Directional Color Schemes at Chaco Canyon: Quaternary Patterns in Ornaments and Minerals from Kiva Offerings

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Coloring the World: People and Colors in Southwestern Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The placement of colorful ornaments, marine shell, and minerals in discrete ritual deposits is a long-lived practice in the Ancestral Pueblo region. This tradition is exemplified in Chaco Canyon, where numerous ceremonial deposits comprised of such objects have been documented in kivas and other rooms within great houses. These materials display patterned variation in their distribution and co-occurrence in structured contexts, suggesting that they held symbolic significance. In this paper, I explore the hypothesis that the past meanings of ornaments and minerals in Chacoan kiva offerings may be linked to cosmological associations between specific colors and world quarters/directional quadrants. Color-directional schemes are common in traditional societies worldwide, and quaternary systems (those including four directions, each with a different color association) are particularly widespread among ethnographically documented North American groups, including the Pueblos. I also consider evidence for color circuit directionality (clockwise/counterclockwise) and changes in offering contents over time.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Coloring the World: People and Colors in Southwestern Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25080