University of Virginia Library

THE PLACE OF TSEH SO IN THE CHACO CULTURE PATTERN

By Florence M. Hawley

No longer ago than the early 1920's archaeologists were debating
the age of prehistoric Southwestern ruins and were laughing over
each other's exaggerated estimates. Now, since many of the ruins
have been definitely dated by the Douglass system of tree ring chronology,
archaeologists debate the reasons for spurts and lags that produced
very uneven levels of culture over the area during a single
century. Pueblo I overlapped Basket Maker III and Pueblo II in actual
dates; and Pueblo II, where found, is contemporaneous with much of
Pueblo III. A vivid example of this appeared in dating the Chaco
ruins.

Douglass has dated Judd's Basket Maker III pit houses in the
Chaco at 777 A. D.[4] Pueblo I here has not yet been dated, but Pueblo II
(as represented by the upper structure of Mound Bc50, Tseh So)
dates 922 plus between ten to twenty years, the rings for which had
decayed from the exterior of the dated specimen. This places the cutting
date of the beam about 940 or 950 A. D., a later date than had been
expected for Pueblo II in the Chaco. Chetro Ketl and Pueblo Bonito
dates extend back into the 900's.[5] Dates in the late 800's came from
beams built into walls in Una Vida and in Kin Biniola, but these
appear to have been logs once used in earlier structures, salvaged, and
re-used in later walls. We cannot avoid the evidence, however, of
small Pueblo II pueblos having been built in the Chaco at the same
time that some of the larger pueblos were under construction. The
wall types used at this period in the two classes of structures were
successive in typology and in some cases were found superposed one
upon the other. Evidently the two wall types were more or less contemporaneous
over a part of their period of use, although one probably
preceded the other in origin. A similar statement may be made for
the two classes of structures, the large pueblos and the small: they
were more or less contemporaneous over a part of their period of construction
and of use, although the latter preceded the former in origin.

Sedentary occupation of the Chaco goes back to the people of
Basket Maker III who brought their culture into the Chaco sometime
before 777 A. D. They lived in pit houses until they began to think of
using slabs, such as those which lined their pit walls, as the bases of
walls constructed above ground. The upper part of these walls was
crude masonry, if one may distinguish by that name a wall largely of

adobe but interspersed with small stones. The women made pottery
similar to that of their neighbors to the south in the Pueblo I villages
of the Red Mesa country. We may give this Pueblo I culture the
approximate date of 850 A. D., plus or minus, in the Chaco.

In the early 900's the Chaco people were building small pueblos
with rooms outlined by walls of small stones set in a great deal of
adobe. Their most common painted pottery, Escavada Black on White,
became more sophisticated in design but cruder in workmanship than
the Red Mesa Black on White prevalent in the previous period, although
the latter continued to be made. Some of the pueblos built
during the 900's were not small, however; daring builders were expanding
them beyond anything previously attempted. A new and
more stable type of wall than any previously devised was used. This
was built up of large slabs of sandstone set in abundant mortar. The
idea of a core in a wall had not yet occurred to the builders. The fact
that slab walls were found superposed over walls of the small stones
set into clay in the central section of Una Vida indicates that the
cruder walls of small stones probably had been devised before slab
walls were used, but the dates on the small stone walls at Mound
Bc50 and the dates on the slab masonry of other sections of Una Vida
prove that the former were still being made for some time after the
latter had been developed. This is what one might expect, for in the
Chaco the study of trash mounds has demonstrated the hold-over of
pottery types of a former period into the succeeding period; one does
not expect clean-cut breaks between types of any element of material
culture. Moreover, the dates obtained on beams taken from Pueblo III
wall types which succeeded the slab masonry leave no doubt but that
each of these types, although prevalent at one period, lasted over into
later periods when other types were prevalent.

The small house pueblos of the Chaco were contemporaneous with
the first of the large house pueblos being constructed during the tenth
century. We may imagine the debates of builders on whether the new
expansion was feasible and advisable, and the recommendations of
masons that the larger villages be built with heavier walls. Building
was upward as well as outward; towers rose and several stories were
laid above each other. Pueblo II merged into Pueblo III in the
eleventh century in the Chaco, and types of masonry were developed
in which the inner core was covered by a surface marked into bands.
The bands were of large blocks separated by bands of small spalls, the
bands being narrow at first, then wide and carefully laid, then wide and
carelessly laid in somewhat uneven lines. Finally the large blocks
were laid up without trace of banding, and in other walls small blocks
the size of the spalls used previously were laid up, likewise without
trace of banding.

The pueblos begun on a large scale during Pueblo II were further
built up, built over, and re-built. The neat shapes of the Chaco ruins
as we see them today were not a part of the original plan of many of
these pueblos; the builders changed old structures and added new ones
until the completed unit fitted their taste in architecture. But not all
of the pueblos occupied during this period were large. Just as there
were small villages characteristic of Pueblo II but some large ones
being built at that time, so there were large ones characteristic of
Pueblo III but some small ones being built contemporaneously. Talus
Unit 1, built against the cliff just to the west of Chetro Ketl, is an
example of a Pueblo III structure as small as any of those of Pueblo II.
Its masonry types and its dates leave no doubt as to its period.

While their husbands were tending the farms and were transporting
and laying the sandstone slabs into walls, the women were
working at their pottery and utilizing the resources of the canyon
quite as effectively as did the men. Gallup Black on White succeeded
Escavada Black on White, and was in its turn succeeded by Chaco
Black on White,—all three types being used to some extent contemporaneously,
but each enjoying its period of greatest popularity.

Then, in the early twelfth century, just when their culture was at
its height and the culture of other peoples throughout the Southwest
was flourishing, the population of the Chaco deserted their homes and
moved out of the canyon. Why they left is a matter of theory. Perhaps
they were oppressed by nomadic raiders; perhaps they were
plagued with superstitions and ill omens; perhaps the constant improvident
cutting of trees for building and for fire so denuded an area
never heavily forested that erosion set in and the water supply sank
beneath the surface until the farms could no longer support the farmers.
They did not leave because of drouth; tree ring studies indicate
that the large Chaco pueblos flourished through periods of drouth in
the early tenth and in the middle eleventh centuries, but that no drouth
occurred at the time of their exodus. Nowhere else in the Southwest
is there a record of any large movement of peoples at this time; the
movement and the reasons behind the movement were local.

Thus disappeared the bearers of one of the most highly developed
cultures in the Southwest. The Chaco culture was not limited to the
Chaco area; its influence is traceable in the Little Colorado, in the
Zuñi district, up into the Four Corners, and over into the Rio Grande.
Cross finds of pottery indicate that the Chaco people had carried on
trade with people of these outside areas even from early times. Their
trade had extended over into the Kayenta and the Flagstaff districts;
up into the Mesa Verde; south to the Upper Gila; and even farther
south into southern Arizona or into Mexico for the shells they cut

into jewelry and for the macaws[6] they kept for ceremonial purposes,
if we may judge from the function of macaws in the pueblos where
they are kept today. And the pottery types of the large area which
shows Chaco influence are so closely related to those of the Chaco that
it would appear Chaco people had gone out from the center and had
spread the pattern of their culture through small settlements or
through amalgamation with other peoples. They spread not only at
the time of the final desertion of the canyon but from Basket Maker III
onward. It is impossible at present to delimit accurately the area of
Chaco culture proper, and it can not be said exactly where the people
of the Chaco settled when they left the canyon about 1120 A. D., but by
the occasional presence of banded walls and by the close affinities of local
wares with the pottery of the Chaco, their influence can be traced
from the Lowry Ruin in southwestern Colorado down through the
Little Colorado and into the Upper Gila, east to the Pecos and Chupadero
country and west to the Petrified forest.

It might be said that north of the Hohokam and the Mogollon
areas of the Southwest, the Pueblo culture divided itself into two basic
patterns, that of the Tusayan and that of the Chaco. The former is
basically that marked off by pottery with carbon paint and polish over
the paint. It was formerly designated as the "Western division," by
Hawley and by Roberts. The latter is the "Eastern division," the area
of pottery decorated in black iron paint, the surface of the vessel having
been polished before the paint was applied. Design types and other
culture characteristics likewise broadly fit into these areas, because
influence from the center of highest culture virility carried out toward
the peripheries.

The former designations of area may be criticized for two reasons:
because the outlines are difficult to delineate, and because the idea of
the culture areas originally carried geographic connotations which no
longer hold in full. For instance, the Chaco was once listed in the San
Juan area, which is a correct statement geographically, but its culture
affinities are with the Little Colorado districts. Yet, if we list it as
of the Little Colorado culture, we are criticized because it is not in the
Little Colorado drainage. Perhaps the difficulty might be alleviated
somewhat by the use of culture centers rather than of culture areas,
but the idea of a center is likely to be tied up with the notion that the
culture center is a point actually located in the center of the area
affected. As a matter of fact, the culture center is not a point and
need not be near the center of anything; it is merely the district of
greatest culture influence at a given time and may change from period
to period within a large range of influence. The concept and term of

culture pattern, already in use in ethnology, avoids both the specific
use of "area" and the centralization of the term "center."

The center of most virile culture and consequently of the most
influence within the Chaco pattern appears to have been either the
Chaco Canyon or the Red Mesa district in Basketmaker III, and Chaco
Canyon in Pueblo I, II, and III. In late Pueblo III and in early Pueblo
IV the center moved to the Zuñi-Silver Creek district where pottery
glaze was developed. Many of the villages of this area were deserted
or died out during the great drouth of 1276 to 1299, and the culture
center moved eastward to the Middle Rio Grande a little later in early
Pueblo IV. There it remained, and in Zuñi and the Rio Grande pueblos
of today we find the modern inheritors of a culture which rose to its
peak in the Chaco between 750 and 1150 A. D.