado Plateau (2) came to be as they were during the Pueblo II, III and IV periods. It is these topics that concern sociological archaeology, or archaeological sociology. The books confirm that sizes of community populations increased from early to late Pueblo III, as did aggregations of hamlets around community centers replete with public architecture--food-storage facilities, plazas, defensive structures (towers), and defensive locations (atop mesas that afforded good lookouts and within the great alcoves beneath sandstone ledges high above valley floors). The outlying hamlets were connected to community centers by roads.
Threats of warfare and actual violence almost surely characterized the final few decades of the Pueblo III period. There is no conclusive answer as to whether the battles, whatever their nature, resulted from extreme and protracted weather conditions that reduced crop productivity and prompted attacks on communities to acquire food. On one hand, whereas corn (Zea maize), beans (Phaseolus vulgaris), and squash (Cucurbita pepo and C. moschata) disturb soils and allow for invasive weedy plants, there is no good evidence that soils were depleted of nutrients during the last quarter of the thirteenth century at the most thoroughly studied Pueblo III sites (see Adams and Bowyer in Varien and Wilshusen 2002, 123-42). On the other hand, evidence that the Colorado Plateau suffered severely depressed environmental conditions during the last quarter of the thirteenth century is irrefutable. Overwhelming evidence also supports the generalization that the Puebloan population of the Colorado Plateau grew and aggregated into fairly large communities during the thirteenth century. So the question persists as to whether or not a drought caused raids that led to the eventual abandonment of the 130 community centers in the northern San Juan region as well as many villages in the Little Colorado River region to the south.
It is of interest that from the late Pueblo II through early Pueblo III periods (A.D. 925 tO 1130) stable environmental conditions occurred across a wide range of habitats favorable to dry farming throughout the Colorado Plateau. Human populations in the Colorado Plateau, too, were remarkably stable during that period. Yet beginning about A.D. 1130 and continuing for fifty years thereafter, alluvial groundwater declined and floodplain erosion occurred, accompanied by both high- and low-frequency climatic deteriorations. During this period, the dry-farming zone was reduced and crop production potential decreased.
Charles L. Redman (1999: 118-22), whose book assesses impacts of humans on their "ancient" (often prehistoric) environments worldwide, calls attention to prehistoric Puebloan farming practices. Leaning principally on the work of Timothy Kohler, Redman claims that early farming of floodwater plots, broad washes adjacent to floodplains, and mesatops in southwestern Colorado led to degradation of the region by depleting the soils of nutrients; that is, human activities degraded the areas in southwestern Colorado amenable to hoe horticulture. Pinyon and juniper were removed by using fire as a swidden strategy for farm plots, and trees were also felled and used for firewood. Given thin soils, modest precipitation, deforestation, nutrient depletion, and slow environmental recovery rates, the Anasazi region was abandoned because the swidden practices were not sustainable.
This explanation of the Anasazi abandonment of the region is refuted by the evidence of Dean and Van West, Adams and Bowyer, and Driver (all in Varien and Wilshusen 2002). According to Jeffrey S. Dean and Carla R. Van West (pp. 81-99) hydrologic conditions may have offset climatic problems in the lowlands. It appears that the adverse environmental conditions of the middle twelfth century caused contractions in some villages and relocations from others. At the end of the protracted drought, as precipitation increased and stabilized in the late twelfth century, Puebloans moved back into areas they had evacuated, and their populations grew and spread into new locales across the arable land.
Richard H. Wilshusen (in Varien and Wilshusen 2002, 101-20) controlled for the dating of sites and estimated that the maximum population of the northern San Juan region during the Pueblo III period was 12,708 (range 12,000-14,000). Interesting to me, many more persons resided on the great sagebrush plains than above and under the great sandstone ledges of Mesa Verde, Johnson Canyon, and similar mesa or canyon areas of the central Mesa Verde region. So most of the sodbusters of the tenth through thirteenth centuries occupied environments similar to, indeed the same as, those occupied by nineteenth- and twentieth-century white farmers and ranchers of southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado. (3)
In contrast to the conditions of A.D. 1130-1180, a period of severe arroyo cutting and depression of alluvial groundwater occurred in the late thirteenth century. In what was by all measures a great drought, the dry-farming belt in the Colorado Plateau was reduced, as were yield potentials. Thus, there is general agreement among scholars, including those whose works I review, that the combination of unfavorable environmental circumstances and a large human population meant that the Puebloans lived under severe environmental stress. But it is not likely that the vast Colorado Plateau region was abandoned because of environmental deterioration alone. That some fashion of violence was also a factor is unchallengeable.
There is plenty of evidence of violence throughout the region during the last stages of the Pueblo III period. Much of the violence may have been committed within individual communities by members of those communities. There is also evidence suggesting raids by Pueblo neighbors, but there is no evidence or suggestion of raids by non-Puebloans. (4)
Still, it is not conclusive that warfare, internal violence, environmental deterioration, and population pressures in some combination were the sole factors that triggered the abandonment. The violence within and between communities may have been a human settling of festering scores unconnected to any climatic or nutritional factors. (5) And it is not clear why, after conditions favorable to dry farming returned in the early fourteenth century, Puebloans did not return to the locales that they abandoned a generation earlier.
THE NORTHERN SAN JUAN BASIN
Among the most significant contributions to our understanding of the scientific history of the Anasazi are those of William D. Lipe whose pacesetting research in the Dolorcs Archaeological Project in the 1970s and 1980s was an intellectual precursor to the research conducted through the Crow Canyon Archeological...
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