Ritual Movement on Chacoan Roads: Insights from Recent Fieldwork, Ethnography, and Cross-Cultural Comparison

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper highlights some results of my four year fieldwork project to document monumental roads throughout the Greater Chaco Landscape and on Navajo Nation in particular. I place particular emphasis on the question of why and how people moved along Chacoan roads as a dimension of ritual practice. Using a combination of LiDAR, drone-based SfM photogrammetry, and traditional archaeological survey, my team and I discovered two previously unknown roads, three new herraduras (road shrines), and novel insights about the earlier dating of the South Road running from Chaco Canyon to Hosta Butte. One of the more intriguing findings was a set of parallel roads and associated small roadside architectural features near the Gasco Herradura that suggest some of the formalized prescriptions for ritual movement along Chacoan roads. I present an illustration of the movement patterns suggested by the Gasco Roads and interpret them within a larger discussion of processions, races, and ritual movement in the Chaco World.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37422.0