Persistent Places, Affordances, and Temporalities on Chacoan Time Bridge Roads

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Beginning in the 1980s, researchers noticed that some monumental avenues in the Chaco World (ca. AD 800-1200) of the Four Corners region of the U.S. Southwest were “roads through time” linking non-contemporaneous sites. These so-called “time bridges” are often interpreted as monuments built by later generations to connect with the traces of ancestral dwellings, perhaps in service of political claims of continuity. In this paper, I draw on recent fieldwork to reexamine two Chacoan time bridge roads—the South Road and Asdzáán Tááh Ííyá (Taylor Springs) Road—and outline evidence suggesting that formalized roadways existed at these locations from their earliest periods of use. I explore the utility of conceptualizing Chacoan roads used across multiple centuries as persistent, affective places rather than as a form of memory work; in other words, places with qualities that attracted people and altered history across centuries. I consider some of the affordances of land and water—including springs, rain-making buttes, naturally occurring roadways, and fossils—that appear to have drawn Ancestral Four Corners people to construct roadways to such locales in the first place and trace elements of the changing relationships between roads, places, and people over the course of Chacoan history.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38851.0