 | Pueblo del Arroyo, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico |  |
VII. CONCLUSIONS
Despite the reconstruction so evident in the middle section, between
its north and south wings, Pueblo del Arroyo appears to have been a
relatively short-lived settlement. There is no associated external trash
pile now visible, and if the rubbish layer seen in the Hyde Expedition
photographs (pl. 53, A-C) marks the position of such a pile, it was a
modest accumulation soon buried under 2 to 3 feet of water-borne
silt. The recorded bracket of tree-ring dates from Pueblo del Arroyo,
A. D. 1052-1117, falls within the last half of a similar bracket from
Pueblo Bonito, A. D. 807-1130. Architecture and ceramics further
evidence a contemporaneity with Pueblo Bonito and prove that the
inhabitants of Pueblo del Arroyo were more in tune with the Late
Bonitians than with their P. II neighbors, the Old Bonitians. It is not
beyond reason that Pueblo del Arroyo was built by a group migrant
from the larger village, less than 300 yards distant.
The builders of Pueblo del Arroyo, trained to the Chaco tradition,
were not long in sole possession, if I read the signs correctly. They
moved on, or part of them did, and the bearers of a slightly different
culture came in to take their place. It is barely possible that the outward
movement was spurred by annual floodwaters and the mud they
carried—recurrent deposits welcomed on farmland but not satisfactorily
diverted from the pueblo by a 2-foot-high, east-west masonry
wall. The twelfth-century arroyo south of the old wall carved its
16-foot-deep channel somewhat later.
Partial abandonment of the original village and resettlement by an
alien people are indicated by changes in the pottery complex and in
architecture. A cruder, non-Chaco type of masonry was introduced
in the construction of Rooms 1-7 and elsewhere. Kiva B, associated
with Rooms 1-7, was equipped with an above-floor ventilator, a northern
trait. The seven kivas we cleared within the pueblo proper were
all built with Chaco-type subfloor ventilating systems, but in four
cases, Kivas F, G, I, and J, alterations followed and above-floor ventilators
were substituted. Wall repairs and new walls in this area exhibit
stonework of inferior quality. Unused rooms and kivas became dumps
for household rubbish and in this a dozen or more burials were made,
all but three of which had subsequently been distributed and widely
scattered. Although an established custom in contemporary P. III
practice of the high Chaco culture.
West of Pueblo del Arroyo, on a silt stratum 6 inches above the
base of its west-wall masonry, are the remains of a triple-walled tower
over 73 feet in diameter. This is a type of structure well known
along McElmo Creek, in southwestern Colorado, but we never expected
to find one in Chaco Canyon. Our McElmo Tower had been
outlined and its walls begun; then the unfinished stonework was pulled
down and the rocks salvaged for use elsewhere. Potsherds recovered
from this wreckage were preponderantly of a variety we called the
Chaco-San Juan—an organic-paint variety in marked contrast to the
several mineral-paint types native to Chaco Canyon.
As a new pottery type the Chaco-San Juan made its appearance at
nearby Pueblo Bonito comparatively late, after the village had attained
its majority in growth and prestige. Pueblo Bonito's famed
hachured ware was in every household before Chaco-San Juan fragments
began to accumulate in local trash piles, and this seems equally
true of Pueblo del Arroyo.
In my opinion most of our Chaco-San Juan pottery is identical with
what others have called "proto-Mesa Verde" or "McElmo." Both in
Chaco Canyon and beyond the Rio San Juan the McElmo (or protoMesa
Verde) is frequently found in association with another type,
the sherd-tempered, mineral-painted "Mancos." Together, Mancos and
McElmo account for much of the "Chaco-like" quality archeologists
see in pottery from ruins outside the Chaco area.
Morris, who has unquestionably given more thought to this resemblance
than anyone else, was repeatedly reminded of Chaco Canyon,
and especially by occasional vessels that appeared to be trade
pieces from it, while exploring La Plata Valley. He regarded as contemporaneous
the pure Chaco, the Chaco-like, and the non-Chaco
pottery he exhumed there (Morris, 1939, p. 205) but warned against
confusing the pure Chaco and the Chaco-like.
Recalling his explorations of 20 years before, Morris wrote "the
largest great house at Aztec Ruin National Monument is a Chaco
structure in every detail, and the pottery made by its builders is distinctly
Chaco-like." But, after a period of abandonment, "makers of
Mesa Verde pottery took over" (Morris, ibid., p. 39). Again (ibid.,
p. 205) "pottery made and used by the builders of the Aztec ruin is
more Chacoesque than Chaco." Illustrations in his earlier reports
(1915, 1919) show that the Aztec vessels Morris regarded as Chacoesque
or Chaco-like include what we, at Pueblo del Arroyo, would
classify as Chaco-San Juan.
Speculating upon the ancestry of the distinctive Chaco and Mesa
Verde wares, Morris (1939, p. 204) thought it "altogether possible
that both grew out of the same general substratum, and that this substratum
was as much indigenous to the country north of the San Juan
as it was to any other." This premise has much in its favor. Prudden
was perhaps first to point out that certain distinctive qualities in pottery
from ruins north of the San Juan seem ancestral either to the
Chaco, the Mesa Verde, or both. The ubiquitous Mancos ware, usually
described as Pueblo II, is widely distributed throughout the San Juan
country and has within it elements that foreshadow both Mesa Verde
and Chaco.
The content and the relative ages of the Mesa Verde and Chaco
high cultures have been fairly well explored, but there is a deal of
digging yet to be done in what Morris calls the substratum from
which they emerged. In 1921 and 1922 Jeancon and Roberts discovered
and partially excavated a small ruin near the famous Piedra
Parada, in Archuleta County, Colorado (Jeancon, 1922; Jeancon and
Roberts, 1923-1924). That ruin may not be the only one of its kind
thereabout, but I know of no other. Its architecture and ceramics are
so indisputably Chaco-like as to warrant belief that the structure
housed colonists from Chaco Canyon, a hundred miles or more to the
south. With this ruin in mind but referring more specifically to pottery
from southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado, Kidder
(1924, p. 56) suggested the possibility of "a northwestern spread
or a northwestern origin of the Chaco culture."
In shape, technique, and design many of the Chaco-made vessels
from Pueblo del Arroyo are duplicated from P. II levels on Alkali
Ridge, southeastern Utah (Brew, 1946), and our organic-paint ChacoSan
Juan type is abundantly represented in the U. S. National
Museum by P. III sherds from Far View House, Mesa Verde National
Park (U.S.N.M. No. 298851), and from Pipe Shrine House
(No. 326398). By type alone, pottery from Pueblo del Arroyo unites
the Pueblo II culture complex with that of Pueblo III.
After 40 years experience in Southwestern archeology and with
the question of origins still unresolved, Morris (1939, p. 202) believed
that the "lead-up" to full Chaco ware, at least along the La
Plata, came "through an intermediate stage directly from Pueblo II."
My own feeling in the matter, based primarily upon our Chaco Canyon
collections, is that there was no intermediate stage. At Pueblo
Bonito full-blown Chaco ware is Pueblo II plus the hachured types,
and Pueblo del Arroyo reflects Pueblo Bonito. Our iron-painted
in almost every P. II ruin throughout the San Juan country. I see
no halfway point.
The older portion of Pueblo Bonito is a typical Pueblo II settlement—an
arc of masonry dwellings with storerooms at the rear,
sunken kivas in front, and a communal trash pile beyond. Throughout
occupancy Old Bonito did not change its style of architecture, and its
pottery, despite successive vogues in ornamentation, continued to be
thin and hard with hand-smoothed surfaces, paper-white slips, and
night-black designs in iron-oxide paint. Throughout, bowls remained
deep with rounded bottoms, thinned rims, and blackened lips; jars
remained squat and globular; ladles, of the half-gourd form. Favored
elements of design included interlocking whorls, bat-wing figures and
stepped triangles, checkerboard, wide-line rectilinear scrolls, and curvilinear
designs with squiggled hatching and filled-in corners. The
old settlement was a P. II town with no urge for change.
After Old Bonitian rubbish had piled up to a depth of 8 feet,
new vessel shapes and new designs suddenly appeared. Rectilinear
compositions in boldly bordered, straight-line hachure replaced some
of the older patterns. Then came the Chaco-San Juan variety with its
velvet-smooth finish and proto-Mesa Verde type of decoration.
The descriptive characteristics of "pure Chaco" given by Morris
(1939, p. 205) and by Kidder (1924, p. 52) were formulated after
careful study primarily of sherds picked up from the surface at
Pueblo Bonito. We have since learned that this village in its prime
was inhabited by two peoples, one more laggard culturally than the
other. The La Plata sherds Morris illustrates (ibid., pls. 287, 288)
as pure Chaco black-on-white might, with a few exceptions, have come
directly from the Old Bonitian trash pile under the West Court at
Pueblo Bonito. The few exceptions are fragments of Early Hachure,
alone or combined with Solid.
Since Old Bonitian pottery is well represented at Pueblo del Arroyo
we know that its makers were still active. They did not reside here,
but they lived less than a quarter-mile distant. However, the dominant
black-on-white pottery at Pueblo del Arroyo was our Chaco-San
Juan type, an organic-paint variety that seems identical with McElmo
black-on-white, a prominent Early P. III ware north of the Rio San
Juan. The predominance of this type, plus remains of the unfinished
McElmo Tower, intramural burials, altered Chaco-type kivas, and
other factors identify Pueblo del Arroyo as a Chaco village brought
under control of migrants from the north after relatively brief occupancy
to reside in the village, for their characteristic pottery continued
to accumulate in local rubbish piles and to be intermixed with
fragments of pottery introduced by the immigrants.
Abandonment of Pueblo del Arroyo by its builders, or at least part
of them, was deliberate and orderly. In general, only a small amount
of blown sand had collected on the floors we cleared. Some roofing
timbers had been salvaged for reuse; charred ceiling poles and beam
fragments were noted here and there and the pilaster logs in Kiva C
had been burned, but we found no evidence of a major conflagration.
The east wall of Room 24 was reddened by fire above a 33-inch accumulation
of blown sand and fallen masonry, and the sandy fill in
Room 25 was likewise scorched.
To me the evidence indicates that it was a proto-Mesa Verde group,
stepping out boldly from a Mancos-type P. II status north of the San
Juan River, that migrated to Chaco Canyon, joined the inhabitants of
Pueblo Bonito and occupied partially abandoned Pueblo del Arroyo.
True Mesa Verde pottery made its appearance later, just as Pueblo
del Arroyo was about to be vacated a second time and shortly before
the final exodus began at Pueblo Bonito.
| Pueblo del Arroyo, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico | |