Pueblo Bonito (Site Name Keyword)
1-9 (9 Records)
This report describes development of the Chaco Project, a long-term program of archaeological and historical research centered on the cultural resources in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. The text summarizes the goals and objectives of the program and how it came to be managed. The early years of the project are described, including information from interviews with some of the individuals who shaped the project. Also described are problems which later emerged as the program grew and changed. This...
Ancestors in Cosmologies (2010)
This article discusses the role of ancestors in New World cosmologies. Specifically, it gives examples of how ancestors mediate cosmologies through sensory experiences, things, and places. In Eastern North America, ancestors were engaged in posts, bundles, stars, mounds, and temples. In the American Southwest, “conceptual packages” of wind, water, and breath represented the cosmological force shared by humans, ancestors, and places. Mesoamericans transformed the dead into ancestors by...
A Biocultural Approach to Human Burials From Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (1986)
The study of human remains offers a unique perspective on prehistory. Environmental reconstructions can approximate the constraints of life in a particular area, but the examination of the human remains can measure the success of a population's adaptation to those conditions. Mortuary practices are a part of the cultural system that has seldom been studied by Southwestern archeologists. Too often biological and cultural aspects are treated as independent topics. The biological analyses do not...
Burial Performance and Interaction with the Dead in Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon (2010)
This paper examines the mortuary rituals that formed the elaborate burial deposits in the central portion of Pueblo Bonito, in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. I argue that the performance of these mortuary rituals in Room 33 created a powerful tableaux that was actively remembered within the pueblo. Evaluation of the different elements of the performance suggests that the deposit was a collective burial that may be viewed as a narrative.
Casas Grandes and the Chaco Canyon Cultures (1975)
As early as 1936, Edgar L. Hewett suggested that there might have been some sort of temporal relationship between Casas Grandes, in Chihuahua, Mexico, and such Chaco settlements as Pueblo Bonito, del Arroyo, and Chetro Ketl, in New Mexico. He recognized the obvious differences in terms of ceramics, architectonics, and historical background which marked these two entities, but still felt that there was some common time denominator. Most of his contemporaries, however, believed that the city of...
Cosmology in the New World
This project consists of articles written by members of Santa Fe Institute’s cosmology research group. Overall, the goal of this group is to understand the larger relationships between cosmology and society through a theoretically open-ended, comparative examination of the ancient American Southwest, Southeast, and Mesoamerica.
Great Pueblo Architecture of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (1984)
After a century of excavation and survey in Chaco Canyon, a new study of Chacoan architecture should be redundant. Oddly enough, this is not true. The most extensive field studies of Chacoan building were the earliest (Holsinger 1901; Jackson 1878), undertaken before the development of tree-ring dating; while the most important dendrochronological studies (Bannister 1965; Robinson et al. 1974) were accomplished without the benefit of concurrent fieldwork. Chaco's archaeological literature,...
Shaping Space: Built Space, Landscape, and Cosmology in Four Regions (2010)
In this article, the authors seek to understand cosmological expressions in architecture and the built landscape in Mesoamerica, Northern Mexico, the US Southwest, and the US Southeast.
Stone Circles of Chaco Canyon, Northwestern New Mexico (1978)
In the summer of l972, the Chaco Center, a research facility of the National Park Service and the University of New Mexico, implemented a proposal to intensively survey the 32 square miles composing Chaco Canyon National Monument. During the course of this survey a number of unusual sites for which there had been little previous documentation were recorded. A limited number of these sites were later classified as shrines belonging to a visual-communications network, skillfully placed to link...