Archaeology Cafe: What Was Chaco, Really?

tonight's talk by Steve lexan and I think you probably have all heard of Steve and I certainly of Chaco Canyon before so his talk tonight is what was Chaco really or there's another way to read that you may see it as what was Chaco and at the end you might say really so let's see how what Steve has to tell us about Chaco welcome Steve thank you thank you Bill I imagine everybody here knows a lot about Chaco or knows about Chaco or you probably wouldn't be here tonight and so I'll assume that there's a familiarity with the place but I did want a a show of hands of how many people are members of archaeology Southwest that's great for those of you that aren't members of dr. Dooley's organization archaeology Southwest is sponsoring this I've long been a fan of that organization for doing things like this for doing this really magnificent basic research and one of the the best basic research organizations in the southwest doing a lot of collaborative stuff with tribes which is very very important these days and in a number of other programs that I think they had a handout that tells you more about the organization but but he didn't ask me to do this bill didn't ask me to do this but yeah think about think about supporting the organization in the publicity for this to Ark least the stuff that I saw it said I didn't write this it said come here what Steve luxan thinks about what was charcoal really well I'm not gonna tell you okay maybe we can get to questions and answers if I'm feeling like it I'll tell you what I think about Chaco but I'm gonna tell you a lot about how archaeologists have thought about charcoal and how you can figure out what chocolate was because I think I think it's a solvable problem the the mystery of Chaco Canyon with a capital M the mystery of Chaco Canyon is a great failure southwestern archaeology we've been working there not we me personally I just retired I'm not this old we've been working there for over a hundred years alright there's been a lot of really smart people working at Chaco and it doesn't me either but a lot of smart people putting a lot of money of energy and money your money a lot of your money into for a hundred years in the archaeology there's pretty easy okay compared to what goes on around here they didn't build a city on top of it and chocolates there you gonna walk into this the buildings building still standing up um you know it had a bit of a history maybe 500 years but that you know in archaeology that's that's nothing it's not a big deal it's the best dated site if you take the old Canyon probably in the whole world a prehistoric site and in the whole world with all is you know this point tens of thousands of trimming dates it's you know wonderful preservation you can see it you don't the big Phoenix off of it it's not that old and it's not that strange you know it's just it I'll get to maybe I'll get to what I think about it it you know it's it's not Easter Island it's not Stonehenge it's an agricultural society in the north edge of Mexico the fact that that archaeologists know I brought some quotes with me and I'll pull is out later probably that the archaeologists are content to have it be a mystery is kind of admission defeat and and frankly if I were you guys I'd ask for your money back that's ridiculous we should you know we we get paid to figure these things out that's what we get paid to do recently I had some ideas about chocolate I said oh I think this kind of solves that mystery being you know he's buying into the hype of the mystery that you know this is probably the solution and I get hate mail for this yeah archaeologists are really interested in keeping it a mystery many of you I know know my good friend and I would like to call my mentor Gwen Vivian who is by the grand old man of choco for sure Gwynn wrote a really cool book with Bruce Hobart from down at ASM called the choco handbook and I bet some of you on it if you don't if you're nursed and chocolates worth the investment it went into a second edition in 2012 and Gwen in and Bruce in sort of the introduction say that you know of course the trying to sell books to but um Chaco Canyon presents almost in the most excuse me Chaco Canyon presents the most enduring and intriguing questions of any prehistoric site in the world perhaps this is the biggest mystery of Chaco Canyon for the present the mystery of Chaco Canyon remains just that a mystery that's worse this is important okay that's important yeah it is Gwynn who studied Chaco all his life his father studied Chaco almost all his life at least four rhetorical purposes being content to say it's a mystery and that appeals to a lot of us too we want to go out there and feel like it's mysterious I would submit that if the boundary between the United States and Mexico wasn't there it wouldn't be a mystery at all I mean that boundary wasn't there at a thousand ad and you know it's just the north end of Mexico archeological opinions on Chaco were all over the map and again this this to me is embarrassing it's it's strange it's you know it's we shouldn't impel how it everybody should agree with me um there's one group which at this point is more than the minority although it's gaining speed again when the choco is pueblos but it's you know but Canyon Philip Webb Ellis and Gwyn Vivian would be you know probably I thought the the rearguard of that chip wills at UNM and Steve blog Universal Virginia are kind of crawlin on that bandwagon that it's a canyon full of agricultural villages I I'm not gonna go through and you know make fun of my friends here but that's not gonna work it's it's no place to grow corn Navajo people that lived in Chaco Canyon they know how to grow corn there you know now all people are pretty good at growing corn and the maximum population of Navajo people in charcoal at its height according to Dave roogie who knows more about anybody else it's like 300 people you know maybe you can keep a few hundred people alive growing corn out there but you can't keep 3,000 people alive growing corn a child and the evidence is almost incontrovertible that you have a class Society from the architecture I'll get back to that in a minute that you don't you don't have class societies where you have an upper class in a lower class where you have nobles and commoners in pueblos that's just not how pebbles work but you have it a chuckle I mean that's pretty hard to deny okay so some archaeologists push that it's a Pablo and like that has a lot to do with modern here urges issues and and modern Pablo's interest in the place a lot of folks have seen Chaco and said ooh you know trying to turn it into Zuni today or turn it into Sentinel to funds over some place at the turn of the 19th century yeah that's not gonna work but let's keep it sort of in a mode in a space that makes us comfortable is you know that we think bubbles are not supposed to stand there we we think Pablo's are all about egalitarian spiritualism communalism you know all this stuff that we think is probably nice let's make it a pilgrimage Center let's make it a holy place and it probably wise I'm not denying that you know it was a holy place or a sacred place so a pilgrimage center is a nice model along with some other things that are floating around or it's a popular model there there are things that I would call iniquities and that's a real word you can use it Scrabble it means that it's a something we haven't seen before that kind of a deal where you have a built center that is a center for pilgrimages in the new world in the old world you know these happening they happen in especially in a sub time in India in the new world there's exactly one other place that's like that there's certainly lots of pilgrimages in Latin America and you know what lots of programs is here too but not the models that people are putting forward for Chaco with you know tens of thousands of people coming in having a county fair or something and you know getting their babies blessed and going home so it's it's iniquity it doesn't mean it didn't happen but if you think about the statistical aspects of it if it's something it's really weird and unique the odds are against it all right it could be that they're right but the odds are kind of against it if you can come up with a better idea that's that's not so you Trey today you might be doing better to go with the other model third model is it's a political center a polity and it could be those other things too these aren't necessarily mutually exclusive it certainly is a Pueblo place and since it's part of Pueblo traditions is it's not a Pueblo in the sense of our stereotype of Pueblo this is independent farming villages full of you know people who are all in the same social level held together by ritual it's not it's a political system there's a lot of pushback on that that archeologists don't want to let that happen north of Mexico and this goes way back into the history of anthropology you know in fact in the 19th century of American anthropology that basically had water essentially racist roots where in the 19th century if you remember your history we were busy killing Indians and it's what we did our or send him Oklahoma you pushing them off their lands the anthropologists at that time mostly were very interested in Indians their Pro Indian I'm thinking of Lewis Henry Morgan people like that but they in the 19th century you'll also recall it in the first half of the 19th century the country is built on racism I mean you you had slavery in the South it was just an institution is our peculiar institution so a good Victorian era gentleman up north even we mildly racist wariness the white man's burden all that stuff so Lewis Henry Morgan looked at American Indians who he was very much a champion of and said oh you know these people were savages and that was not a bad thing necessarily was a stage he or Barbara's savagely barbers and they were barbarians he's Mia savagery barbarians civilized there were middle barbarians somewhere in there and that's all they ever were that there were no an excellent listener Morgan said there never were any empires or never in States even in Mexico I mean he applied this all all over the new world that it never happened and those kinds of governments never happened nobody in Mexico you know the Mexican anthropologist laughed about this I said wait a minute we got the Aztecs you know I don't know what you're thinking but but it's tucked north of the border and the guys that taught the guys had taught the guys have taught the guys taught the guys have taught me just you know it's become embedded in American Anthropological archaeology that there were never any polities there were never any state's north of Mexico well chalk was not the Mexico therefore cambia state uh I get back to that possibly in that camp actually the beginnings of that for Chaco was Glenn Vivian's father Gordon Vivian and Gordon Vivian back in the 60s when he published a site report 64 okay this isn't in at that point pilgrimage centers hadn't popped up so in the sixties it was either choc was a canyon full of pueblos which was the prevailing view at that time or Gordon Vivian's view who knew chuckle pretty well I mean he was the guy that was the park archaeologist out there for many many many many years he said in in 64 that developments in Chaco in the 11th and early 12th centuries were not in the direct line of the Pueblo continuum as it was known at the beginning of the historic period the Chaco was not on that some sort of historical or evolutionary trajectory would give you San Ildefonso that would give you hope II that would give you zoom the continuation of the direction taken by chocol would have carried it even further out of the stream of development that culminated in the Rio Grande and he's talking about ever increasing control specialization centralization of authority at chocolate which he saw in the 60s was simply not compatible with a slant that directed the destiny of the basket-maker rio grande continuum he called choco a a cultural experiment our deviation that failed is it strayed from the main course of northern public history Gordon Vivian saw that choco now a chocolate wasn't no Pueblo it wasn't it was public history okay it's absolutely part of total history but the key thing is this part of history where history doesn't lead in some lockstep linear line from you know the earliest basket-maker people up there striving to become Taos the way the archaeologists parse out the prehistory in southwest you get the thing called Pecos system which some of you I'm sure aware of it is basket-maker three and Pablo one two three and four and each of those stages like they add an element that will turn them into into Santa Clara they're eight first they get corn oh boy and then they get pottery hot dog and then they you know then they have Kiva's I'm going stage to stage and say they keep adding stuff then we see Kachinas or getting closer then they mask their rooms into in the Pueblo is in bingo they finally you know it's like they've been wanting to be Santa Clara or San Ildefonso or one of those places way from the five hundreds and they just couldn't hurry they could hardly wait to get to that's not history worked that's not how history works okay we need to give these guys the ability to have history where they go off and do other stuff that doesn't know survive into the present which brings me to my my bete noire here of upstreaming which i'll rail on for the course of the evening here of taking modern practices and projecting them back into the past and this is when I got into archeology and like I might get in his personal history in a miniature one of the strong suits of the Southwest is we had living Pueblo people here so we could flesh out the the archaeological record and I thought ok that's that's that's cool you can take stuff out of an ethnography on a description of what was happening at Zuni in the 1890 and pasted it on a pillow Benito and and that fills in lots of holes that you can't know archaeologically I've come to realize that that's actually probably clinically insane a time does not work that way time does not work for Ana present back into the past time works in the past to the present our job as archaeologists to figure out what the hell was happening in the past and how on earth that led to Zuni ok nothing in the past predicts that you will wind up with well with Puebla is the way we know and today they stumble or not stumble they make all kinds of bold moves that fail and some did succeed in all kinds of directions and what happens you know sort of Darwinian sense is that they wind up being published but there's a lot of history in between the archaeologists between Lewis Henry Morgan who said they're always barbarians and it's a stage that they could never bust beyond they can never break that class England and then the archaeologists upstreaming because it's a it beats thinking you know makes it easy and you know I do I do this all the time to and I'm being facetious like I love my ecology respect my colleagues I no longer have much use for upstream because again that's it's not how time works you know stop think about it our challenge is to figure out independent of that what you know what what's happening 18th century what happened in the 10th century to figure that out on its own terms and that's not easy that's hard that's alright that's the first glimmer of why we might not be embarrassed about chocolates a long time ago it's kind of hard to figure out what happened a long time ago if you lose that crutch of modern Pueblo living I think going off into a bit of autobiography here because it will probably explain a bit about how I think we should go about understanding chocol that I I don't think I get accused of being Chaco centric by people lots of people probably people in this room I don't I don't think Chaka was important because I worked there I worked there because it was bloody obvious that it was important and in the early 70s which is when I got started a long long time ago to me anyway choco is not that well known reach another quote I'm not gonna read quotes all night long but I brought along a few a text book at that time in 1973 was written by a Paul Martin who is a distinguished older archeologist and and Fred plog who is a hot dog young archaeologist at that point and they and when they talk about charcoal it's called the archeology of Arizona but you can't not talk about Chaco know no matter where you are in southwest you have to come to grips with charcoal they said in 73 and I'm just getting into this stuff I'm just like you're too into it at that point and still learning obviously I'm still learning today I hope in spite of the great towns that developed a charcoal and the interest the region has attracted less is really known of the area than almost any other southwestern district and I think they were possibly as a bit of hyperbole in there but yeah they were saying that that the what we knew about chocolate came from reports that are published from excavations in the 20s and with Gwynn in the 30s accordin season Gordon between the 3rd and the 30s less it less is really known of the area than almost any other southwestern district it's amazing that so little work has been done there and so significant so few significant reports published that's when I was getting into this so choco got on my to-do list not that I was gonna figure it out but I wanted to work there you know as part of a project and I first came to charcoal things working at sallman ruins which is up north of chocolate 60 miles it's a big chocolate great house on the San Juan River and archaeology Southwest has sponsored a lot of research at Salomon if the original research was done by an amazing woman named Cynthia Rowan Williams he's no longer with us but archaeology South what she died and too young and archaeology Southwest stepped in and and Paul Reed and his gang up there are pulling together what we know about someone I worked at Salomon for a few years because it was a Chaco site that was my toe in the door and then I went for 10 years from 76 to 86 I think for the National Park Service Chaco project which was great fun I was actually working at Chaco okay so I didn't have any fixed opinions on chocol I don't think I did except that they moved every two years or whatever carrying over my childhood psychoses but um sorry oh yeah yeah I didn't I didn't have you know much wood opinion about charcoal except that having worked at Salomon I was worried that you couldn't understand it just looking at Chaco Canyon chocolate chocolate was bigger than than Chaco Canyon itself because here Salman ruins up here 60 miles away or 50 miles with excuse me so I came with that notion in my head but the official party line when I joined the Park Service project was that chocolate came out of Mexico that was Alden Hayes who was a man I respect enormous Lee who's been gone for some years now but he published the first of the choco reports a whole series you know bookshelf of all these things by the time it got done and his conclusion on choco he was looking just he does survey at a canyon where he wasn't digging he's just recording sites but his conclusion was that choco not that it well that it came out of Mexico by some means that either people from Chaco were inspired by Mexico or people from Mexico Mesoamerica came up and took took over in ordered things and had things done in a right proper way and somewhere above middle barbarism pushing pushing up against a glass ceiling the temper of the times and this is a terror ly 80s was against al that archaeology at that point the late seventies early eighties wanted everything to be local and small and no point going into why we thought that at the time we did so I was in the soup that I was in or the milieu I was in I I didn't like that Mexican stuff at all and I wrote some things about that and I realized that know there were some things at Chaco you know I argued with with Al and in print and with another guy named Charles to pay so in print you know saying now they're wrong about this and this missus boy they may be right about that and that and that that was troublesome to me you know file that one while there's you know there if they're right about that and that maybe they actually are right about the other stuff to hardly saw but um a lot of the work I did for the Park Service not all of it but a lot of work I did for the Park Service was looking at the big buildings looking at the architecture of the canyon and one of the things that was just stone-cold clear is that you had two classes of people out there he had people that lived in the great houses that were architectural II just night and day from the folks that lived in normal houses he had the one-percenters on the hill and you had the 99 percenters who were living in five rooms and Akiba fibers they keep his like like a little rubber stamp and they're perfectly fine little houses that commoners lived in but if you took the floor area of one of those commoner houses and compressed it you could fit it in one room a puddle Veneto I mean the scale differences are just you know you have to be well you have to not want to see it the people that don't like the idea of a political structure out there or a class structure remember one review a recent review a very influential review about chocolate said well there are no palaces you know we would you know if this were a political system we expect to see palaces I'm sitting here thinking fellow Benito I've calculated this weighs 40,000 tonnes of sandstone stacked up 30 feet tall over the size of a major league baseball field why can't you see that that's what that is it's a palace all right we know from a number of analyses now where we think we know from number analyses and now that there's 500 rooms there and maybe 12 families right so not all those rooms are part of houses some of those rooms are warehouses some of those rooms are other functions some of those rooms are just building to build you know to be bigger than the other you know the guys at chapter kettle literally that simple but yeah I mean it's really really clear that you have two classes of people Gwyn Vivian got around that Gordon figure you picked up on it Vivian senior picked up and then said you know this is not going towards Pablo so you got you got the haves and have-nots Glen Vivian explains that is two different ethnic groups which you know it's an interesting idea obviously you can tell like I don't I don't agree I mean I don't I just don't see that and again you know it's 40,000 tons stacked over a baseball field we know what's so hard to see and there's six more of them that big so that was troublesome because I you know I go into Chaco not knowing what to think about it all sudden I'm saying hey wait you know this is real obvious that you got one class that's living in the Great Houses and another class of people that living in small houses and subsequent work is just not mine not some of mine but a lot of other people's born that out that the people in the Great Houses are living differently than the people in the small houses people in the great houses are not working if people working for them probably slaves they're knocking back at Miller time and drinking cow they are wearing parrot feathers which you know that's a big deal in Mexico and macaws I got copper dangling all over them and more turquoise and you know than God the people in the small houses don't have that stuff I mean and it's just you know lots and lots of evidence stacked up now that you have a upper class and a lower class a ruling class and and nobles and commoners so that was troublesome then I got to to working with Native American people I mean I was working the Native American people all along we're Native American people on an intellectual level and this isn't when I I went from the Park Service by way of Arizona State Museum to the museum in the arts and culture in Santa Fe I was cured there and working a lot with a lot with Rio Grande people a Rio Grande public people and then putting together exhibits guys I was working with my you know colleagues say oh yeah you know they're from Rio Grande publicist and we know all about chuckle we don't talk about it bad things happened out there oh that's interesting because everything I heard about it was all goodness and light and they're all out there being communal and you know praying all day long and you know doing whatever whatever we think is nice yeah they said bad things happen out there exist started asking around and reading and studying and yeah there's a number of stories the Charis stories decreasing pueblos is like akima and Laguna and Zia where they talk about White House in some places you see over translatez White City where there is this place that was marvelous it was amazing they had parrots they had turquoise they had all this stuff but people got power over people political power spiritual power and now I'm paraphrasing a public person who actually said those things and that wasn't right and so the the spiritual adviser the entities that would become Kachinas I told the people that you shouldn't be living this way you know you need to leave here and turn your backs on this stuff and reinvent yourselves and not have leaders not have rulers now I have nobility noble families so he did they march south and after four days they have a certain this is the akima version they have a ceremony you're forgetting okay and obviously didn't forget because the old guys remember this and the only some people in you know in the tribe whose Duty it is to remember these things remembers this story about what happened back there but that a ceremony are forgetting for everybody else and it's really after 1300 after Chaco and Aztec which is chocolate successor after they fall in the know those noble families are either wiped out or they move or they decide they're not Nobles anymore but more likely they get wiped out or move the problem of people reinvent themselves as the pebble is that that we caricature today is happy peaceful egalitarian communal all that stuff that happens after 1300 and it's in reaction to judge choco and that's that's in the stories Navajo people who the archaeologists until recently said we're not out there at the time of Chaco now it's looking more like maybe they were they did they say they were out there they know a lot about those those places when I was working for the Park Service the labor force was all Navajo guys because we were the only picnicking ruins but they were the only labour around and we were the only paycheck and you know 40 miles so they came work with us and some of those guys would say well I know what happened to this you know we're digging pull out or something in some guy would say I know what happened in this room oh yeah how do you know what happened in this room my mother told me my grandmother told me whatever they have stories of they're much more detailed and pablo accounts are kind of abstracted it's all about the principles and what you learn and what happened at white house and why we never want to do that again and we never want to have kings again and it's all about lessons and some details but the Navajo stories because they live on that landscape are very detailed okay and maybe they heard those stories from public people and they're fresh because they actually lived next to those places where it actually happened or maybe they were there I don't know what the Navajo stories are about the great gambler and the great gambler reduces every one Navajo people pebble people whoever's there to slavery I mean there's an upper class and a lower class and lower class or slaves and he does it through gambling games supposedly a Navajo colleague of mine black horse was in the room when the story was going around with bunch of scholarly types and have said no way no you you white guys you called him the great gambler that was actually our King this is his words and you know everybody sort of turned to him and said Taft is there a Navajo word for King said well no but but if we had a word for King that's what we call him this gambler stuff kind of bulb arises the whole situation this was an upper class and you know the first thing that the great gambler and demanded of these peoples build me a house build me a palace and then build one for my brother and then build one for you know my uncle whatever those those houses those great houses out there were built for for the Kings and for the rulers for the nobility the ruling class the Navajos and all the people put up with it for a while and then he rise up and it's a class revolt and this also happens here as happens with the platform ends here there's a class revolt that the commoners and you probably know the stories around here but at Chaco there's class revolt they get the great gambler in one version I shoot him back to Mexico where he came from another version they cut off his head and bury him under a rock so you just pick the version you know that you like or you pick the version that you were you learned as a kid or picked a version that your clan tells whatever I'm not gonna be to try not to be facetious about these these traditional histories but you know this these are strong stories and you know there's a more than a kernel of fact in that there's a you know probably a it's probably factual not that they shot him back and makes where he came from but maybe he came from Mexico or he thought he came from Mexico but that way so that's troublesome so I'm talking to talking to you know Native American people and hearing things about charcoal that you know make Gordon Vivian's version sound better than more likely than when Vivian's version I don't wanna pick on Guin but you know that's it's either a Pueblo at this point or it's a political system with Lords and commoners or it's a pilgrimage Center you know it's something we make up we invent a pilgrimage center and that makes us happy because it explains the it still didn't explain the Great Houses I mean no nobody that's advocates advocates of pilgrimage centers ever to my satisfaction explained why do you need a great house for a Pokemon Center I mean I can't just come in and you know have their burger didn't leave what's what's up with these great houses so there's there's a number of troublesome things the last was Ness is actually developing at this time as the rest is realizing that it's a small world after all in the words of Walt Disney that yarn okay I come in there having worked with Cynthia and Aaron Williams at Solan ruins outside of chocolate young understand chocolates you get outside the canyon as well you need the canyon to obviously it's the center but choco was bigger than the canyon and then I realized that I thought I'd realized that our versions of distance things that appalled us or that we think are you know it's a long way between someone has techno it's not it's not it's a hop skip and a jump when Coronado comes into the Southwest he has a support fleet he's going inland with his troops and he's got a support fleet like Alexander the great head and did him neither of these guys any good going up the Gulf of California and when the support fleet gets to the mouth of the Colorado River and Coronado is just making all kinds of a mess up in New Mexico there's pissing people off laughs right inside the support fleet meets some Native American people down at the Gulf at the mouth of the collar mouth of the Colorado they say oh yeah there's more you guys with the steel helmets up there they think they knew what was happening in New Mexico within you know a week of what what was going on the scales that we find imposing our that's our scales not their scales distances were not a not that big a deal even though you know we have jet planes and we have cars and we have all this kind of stuff they still knew what was going on and they're still deeply deeply interconnected over large large areas well how large an area well I started off by saying chocolate was the north end of Mexico that's what it was I mean forget that that that was a corollary this is our modern political boundaries mean nothing I mean somebody writes no I will get in trouble here somebody writes a book about the archaeology of New Mexico all right that's silly I mean there's no archaeology of New Mexico there's archaeology that happened in New Mexico that was connected with stuff in Arizona and Utah and whatever you'll never understand in New Mexico I don't think anybody ever wrote a book with that title I hope I hope how and if they did please edit this out that it's useful to sell books but it doesn't make any sense in the past because New Mexico wasn't there in the past nor was the United States you know there was no international boundary you're all aware of the history that we took we took the Southwest from Mexico and in 1846 in a colonial war James kapok quite a quite a president he took office and said I'm gonna get you wanted California so I'm didn't get Texas which was you know next Texas and New Mexico and California and I'm gonna get Oregon do it in one term and not run for a second term you got it all done and he also almost almost fought a war with Britain over over Oregon he gets out of office and dies three weeks later so you know he was our greatest colonialist he's a mixed figure let's put it that way I mean you could say my god what a jerk or you could say well he got his California anyway we took it from from Mexico prior to that it was part of Mexico in the Spanish and Mexican days but they were also they were layered over which they're really good historically at doing this layering over pre-existing pre-columbian networks and in political systems that was how the Spanish worked when the English and the Dutch come in a roll over try to roll over just destroy him the Spanish just added another layer they put a church on top of the pyramid and always well and and you know they worked with the local officials I didn't try and change everything they they they added two more layers of nobility three more layers and nobility on top of it all but they adapted existing systems and I think that's quite true in the southwest that they got to the limits of the you know they stopped in in Santa Fe and in Taos and in the San Luis Valley because they were getting out of that ancient city the ancient the the native geographic systems their reach the limits of it so when we came in we draw a line that cuts the southwest and Chaco and everything off from Mexico and we nationalize those those ruins and in a way it's very different than how a Mexico nationalized its past Mexico today and since the second revolution down there nationalize their past and everyone's an Aztec or the Aztecs are part of their heritage we didn't do that with Native Americans Native Americans are part of the past but and they're I'm sure there's some Native American people in the room but for those of us they're not Native American it's not part of our heritage per se I mean I wouldn't claim that Chaco as part of my heritage of course not it's part of it I would say it's part of the world's heritage it's certainly Pueblo I think I find it's an interesting place but I wouldn't claim it as mine unlike what happens in Mexico where those ruins are part of the National moaning so we nationalized the Southwest taking it out of circulation for any any possibilities that that's where the Aztecs came from because that was that was hot back in the 19th century and early 20th century that the Aztecs start in the southwest and they they migrated down into central Mexico so this is aztlán we're in aztlán now the homeland of the Aztecs we didn't want any of that because we just fought a war with Mexico and we wanted to you know squash that as much as we could so we that's the word I'm looking for we isolated the southwest we said oh you know it's this beyond remote beyond compare isolated people to have developed a unique civilization unlike anything else in the oh well it's stuff about chocolate there's you know it's the most enduring and puzzling whatever mystery because it's isolated out of context okay so to figure out what talk Chaco is really you got to put it back in context what was okay we got to figure out what was happening 11th century in its own terms well you know we got to pretend we don't know about soon you gotta pretend we don't know about hoping we could I think it's legit to use their histories why not I mean they remember their own past use their histories about what was happening back then which is different than what was happening now remember the ceremony forgetting and all that stuff their accounts of the past are very very you know it was very very different from the present even though I'm not denying that it's probable history please being let me be clear about this yes of course it's part of their history but that doesn't mean that it's you know the Chaco was Zuni or the charcoal was saying I or something like that I understand chocolate so in terms so what was going what does that mean what was going on when chocolate was going on well if we blow away that border and forget about those you know our problems with distance there are problems aren't there problems and we know this we know these guys are connected with Mexico like I said they're not they're drinking cacao really they're decked out in macaw feathers yeah okay there's no international boundary we know that there well could you know deeply connected with Mexico we know it's a class society where there's nobles and commoners which is what you would call them if they're in Mexico there's no problem with using these terms in Mexico you use this in the you know an archeological convention if you guys are all my peers you'd be out of the room by now okay and I'd be on a rail shortly shortly thereafter there are commoners in in in Nobles there was a capital city chocolate was a center I mean y'all know enough about chocolate another there is a center and there was a region that's defined by 150 small great houses and roads and line especially line sight signaling systems things like that that was really tied in together very tightly or you know tightly um if you start fishing around for bottles of what might Chaco might have been and you don't take some stereotype our stereotype of Pueblo and try and turn them into that don't make up something on a pilgrimage center which again it could have been but you know you know you don't need to make up something if you look for models from its own time from their world there are models that work really really well what's their world where their world is is the early pre-classic in Mesoamerica that's their world that's what they knew okay Toula was a big deal in maybe not as big as people used to think but you had a lot of small polities about the size of Chaco in terms of population the scales are you know about the same as the early polities where their capital cities were about the size of Chaco Canyon maybe 2,000 3,000 people maybe 50,000 people in the whole area there's just scores of those in Mesoamerica from Zacatecas on down if you look what else is going on in chocolates time and the Mississippi River Valley there were great civilizations things that made chocolate look small okay there's a site a city called Cahokia it's just a cross river in st. Louis exactly contemporary with Chaco is the biggest pyramid north of Teotihuacan there's a lot of big sites north tattoo akan is the biggest pyramid it's made of dirt so we call it a mound just like you know if Indians have a 200-foot boat it's a canoe I I don't care if it has 60 people you know and and it's carrying ten tons of stuff which I'm not making this stuff up it's a canoe well you know if they stack up a pyramid and they make it out of dirt it's a mound they're right Cahokia itself had a population I said a lot of the Mesoamerican capitals in chocolate under 3,000 people something like that coke had you know 30 or 40,000 people in a city okay this is exactly content with chocolate and they they knew about each other I mean how could they not which you know clearly was the center of a large region with the st. actually the same kind of architecture I mean that in like scratch architecture the same kind of structure as chocolate even without Liars and signaling systems and all that kind of stuff okay that was chocolate swirl that's what they knew they didn't they didn't know they're gonna turn in a Zuni they didn't know they're gonna have a ceremony you're forgetting they hadn't gotten to that part yet they were still screwing up hey I mean they were you know they were still living like Mesoamerican Lords which is exactly what they were how can i someone from you know New Mexico be a Mesoamerican Lord cuz miss because the boundary wasn't there all right they thought they were Mesoamerican Lords and by God they were right they had all the important probably if somebody from Chaco waltz down to Tula and asked to see the The Wizard they fob him off on the under sistent Secretary of State you know for savages or something but you know you somebody from Cahokia went down there they would treat him with pomp and circumstance I mean he was those guys go you're playing on the same level as Tula guys like chalk were trying to they're doing the best they can all right and it doesn't work it doesn't work so the Pueblo people revolt you know the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 you hear that is that's the first time Paul has ever worked together no it's the last time that you know until they got casinos I think in Politico v to think that they work together there's a revolt across the chaulk one tree they get rid of the nobles I think a lot of the nobles move south because there's a noble families have been noble families for centuries that's where they knew how to do that's what they're supposed to do is rule and nobody wanted to be ruled anymore so they go down and start Casas Grandes I suspect or other places down there um if you if you put chocolate its own context and don't upstream and don't make it small you know make understand that the the geographic limits are the sky's the limit I mean you know the Chaco had birds that were from Guatemala probably and in the cacao from a way for our south of Mexico um you'll you'll figure out what chocolate is and it's not that hard you know once once you get the blinders off and get out from under the shadow of American Anthropological archeology with its colonial baggage and you know past our romanticizing the southwest and this relentless upstreaming and our nationalism of the southwest it's not that hard to figure out what chocolate lies but I'm not going to tell you you got to figure out yourself so questions and answers going Gillett yeah it's interesting they certainly knew geometry and if by fractal you just mean that you know there's repetitive geometric elements I can buy it he gets larger in scale on layouts and does things that I'm not sure they would technically be able to do I mean these guys are working with they do wonderful work but they're working with naked eye and a piece of string in a rock okay and I'm not sure you could do those layouts on the scales that he's talking about but it's really interesting of course it's about charcoal Midian which is when I first started thinking about the Southwest historically and it's weird I'm an archaeologist of course I'm doing history will know well where I was trained I'm not doing history I'm doing science and they're very different things Chaco Meridian was an argument that Chaco moved it's a four-point problem Chaco moves north and founds a second capital they refined the capital Aztec ruins and I'm sure you guys know where at NYADA has two crowns and chocolate mousse North to Aztec and then when that falls apart that some of those families move south to Casas Grandes because they're all on same north-south Meridian and the people from Chaco actually built a road what we call a road it's not a road in the sense of this thing out here with a light rail on it but connecting due north from Chaco Diaz tech so they left us that message that's their history written on the ground when that first came out and in 99 and it first started circulating the idea is like 95 something like that people were all appalled you know Chaco couldn't move to Aztec that's too far and you know they're just always it's you know it's not in San Juan County for instance it's medic in Lee County at this point everyone I know accepts the chocolate yeah three points to the four point problem are okay chocolate mousse North Bay Aztec yeah that's that's a done deal at this point they still a few people have problems with it but don't pay any attention then March and South is a harder sell and in part because there's fewer people working it in Casas Grandes and a couple of guys that kind of stranglehold the interpretive and they're good guys it's Mike Whalen at home in us both friends are just not interested in stuff like that I still think it's you know there's just too much evidence there's too much stuff that links paquimé or casas grandes to the north tea doors one thing if you if you map the everybody knows tea doors you know it used to be the park sirs to tell you the tea door guy has a backpack on his back that's why it's a tea door you know tea doors are exterior doors they're meant to you know they define your house door means a lot and that's what somebody sees when I come into your house they're part of that tea door group I don't think I'm gonna go in there or their part I teach our group don't give me some food you know tell us who you are if you if you mapped in some day I will do this or get some student to do it the first tea doors are at Chaco in the exterior walls of great houses that's where they are all right and a few of the few of the outliers to the great outside large chocolate mousse to Aztec and they get democratized everybody has tea doors on the exterior you see him all over Mesa Verde and that's the Oh Mesa Verde was part of Aztecs world um and then when things fall apart and 1275 and it all falls apart there's a class revolt and the nobles go away and everybody else just leaves because the whole place is you know and then no one live that way anymore and they forget it and all that stuff you never see tea doors up north again is you know an odd window that by accident is a t-shape or something like that but if you go to Casas Grandes there are tea doors everywhere alright interior/exterior tea tours all over the place tea doors and all the cliff dwellings in Sierra Madres the tea was so important the tea aperture was so important that there's two of these things that are called altars and they probably work that are stoned it's perfectly squared off stone like so with a tea cut in it they're you know up on on mounts then there's there they're set up like altars I mean I don't think we know but I have no problem with that that t-shape the the penetration the T the void is a t-shape goes chocol as tik paquimé and stuff like that that you know that's not independent invention there Evan Sykes okay vacuum Costas crannies goes away at 1450 like everything else does if you go straight south from there you get Culiacan on the coast of Sinaloa which was the northernmost mesoamerican out city that starts at 1400 something like that the moat near the the big part of it that's where all the conquistadors launch from they go you know they're there in civilization until I get the Culiacan then they have to go out in the wilderness beyond there so there may be something minute it's really cool about the charcoal Meridian as it starts 500 years earlier that I knew that the I described not very sympathetically the Pecos system with with basket-maker 3p one two three four were they you know first they get corn and they get pottery then the icky okay but for each of those stages and those stages are real there at least they are the differences between them are enough that even archaeologists can notice them for each of those stages the biggest weirdest most important interesting sites each of those stages is on that Meridian basket-maker three is huge basket maker sites at Chaco t1 its ridges Basin and blue mesas just south of Durango just five five or six times bigger than the next biggest p1 site with all kinds of weird architecture towers I don't know nobody in p1 builds towers you know stuff like that p2 it's Chaco p3 its ass Tech and in p4 its but you know there's a real wind up before the pitch of course is about the evolution of Kachina religion for some of the stories that that are ostensibly about China not stenciled with it seem to be about charcoal the kachinas are actually living among the people and they're people just sort of people ask there's actually when they leave White House those battles between Kachinas and the humans and Kachinas die and humans die and they still they do this at akima not every year i think but they recreate the battle with the Kachinas it's after they after they turned their backs on or after they off the nobles or get rid of the nobles and reinvent themselves the Kachinas really coming to prominence and the Kachinas might always been there Cucina might have been there before Chaco and some other and get suppressed I don't think choc was a cheerful place remember the Rio Grande guys saying you know we don't talk about it bad stuff have another might have been suppressed and it comes back in a somewhat different form for archaeologists the earliest things that we can recognize as Kachinas and this is not a good criteria as you know we don't deal with Kachinas in a way two people do the earliest ones that I'm aware ever and members which is same time as Chaco and you see they you see the images and members you don't say this is actually talking cave last night yeah everybody knows members to black aren't pottery from Southwest New Mexico people doing stuff and we think it's real cute all right just bunnies and and listen that the other thing dinners there's bowls where somebody's taking somebody else's head off all right I don't think that he thought it was cute make this quick that I think that that's an ideology that gets developed and memberís that sort of anti Chaco it's sort of holding their communities together and people you know Chaco could a head if anything it wanted they're exactly contemporary we think that power is really cool I bet there's I bet just people with members you know jewelry on tonight you don't see that figured your pottery outside the members area did none of it at charcoal it's hardly any members of Chaco even though that you know they they share my cause they share turquoise I sure everything else that poverty does not move outside the members area I think those things the little bunnies that we think are so cute you know I think that unless you were part of members you didn't want to be eating your Wheaties out of that that bowl I mean it meant something and meant some you know another way to say this is that when they bury people they burying with a bowl over their head I mean this is they're not up ending their morning breakfast bowl this is you know that images that JA geometric stuff and really meant something and it doesn't show up doesn't show up over here the early members stuff shows up over here but you don't find out later remember stuff over here and you don't find it you don't find outsider members so maybe they're cooking up not cooking up I don't want it sound this is not a starting to be bluff about but maybe Kachinas come out of out of memberís you know and it's when they experiment after charcoal you can see they experiment with lots of different ways of thinking about the world to reinvent a society without nobles there's all these art styles that come and go when we call cults I don't know if that's a good word or not but it's like a Darwinian competition of cults and and members may be part of that where those idea is a percolate up about a member state those are useful those good know of course they're useful you catina's holy people that help the people so that's a good thing you don't need the leaders anymore you got the Kachinas the the question is about this north-south axis which is pretty clear at chocolatiers buildings that are very Cardinal very north south east west but specifically about a pine tree big pine tree big Ponderosa that was growing in the plaza or that or Neil Judd the one of the excavators problem Anil found the stump of this pine tree in the plaza of Pueblo Bonito and whether that was part of the axis the the tree is very clearly prehistoric I mean the triggering guys dated it I don't know what but it's it's early and he liked this before a thousand AD chip wells over in New Mexico who wants the place once chocolatey pueblans I guess his argued an article that some Rancher dragged that thing in later you know that it wasn't really growing there there was a stomp and they brought the stump in because they were making a brush Corral or something like that and it you know I'm I'm not doing chip justice if you're really interested in this you should read his article in American antiquity flipside is that that was a big tree and and by a thousand AD there weren't any big trees in chocolates they wanted them there you know unless they spared them because you know hundreds of thousands of beams went into you know building those buildings and most of them came from 80 miles away on somebody's shoulders or you know what somebody's towed them so if there was a big big tree growing in veneto as it wasn't an accident because they wanted it there and it was really important you know what is the choco median chocolate meridean for me is like a kilometer wide I mean these guys are not working with the auto lights and not working with GPS that working with a piece of piece of string in Iraq so the Meridian does this you know and they don't they can't determine longitude we couldn't do that until 18th century determine you know where you are absent back citing absent action you know looking and saying oh I'm due north of that it if you can't see that whatever that is you know the crack in the door something you can't see anymore you can't reestablish where you are you have to have to reestablish north and there's gonna be a little error so the meridian is a wide thing it could well be that the meridian comes from that tree and you know aztecs off quite a little bit but you know what's what's a half kilometer among friends but yeah they have any interesting thing on the tree is that it's in play it's archeologists you know making charcoal mystery I have two questions one about warfare and cannibalism in Chaco and I'll answer that one first and then about people from Chaco moving south into Mexico into Mesoamerica into what is today Mexico but actually internally within Mesoamerica warfare choc was kind of remarkable in that there was not a lot of warfare well chocolate was in charge which is a good thing there's about a century there of not a lot there's always some there's all you know people human beings are no damn good there's always some fussing going on alright but there's not villages being wiped out and again I really like architecture more than pottery anything else architecture doesn't move and it's big the commoners are living in individual family houses where you have one family maybe ten people you know an extended family here and a quarter mile away is another one a quarter mile always another and sometimes they're more cluster than that but they aren't living in defensive settings you know they don't have walls around them and they're you know they're living separated so they're not worried I'm sure bad things still happen but you know generally speaking they're not worried and when Chaco moves to Aztec the wheels come off and that ends and they circle the wagons they make these huge Mesa Verde sites where they bring in a whole lot of these old family houses build a wall around it with a spring in the middle that same Canyon there for those of you to know that or any of a dozen big towns that's the cliff dwellings not living the cliff dwellings because they're cute and because you know Vincent Scully would like them you know hundred years later or five hundred years later whatever that was they're living those cliff dwellings cuz they're scared um so yeah there's peace during chocolates time and then the wheels come off and that's I think when the class revolt happens the nobles aren't doing their jobs you know we have war we have drought off with their heads second question is did people move into Mexico and I think the nobles did the noble families well the story ok the stories every public not every Pablo but a lot of problems I've talked to have some claim that went south never came back there right and even the akima stories they talk about the care stories where they leave White House and they have a ceremony for getting stuff like that half the people is a long story it's a good story half the people stopped and found Akamai the other half keep going and I don't where they went and some of them come back as traders with macaws and you know turquoise and copper and stuff like that later but they don't really know where they wound up for Casas Grandes and I'm hoping that people here know Casas Grandes it's the third great last great city third and last great city in the southwest it's in Chihuahua and that's the one with the tea doors the local Indians there when the conquistadors come through and there's some mysteries to who the local Indians were because they after like in key stores came through there weren't let and there weren't many of them left um but the conquistador is not the Warriors but the guys were writing stuff down recorded a story by the Indians around Casas Grandes who talked about the site they said yeah you know two brothers led huge groups of people out of the north heading straight south and they bumped into a hag an old lady a witch sitting on a huge rock of iron and which said one of you founds a city here or the rest of you keep going all right which is what happened one of them founded the city and the rest of them keep going heading south I'll get back to them in a minute in the 1860s before there's any scientific archaeology down there there are some guys from the local village of Casas Grandes who are looking for treasure in the ruins and they found one of the biggest meteorites in North America its Casas Grandes meteor I can go see it in Smithsonian what's left of it they sawed it in half you know what you do with meteorites if you're into this kind of stuff if you want the mineralogy and all that sort of stuff so you can see half of it there the rest what's been sawed up and sent around the world people studying meteorites but it's an archeological specimen and the way to describe finding it was in the ruin all wrapped up in cloth and you know here's the giant iron rock I don't think the meteorite fell there I think they probably you know brought well I don't know and probably brought it there okay the the bunch that kept going all right and all his clans that probably people say yeah there's this claim went further south and never came back we know where they are they're probably Guatemala now they may be in Guatemala now in the early Postclassic what was chocolate world the early post classic it was really dynamic he had the fall of Teotihuacan which was kind of a it was the center a huge city that didn't necessarily control an empire but it just set the tone for Mesoamerica for hundreds of years it falls and all these little polities pop up little polities that look exactly like chocol with multiple noble families and all um so I just told you when I think Chaco is really but what else is going on there's all these migrations out of the north that Chi Chi Mex and everybody claims her a chi chi Mak over inter askin country over and you know I asked that country you're all coming out of the north and there's this it's at both a domino effect and I think an intergrated stream of people coming out of the north that that create the the early Postclassic and and ultimately the aztecs are out of the north they're from Ascalon they may be from up here we we say that it didn't happen because we can be nationalize the archaeology the timing isn't good for Chaco to become the Aztecs I know but I think they're part of that domino you know string of dominoes or this braided stream of people they're part of that really dynamic early and middle post classic history in Mesoamerica where folks are just moving all over the place and I think some of those guys were from originally from up here what concrete connections with Cahokia can you relate that's a real good question far as I know there's nothing from chocolate Cahokia and nothing from kokia charcoal flipside is that if you had something for chocolate Cahokia the archaeologists there would would kick it back in the in the pit they really don't know they really don't want to hear about long distance stuff I mean in the Mississippi Valley you have if you picked a site and said what looks like Mesoamerica Cahokia with a hugest pyramid and this Plaza surrounded by a smaller pyramids or Chaco but you know there's these big buildings if you said which one looks like Mesoamerica is no question it's Cahokia okay what okay so it's a big deal Oh fall back there are there's turquoise that makes it to the Mississippian world doesn't make it to Koki as far as I know but there's turquoise that makes it too big misses this was called Mississippian these big Mississippian sites like spiral places like that is literally hundreds and hundreds of pounds of Pacific coast shale it makes it to Spiro it probably went through chocol but I'll take it into historic times this is not so much upstreaming is I don't think it's up streaming Coronado to pick on Coronado again he comes up in New Mexico and raises hell and goes to one Pablo and he's looking for cities of gold and it's not gold so they say well maybe you should go a little further than that next Pablo it's made out of gold yeah you know he goes there he goes there and they finally went to put Pecos and Pecos is not made of gold either that Pecos is the big trading center on the plains and Pecos is at the same latitude almost exactly as Spiro which is the southeastern musk coat this is backwards bringing southeastern most Mississippi and trade entrepot trade center it's connected with with Cahokia for sure a lot of stuff there is from Cahokia his fancy stuff that you have espero so at at Pecos they get tired to having these conquistadors and these guys around because they're eating a lot and behaving badly they said well if you don't like this we have this guy here who the Spanish called a Turk he was not a publican he's Native American he's not a pal Indian says yeah I can show you where cities are and he describes boats 200 feet long with all guys paddling a river that was a mile wide or a league or whatever their measurement was with with towers he called them which were pyramids and he's describing the Mississippi Valley all right so Coronado and the Turks at the corner so don't get it sounds this sounds good this is what we're after he goes he goes pretty much due east he's headed towards Sparrow at that point until the Spanish are going across the southern Great Plains and they don't like it very much and they think the Turk is lying to them irate and they strangle and then he wander all over the place they go to Kansas and they say back Kansas is not what we're after and they go you know they go back down the Turk was just doing his job all right the Turk who is that Pecos knows about you know Cokie is come and gone at that point but he knows about the cities along the Mississippi Valley and he's taken the Spanish there concrete evidence that would set a but I would I would assert that it'd be safe - safe to think they knew about each other I mean it's a leaders job to know what's over the hill and what's over the plains but a good question sir actually part of the answer that okay the question is about whether members knew about Chaco and a speaker here who studies in the members area apparently you asked that question he said no it's too far yeah and and the the real question was why do PhDs have part of that I think is because the scale of a PhD research you know you're single scholar you've got to prove yourself you got you got to prove yourself on a project in your project it's really difficult to do a PhD dissertation and not go broke you know over ten years that's big you got it you know we're sort of that's the scale that we teach our kids to think in it's as you know here's a project part that's turf I mean just to be blunt about it part of its turf I gave a talk last night in in Tucson is all about how Chaco and members interacted I mean it evidence is all over the place all right if you don't want to see it you know I mean it's quite possible for people to ignore 40,000 tons 30 feet tall size of a major league baseball field you know if you can ignore that then you know you can ignore their roads and members there's you know there's like when chocolate comes online make a long story short I work in members that's where I work these days that's where I started that seems to be where I'm ending that when Hall comes going strong you know seven hundred to a thousand something like that going really strong expanding members it's like a weatherman they pay a lot attention to holcom they do the cremations they do everything but the ball courts everything with the ball courts some of the members half the other half the members don't do that stuff and that's an interesting question this you know why did someone remembers do this and others didn't Horicon shrinks back on phoenix and the wheels come off for holcom chocolate comes online it's a one-two punch and they're like a weather vane all of a sudden they start making little stone Pablos and doing corrugated you know and end corrugated pottery making this fancy black and white stuff and look in having roads and things that look like a little great houses you know members is a really good index for what's going on in the southwest because they're affected by these things and you know if if the members valley people don't want to acknowledge that that's I suppose that's their privilege sir I one of them good friend Raj Raj Iranian was at this talk that I gave last night and he wasn't speaking to said Roger would you think about that I said well at least over with Rogers good man who should have Roger up here sometime yeah sir there's always people at Zuni the questions about Zuni it's a two-part question that's one part question is that to be a linguistic isolate you need to be isolated for a long while and you know some people say 5,000 years some people say not so long so we're we're we're a Zuni when all this was going on there are always people at Zuni I mean from early early days on some of the earliest irrigation agriculture on the plateau is around Zuni and there's always people there's this is not a nice place to live I guess certainly is anything so I think they were there there were people there I mean there Chaco great houses at Zuni all-around zing is a village of the great Kiva's it's right up the valley from 17 there's all kinds of chocolate ease around there so there are people there or whether they're the moderns Oni or not I don't know students would say they were and you bet you're you betcha they were Zuni have stories that that probably relate to Chaco not as dramatic as White House a Zuni government back in the 19th century they had they had noble families they had families who didn't work and they made the decisions this has changed over the years you know it's that the real powers and the the elders who pray and that kind of stuff but the way Cushing describes any of course Cushing might not know he's talking about but he said there's a the the great house at the center of the world is where the noble families who made the decisions and who didn't work lift which you know that sounds a lot like what I think is going on in great house it's just a little more benign um the linguistic isolation of Zuni affected the linguistic isolate I don't know I'm not a linguist it's a puzzle southwestern alingas stiix is a puzzle my guess is that we don't know as much about the formation of linguistic isolates as a linguist would like us to think about or maybe we do you know maybe they had to you know bi linguistically isolated not socially isolated because clearly they weren't that for four five thousand years I mean some reason why nobody else wanted to speak Zuni just like nobody else wanted to be members I'm making this up right I don't have an answer I don't have an answer to that I mean there were people at Zuni while all this is going on absolutely there are lots of people around Unni so whoever was there is all wrapped up in it and I it's hard for me to believe and Zuni certainly would object if I said that they weren't you know the ancestors of the people are there today so they were there and they were in the middle of it you're right Dave Wilcox he's a really smart guy and and Dave Gregory is also an author Annette had a really good book multidisciplinary look from all kinds of different you know perspectives on Zuni origins and I thought those guys thought said that they were isolated in the mug you know in uplands for a while but I think des is gonna backed off on it the opinion of all his authors was against that they still publish the book which is great that's good scholarship question is what was White House I mean there is a White House at Canyon de Chelly which is named because of the white but you know that's not the White House White House is a name for this area that I've heard some total of people say it's just the four corners and in other people people say it's Mesa Verde because that's that's famous it's in the news most people probably people say yeah it was it was chocol it was that you know that series of events is what that story is talking about so White House or White City is the whole thing it's it's the whole settlements the whole city in fact there's some accounts of that to translate it his White City but I imagine that most people are doing the translating say pebbles can't have cities so he turned to White House you know just like the Navajo guy said you know he's really our King would know we have a word for King questions about if noble families from charcoal went to Casas Grandes were the palaces I would say the Casas Grandes the whole city is an elite city and all the goodies are there when when Mike and Mike Whalen and Paul Minister digging the you know the sort of secondary sites and even actually people haven't dug too many commoner houses down there you don't have all the stuff that's just all over the place it causes so I think if you took all the Great Houses of chocol where the nobles lived and pressed them into a cube you know the enclosed architectural space be a cube like that if you did that at Aztec ruins it's a cube like that and if you do it at paquimé it's a cube like that so you know there's it's smaller and smaller and more and more compact and I think the whole site there probably is is important people and then you know the commoners are living out in the countryside thank you very much Steve pleasure thank you you

Channel: ArchaeologySouthwest

Views: 40,998

Keywords: Archaeology, Southwestern Archaeology, Archaeology Southwest, Preservation Archaeology, Archaeology Cafe, Steve Lekson, Stephen Lekson, Chaco Canyon

Id: 6kmh9qWPpjI

Length: 65min 41sec (3941 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 02 2014