Casas Grandes (Site Name Keyword)

1-25 (33 Records)

An Analysis of a Prehistoric Skeletal Population, Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico (1968)
DOCUMENT Full-Text Robert A. Benfer.

The Casas Grandes skeletal sample contains approximately 654 individuals. This excavated number represents one quarter or less of the probable total number of remains at the site. The collection arrived at The Physical Anthropology Laboratory of The University of Texas at Austin in 332 cardboard boxes. Many of the boxes were partitioned so that more than one individual was alloted to a box.


Athapaskans They Weren't: the Suma Rebels Executed at Casas Grandes in 1685 (1982)
DOCUMENT Full-Text Thomas H. Naylor.

Two decades ago Jack D. Forbes proposed that the Suma, Janos, Jocome and Mansos Indians were the southernmost true Athapaskans in North America. Inhabiting northern Chihuahua, far western Texas, and the southwestern fringes of New Mexico, these groups were described by Spaniards in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as primitive, loosely related bands of nomadic hunters and gatherers. Beginning in the later seventeenth century and continuing through most of the eighteenth, these same groups...


Cambios Estilisticos en la Reproduccion de Piezas Ceramicas de Mata Ortiz, Norte de Chihuahua, Mexico: un Estudio Etnoarqueologico (1989)
DOCUMENT Full-Text Andrea K. L. Freeman.

Mata Ortiz es un pequeño poblado en el norte de México, localizado en el estado de Chihuahua (véase la Fig. 1), a 1,600 metros sobre el nivel del mar en las faldas de la montaña conocida localmente como Cabeza del Indio. La aldea está limitada hacia el occidente por la Sierra la Breña, que se encuentra aproximandamente a 10 Kilómetros; al oriente del asentamiento se localiza el río Palanganas, un cauce de temporal que es la principal fuente de abastecimiento, de agua para los habitantes de Mata...


Casas Grandes and the Chaco Canyon Cultures (1975)
DOCUMENT Full-Text Charles C. Di Peso.

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...


Casas Grandes: A Fallen Trading Center of the Gran Chichimeca
PROJECT Charles C. Di Peso.

CASAS GRANDES, a three-volume set, is the fascinating narrative of the monumental excavation and research which have been accomplished by The Amerind Foundation over the past fifteen years. Dr. Charles Di Peso and his colleagues have proposed new and unique theories concerning the people of the Gran Chichimeca and the development, dissemination and decline of their cultures. This massive publication, documenting one of the most significant of archaeological investigations, will be a landmark of...


Casas Grandes: A Fallen Trading Center of the Gran Chichimeca, Volume 1, Preceramic - Viejo Periods (1974)
DOCUMENT Full-Text Charles C. Di Peso.

"The archaeological zone of Casas Grandes lies within this unknown expanse. Its cultural core is that prehistoric metropolis of which Bandelier counseled: I also venture to suggest that the earliest possible date the ruins of Casas Grandes be thoroughly investigated, since excavations, if systematically conducted, cannot fail to produce valuable results." -Bandelier, A.D. 1892 Comments such as these kindled the flame of curiosity and directed the Amerind Foundation, Inc., to turn its...


Casas Grandes: A Fallen Trading Center of the Gran Chichimeca, Volume 2, Medio Period (1974)
DOCUMENT Full-Text Charles C. Di Peso.

It is believed that sometime around the year A.D. 1060 a group of sophisticated Mesoamerican merchants came into the valley of the Casas Grandes and inspired the indigenous Chichimecans to build the city of Paquime over portions of an older Viejo Period village. These foreign donors may have been drawn here by specific information supplied to them by their family-affiliated spying vanguards, who perhaps lived with the frontiersmen during the last phase of the Viejo Period. These organizers who...


Casas Grandes: A Fallen Trading Center of the Gran Chichimeca, Volume 3, Tardio and Espanoles Periods (1974)
DOCUMENT Full-Text Charles C. Di Peso.

The Chichimecan Revolt of the 1340s tore asunder the weakened body politic of the Paquime province and in so doing radically changed the settlement pattern in the old kingdom. In the Robles Phase, the city, along with some satellite villages in the Casas Grandes Valley, was abandoned and the political power, as well as the economic wealth, shifted to such northerly towns as were located in the Zuni, Hopi, Mogollon, and the eastern Anasazi-Chichimecan homelands. Some of the Paquime artisans may...


Casas Grandes: A Fallen Trading Center of the Gran Chichimeca, Volume 4, Architecture and Dating Methods (1974)
DOCUMENT Full-Text Charles C. Di Peso. John B. Rinaldo. Gloria J. Fenner.

In the case of The Joint Casas Grandes Expedition, correlating the past in terms of the Christian calendar required considerable assistance from members of many other scientific disciplines who were not directly involved with the actual excavations. This scholastic absenteeism created a few communication problems, but in every case the effort of informative dialogue proved very worthwhile, inasmuch as it led to the re-creation of a Paquimian historical continuum, which was one of the primary...


Casas Grandes: A Fallen Trading Center of the Gran Chichimeca, Volume 5, Architecture (1974)
DOCUMENT Full-Text Charles C. Di Peso. John B. Rinaldo. Gloria J. Fenner.

The serpentine mound after which Unit 11 was named was located in Blocks 22 and 23, extending slightly into Block 24, of the Sanchez Bjanco map. To the E, in Blocks 32, 33, 42, and 43, was the house-cluster. Unit 11 was entirely surrounded by an open expanse, with Unit 10 to the NE and Reservoir 2 further to the E. The house-cluster measured 68.30 m. in length on the N-S axis and 56.80 m. in width on the E-W axis, an area of 3,200 sq. m. Included within the house-cluster were 25 single story...


Casas Grandes: A Fallen Trading Center of the Gran Chichimeca, Volume 6, Ceramics and Shell (1974)
DOCUMENT Full-Text Charles C. Di Peso. John B. Rinaldo. Gloria J. Fenner.

The value of ceramic analysis for chronologically organizing a series of unknown cultures in a particular region and of relating some of them synchronically cannot be denied. Unfortunately, this useful tool is sometimes given undue emphasis and is regarded in some instances as representative of the total culture. Such unbridled use is most dangerous because of the complex nature of pottery - its plasticity when formed, its chameleon-like character on firing, its relative abundance in use, and...


Casas Grandes: A Fallen Trading Center of the Gran Chichimeca, Volume 8, Stone and Metal Bone, Perishables, Commerce, Subsistence, and Burials (1974)
DOCUMENT Full-Text Charles C. Di Peso. John B. Rinaldo. Gloria J. Fenner.

During the course of excavations a total of 885 bone artifacts was recovered. Four (0.5%) of these were in Viejo Period association, 877 (99.1%) belonged to the Medio Period, and four (0.5%) to the San Antonio Phase of the Espafioles Period. All of the Viejo Period specimens were utilitarian implements and included a plaiting tool, a coarse coil basketry awl, and two other awls with broken tips. These were simply made, undecorated items- three were splinter tools and one was a split grooved...


Colonial Exchange Systems and the Decline of Paquime (1980)
DOCUMENT Full-Text R. A. Pailes. Daniel T. Reff.

We suggest that the failure of Casas Grandes was inevitable. In the absence of advanced transportation technology, a monopolistic dendritic exchange system failed to develop. In its place, the administered market system was inadequate to control the local economies beyond the Casas Grandes province. Stimulated by Casas Grandes, the local economies eventually began to compete with the merchant-priests. While such competition may not have been large scale, its cumulative effect would have been...


Cosmology in the New World
PROJECT Santa Fe Institute.

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.


The Dentition of the Prehistoric Inhabitants of Casas Grandes (1971)
DOCUMENT Full-Text G. Richard Scott. Edward F. Harris.

The skeletal series recovered from Casas Grandes, Chihuahua is described and compared to samples of living Papago, Hopi, and Navajo Indians for several non-metrical dental traits (incisor shoveling, canine tuberculum dentale, maxillary molar hypocone, Carabelli's Trait, mandibular molar cusp pattern protostylid, cusp 6, cusp 7, and mandibular premolar lingual cusp number). To quantify the biological relationships between these groups Smith and Berry's mean measure of divergence (Berry, 1968) is...


The End of Casas Grandes: The Legacy of Charles C. Di Peso Fifty Years after the Joint Casas Grandes Project (2009)
DOCUMENT Full-Text David A. Phillips, Jr..

Charles Di Peso believed that Paquime, the primary center for the Casas Grandes culture, succumbed to an attack in A.D. 1340. He further argued that the culture survived in the Sierra Madre, where it was encountered by early Spanish military adventurers. Other reviews of the data have come to different conclusions. In this essay, I examine and discuss the available chronometric data.


From Archaeology to Ideology in Northwest Mexico: Cerro de Moctezuma in the Casas Grandes Ritual Landscape (2011)
DOCUMENT Full-Text Todd Pitezel.

The research presented here explores why a few people left their valley-dwelling neighbors to build and live at El Pueblito on Cerro de Moctezuma, the only hilltop settlement constructed during the Casas Grandes Media period (A.D. 1200-1450) in what is today northwest Chihuahua, Mexico. These people also constructed the only currently recognized trails to a settlement, a massive rock agricultural system and subterranean oven, and an unparalleled crowning hill summit precinct. Comparative...


Handbook of North American Indians, Volume IX: The Southwest, Part 1: Regional Surveys A.D> 500-1540 (1983)
DOCUMENT Full-Text Charles C. Di Peso.

During the course of the last decade, research in northern Mexico has produced a mass of explicit data that necessitates a redefinition of the southern boundary of the "North American Southwest" (Arizona and New Mexico) to include all of northern Mexico as far south as the Tropic of Cancer (23°27' north latitude). This additional expanse was once a very substantial portion of the Gran Chichimeca (Di Peso 1963, 1968a, 1968b), and was looked upon by the sophisticated Mosoamericans as the habitat...


A Historic House Excavation Near Janos, Northwest Chihuahua, Mexico (1957)
DOCUMENT Full-Text Rex E. Gerald.

The historic site, Chihuahua D:4:2, was excavated as part of a long-range plan to study the aboriginal and alien cultures of northwestern Chihuahua. This plan includes an archaeological survey of the area, test excavations in representative sites in order to define cultural assemblages or phases, and finally, through the use of the information thus derived, a study of the cultural dynamics of the area. It is believed that the study of the aboriginal cultures of this region should begin at a...


La Lucha del Barro: Two Potterymaking Families of Mata Ortiz (1991)
DOCUMENT Full-Text Michael Allan Williams.

In the past 20 years, pottery making has become a way of life for some inhabitants of Mata Ortiz, Chihuahua, Mexico. What began as a revival of the prehistoric Casas Grandes ceramic tradition has become an artistic school in its own right. The contemporary pottery is a creative restatement of the ancient ware. Two families of potters are documented ethnographically, providing data on what the craftspeople call "la lucha del barro," or the struggle of the clay. Research literature on potters in...


A New Perspective on the Casas Grandes Tree-Ring Dates Paper Presented at the Fourth Mogollon Conference, University of Arizona, Tucson, 16-17 October (1986)
DOCUMENT Full-Text John C. Ravesloot. Jeffrey S. Dean. Michael S. Foster.

The Casas Grandes, Chihuahua phase sequence, specifically the dating of the Medio Period (A.D. 1060 to 1340) has been controversial since first proposed by the late Charles DiPeso over a decade ago. DiPeso and others indicated that the revised chronology would "... at first reading, demand a serious rethinking of accepted time relationships as they have hitherto been ascribed to by archaeologists." Previous workers in Chihuahua had interpreted Casas Grandes and its outliers as representing a...


Of Gila Spiral and Plumed Serpents: the Temporal Sensitivity of Casas Grandes Ceramics (2020)
DOCUMENT Full-Text Gordon F. M. Rakita. Gerry R. Raymond.

Arrangements of temporally sequential pottery types have been a backbone of southwestern archaeology for over seventy-five years. Indeed, the region has been the setting for much of the debate over ceramic systematics within Americanist archaeology (Lyman et al. 1997). Since the first Pecos conference in 1927, much of the early archaeological work in the region was explicitly geared towards establishing such ceramic series. In later years, these sequences provided the chronological framework...


Official Report to the Amerind Foundation, Covering a Preliminary Study of the Casas Grandes and the Valley of the Caves in the Sierra Madres, Chihuahua, Mexico, May 13-18, 1957 (1957)
DOCUMENT Full-Text George W. Chambers.

Official report made by George W. Chambers to the Amerind Foundation covering trips made to the Casas Grandes and the Valley of the Caves in the Sierra Madres, Chihuahua, Mexico. This trip was made after an invitation of Dr. Charles C. Di Peso, Director of the Amerind Foundation, who made the expedition for the primary purpose of continuing arrangements preparatory to the proposed excavation and restoration of Casas Grandes in cooperation with the Mexican Government. The secondary purpose was to...


The People of Casas Grandes: Cranial and Dental Morphology Through Time (1971)
DOCUMENT Full-Text Barbara H. Butler.

Casas Grandes offers an unusual opportunity for a physical anthropologist. There is good archaeological control of spatial and temporal distributions of the skeletal populations, and therefore the results of examinations of these skeletons can contribute important data to general studies of micro-evolutionary changes in Homo sapiens. Studies of the genetics of morphological variation and analysis of discontinous traits of skeletons aid in understanding micro-evolutionary change. This project...


Rakita_The Mortuary Practices of the Casas Grandes Region: A Preliminary Database. (2011)
DOCUMENT Full-Text Gordon Rakita.

I present a preliminary regional database of mortuary practices for the Casas Grandes region of Chihuahua, Mexico. The reported prehistoric mortuary remains from the region are overwhelmingly drawn from the Paquime and Convento sites reported by Charles C. DiPeso and colleagues. Often overlooked, however, are several smaller samples that are reported with less detail. Given the complex nature of mortuary ritual from the region (especially in the late ceramic periods), the structure of the...