A Great House in the Petrified Forest: Iconography of a Possible Chacoan Outlier

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Research in Petrified Forest National Park" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Chaco Phenomenon remains a contentious and ever evolving paradigm of Southwest Archaeology. Key to understanding the nature of Chaco is the extent and purpose of the many outlying great house communities scattered across the northern Southwest. One of the farthest flung of these possible outliers is the Mac-Stod great house of the Petrified Forest National Park expansion lands. This structure is diminutive in scale compared with canyon great houses, but retains multiple features associated with Chacoan architecture. Its relationship to the greater Chaco world is unclear, but such structures did not exist in isolation and must be regarded as part of a larger cultural landscape. One often-overlooked aspect of Chacoan landscapes is the presence of rock art. Surveys around Mac-Stod found large concentrations of petroglyphs depicting a range of motifs, placed in a variety of settings on the landscape. By comparing the depicted elements to panels found throughout the rest of the park and the greater Southwest, this study seeks to understand regional influences represented in the iconography. With this study we gauge whether the Mac Stod site was ingrained within locally rooted systems of interaction or may represent an extension of Chacoan influence into the Petrified Forest.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Archaeological Research in Petrified Forest National Park

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24526