Two Houses, Both Alike in Dignity: Visibility, Material Culture, and Contrasting Histories at Two Chaco Halo Communities

Summary

The communities that surround the neighboring great houses of Kin Bineola and Kin Klizhin contain broadly similar kinds of sites—including the great houses themselves, small habitation sites, and shrines—and are both located in the "Chaco Halo," the region immediately surrounding Chaco Canyon itself. Nevertheless, the two communities differ in their composition, spatial structure, and histories. Intervisibility between habitations and public or religious architecture provides one possible measure of the roles played by such specialized sites within the daily life of the community. In the Kin Bineola community, for example, the shrines are very highly visible from small habitation sites, while the great house itself is not. The comparison of visibility networks with material culture networks generated using the Chaco Social Networks Project data allows greater insight into the relationship between habitation sites and public or religious spaces, as well as providing a means to test the degree to which visibility between habitation sites was related to shared social connections. This project offers a "meso-scale" approach in focusing on comparison within and between two communities, but the material culture considered within the network analysis equally helps to place the communities within the context of the larger Chacoan World.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Chaco and Hopewell: Rethinking "Interaction Spheres" Through Multiscalar Network Analyses

Keywords

Spatial Coverage