Ruth M. Van Dyke

Memory, meaning, and masonry: The late Bonito Chacoan landscape

The monumental architecture of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico was constructed to convey, reinforce, and challenge ideas about social, ritual, and cosmological order. The concept of social memory can help clarify how architecture was employed in the transformation of Chacoan society at the beginning of the Late Bonito phase (A.D. 1100–1140). During the preceding century, Classic Bonito phase architecture expressed basic tenets of a Chacoan worldview—directionality, balanced dualism, and the canyon as a center place. At the beginning of the Late Bonito phase, confidence in the Chacoan ritual order was shaken by environmental and social developments. Leaders sought to re-formalize Chaco as a center place by instituting a new building scheme. Six new great houses were positioned on the landscape in a patterned, nested series of oppositional relationships. This re-formalization of the Chacoan landscape was legitimated through direct alignments and indirect architectural references to the Classic Bonito past. The new buildings were meant to bolster confidence in leaders and to attract followers by offering a combination of the familiar and the novel.

Chaco reloaded Discursive social memory on the post-Chacoan landscape

Archaeologists have recently begun to address the ways in which past peoples revived, referenced, utilized, and amended their own, more distant pasts for diverse social and political ends. Social memory refers to shared ideas about the past. Monumental architecture entails the discursive construction of memory. Memory can be grounded in direct connections to immediate ancestors, or it can involve tenuous links to remote antiquity. In the terrain between, ideas about the past are both replicated and distorted. The concepts of citation and translation help clarify these processes. In the Southwest USA, architects in diverse temporal and social contexts invoked the memory of the prominent ritual center Chaco Canyon. At the twelfth-century site of Aztec, builders cited Chacoan architecture to legitimate ritual and political organization. In the thirteenth century in the Four Corners region, builders translated Chacoan ideas into McElmo-style towers to stabilize and transform a world in chaos.Archaeologists have recently begun to address the ways in which past peoples revived, referenced, utilized, and amended their own, more distant pasts for diverse social and political ends. Social m...

Space syntax analysis at the Chacoan outlier of Guadalupe

Space syntax analysis is a popular method for investigating social processes by quantifying the relationships among architectural spaces. Identification of spatial patterns is straightforward, but interpretation is less so. In this study, segregated spatial patterns were assumed to indicate the presence of social inequality. A space syntax analysis was conducted for Guadalupe Ruin, an excavated, outlying Chacoan great house with three well-dated construction episodes. The study investigated great house function and social context. Results seemed contradictory until room function and pueblo layout were incorporated into the interpretation. The great house can be understood as an group of separate but equal household units accessible primarily through the roof and plaza. Analyzed as a discrete entity, Guadalupe Ruin appears to have been a domestic building rather than an administrative or ceremonial facility. However, topographic restrictions and other differences with the surrounding community of small sites need to be explored through an expanded study at the community level. Comparison of the Guadalupe study with other great house space syntax analyses supports the recognition that Chacoan great houses varied considerably across time and space.

The Chacoan Great Kiva in Outlier Communities: Investigating Integrative Spaces Across the San Juan Basin

ABSTRACTIn the Pueblo Southwest, great kivas are considered to represent communal, public architecture—spaces where groups of people came together to perform ceremonies, discuss matters of concern, and conduct social or economic transactions. Great kivas are geographically widespread and assume a variety of shapes and sizes. This study examines the distribution and size of Chacoan great kivas constructed in outlier communities in the San Juan Basin during the Late Pueblo H period or Classic Bonito phase (A.D. 1040–;1120). Great kivas are less common in outlier communities near Chaco Canyon, suggesting that people living close to Chaco used integrative facilities located in the canyon. Great kiva area does not appear to be related to population size in Chaco outlier communities, suggesting that the iconographic form of the great kiva was more important than structure size. Great kiva spaces were more than containers for activities. In order to understand their meanings in Chacoan social contexts, it is nec...ABSTRACT In the Pueblo Southwest, great kivas are considered to represent communal, public architecture—spaces where groups of people came together to perform ceremonies, discuss matters of concern, and conduct social or economic transactions. Great kivas are geographically widespread and assume a variety of shapes and sizes. This study examines the distribution and size of Chacoan great kivas constructed in outlier communities in the San Juan Basin during the Late Pueblo H period or Classic Bonito phase (A.D. 1040–;1120). Great kivas are less common in outlier communities near Chaco Canyon, suggesting that people living close to Chaco used integrative facilities located in the canyon. Great kiva area does not appear to be related to population size in Chaco outlier communities, suggesting that the iconographic form of the great kiva was more important than structure size. Great kiva spaces were more than containers for activities. In order to understand their meanings in Chacoan social contexts, it is necessary to examine the ways in which these spaces were experienced and perceived.

The Andrews Great House Community: A Ceramic Chronometric Perspective

ABSTRACTTemporal variability in and among Chacoan Anasazi outlier communities may be successfully assessed using ceramic chronometric techniques. Ceramic group dating, mean ceramic dating, and multidimensional scaling were used to date sites in the Andrews Chacoan community in the Red Mesa Valley of northwest New Mexico. The Andrews community was found to have been occupied between the late A.D. 800s and the mid-A.D. 1000s. The Andrews great house appears to be a relatively early example of a Chacoan structure. The early dates for Andrews suggest that great house architecture in outlying communities need not signify an expansionist Chacoan presence.

Temporal Scale and Qualitative Social Transformation at Chaco Canyon

One of the strengths of the archaeological discipline is our ability to examine social transformations over the course of centuries or millennia. However, we rarely think about the ways in which temporal scale affects our interpretations of these processes. Transformative social changes look different when seen from the perspective of the longue duree , a human lifespan, or a single day. Although they clearly result from human actions, long-term, major social changes cannot be understood simply as additive concatenations of short-term shifts.

Great Houses, Shrines, and High Places: Intervisibility in the Chacoan World

Abstract Phenomenological archaeologists and GIS scholars have turned much attention to visibility—who can see whom, and what can be seen—across ancient landscapes. Visible connections can be relatively easy to identify, but they present challenges to interpretation. Ancient peoples created intervisible connections among sites for purposes that included surveillance, defense, symbolism, shared identity, and communication. In the American Southwest, many high places are intervisible by virtue of the elevated topography and the open skies. The Chaco phenomenon, centered in northwestern New Mexico between A.D. 850 and 1140, presents an ideal situation for visibility research. In this study, we use GIS-generated viewsheds and viewnets to investigate intervisible connections among great houses, shrines, and related features across the Chacoan landscape. We demonstrate that a Chacoan shrine network, likely established during the mid-eleventh century, facilitated intervisibility between outlier communities and Chaco Canyon. It is most likely that the Chacoans created this network to enable meaningful connections for communication and identity. We conclude that the boundaries of the Chaco phenomenon are defined in some sense by intervisibility.

Great House Architectural Variability Across Time and Space

ABSTRACTThe broad similarities that allow for the definition and recognition of great house architecture at sites throughout the greater San Juan Basin strongly suggest the form is not the product of independent invention. How and why were great houses built in outlier communities? What does the appearance of great house architecture suggest for relationships between outliers and Chaco Canyon, and for the social structure of the outlier communities themselves? As part of my dissertation research (Van Dyke 1998, 1999) I conducted a comparative architectural study designed to address these questions. In this paper, I revisit the original study, using 188 cases from an expanded database developed by participants in the Chaco World meeting. Variables compared among the outlier cases include geographic location, distance from Chaco Canyon, size, room count, kiva/room ratio, and presence/absence of great kivas, roads, earthworks, core-and-veneer masonry, and elevated kivas. Not surprisingly, Bonito style archit...ABSTRACT The broad similarities that allow for the definition and recognition of great house architecture at sites throughout the greater San Juan Basin strongly suggest the form is not the product of independent invention. How and why were great houses built in outlier communities? What does the appearance of great house architecture suggest for relationships between outliers and Chaco Canyon, and for the social structure of the outlier communities themselves? As part of my dissertation research (Van Dyke 1998, 1999) I conducted a comparative architectural study designed to address these questions. In this paper, I revisit the original study, using 188 cases from an expanded database developed by participants in the Chaco World meeting. Variables compared among the outlier cases include geographic location, distance from Chaco Canyon, size, room count, kiva/room ratio, and presence/absence of great kivas, roads, earthworks, core-and-veneer masonry, and elevated kivas. Not surprisingly, Bonito style architectural attributes are found to co-occur in the Chacoan core area during the Late Pueblo II period. Landscape modifications and multiple great kivas represent the Chacoan package later in time and further afield. Most interestingly, core-and-veneer masonry and kiva/room ratios are found to exhibit significant, patterned distributions in both time and space. An absence of core-and-veneer masonry, together with a high kiva/room ratio, emerge here as a useful way to set boundaries on the geographic scope of Chacoan influence.

Durable Stones, Mutable Pasts: Bundled Memory in the Alsatian Community of Castroville, Texas

This case study from historical archaeology builds upon two well-defined bodies of theory: collective memory, and the ontological turn. Memory studies mesh well with the ontological turn, as archaeologists begin to consider materials, people, and ideas as webs, networks, entanglements, or bundles. Memory and materiality studies need not be merely descriptive but can provide insights into the roles played by materials in social and political struggles. Although durable stones are bundled with original builders’ views and ideas, stone buildings and features paradoxically are mutable and ripe for re-interpretation and contestation by future generations. In Castroville, Texas, a local heritage society is renovating a historic house to create a focal point for tourism. Alsatian immigrants constructed the house in the mid-nineteenth century, but subsequent generations significantly remodeled the house. The archaeological discovery of a blocked-in nineteenth-century fireplace behind a twentieth-century bathroom wall brings two versions of the past into stark juxtaposition. The stones become participants in the struggle between two descendant families over whose past will be celebrated and remembered and whose will be obliterated and forgotten.

From enchantment to agencement: Archaeological engagements with pilgrimage

This commentary springs from insights gleaned from two sources. The first involves my archaeological research into the ancient pilgrimage center of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico; the second includes lessons learned by walking the medieval Camino de Santiago. The four papers in this volume describe enchanting destinations reached by archaeological pilgrims engaged in ambulatory knowing. I frame my discussion of these papers using DeLeuzean concepts of assemblage/agencement, emphasizing the emergent properties of pilgrimage, and underscoring how archaeologists can study pilgrims in motion.This commentary springs from insights gleaned from two sources. The first involves my archaeological research into the ancient pilgrimage center of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico; the second includes les...