Chaco Phenomenon

History

Brody, J. J.

Americas

Maxwell Museum of Anthropology

Astronomy and Ceremony in the Prehistoric Southwest (Papers of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, No 2)

Carlson, John B.

Chaco Canyon was a central place in the Ancient Southwest. Here, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, architects and masons constructed a dozen “great houses” made of formal masonry construction with as many as 650 rooms massed up to five stories high. 
Research in recent years suggests that Chaco appears to have represented a form of regional organization that existed across much of the Colorado Plateau between A.D. 900 and 1200. This collection provides detailed analysis of the nature of Anasazi social organization. 
This updated version includes a chapter “Chaco Update 2000” which addresses research on Chaco settlements since the original publication of this volume in 1992.

Anasazi Regional Organization and the Chaco System

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

For millennia humans around the world have observed and interacted with the sky, watching and marking the seasonal movements of the sun, moon, planets, and stars. Several historic and contemporary Native American groups in the Southwest employ astronomical observations to guide their ceremonial and subsistence calendars, and over the past several decades it has become clear that such practices extend well into the past. This volume contains selected papers from the 2011 Conference on Archaeoastronomy in the American Southwest, held at the University of New Mexico. These papers have as their focus cultural astronomy--the archeological investigation of past astronomical practices as well as the study of oral history and tradition of recent and continuing astronomical practices--within the region. The volume contains chapters that discuss the history of cultural astronomy in the Southwest; prehistoric cultural astronomical systems expressed by relationships between architecture, landscape features, artifacts, and imagery in the northern Southwest; and methodology for examining possible contemporary and prehistoric astronomical features.

Astronomy and Ceremony in the Prehistoric Southwest: Revisited: Collaborations in Cultural Astronomy (Maxwell Museum of Anthropology Anthropological Papers (9))

Archaeology

In this volume, Nick Chapin presents his investigation of the sites investigated by Cynthia Irwin-Williams between 1966 and 1973 and again in the early 1980s as part of the Anasazi Origins Project in northwestern New Mexico. Her primary goal was to determine the cultural and temporal history of use in that region by Archaic hunter-gatherers, with a focus on subsistence, technology, and demography. She defined this as the Oshara Tradition, but regrettably, she never completed a final report on her research. Nick devoted several years of research into the collections and archival records she amassed. This monograph presents an up-to-date synthesis of that research, framed in contemporary theoretical and methodological terms. He describes the present and past environmental setting of the project area, reviews the investigated sites, provides a statistically-based typology of the various dart point styles recovered from these and other Archaic sites, and offers a detailed treatment of one of the most important sites, Collier Dune. He concludes by situating the Oshara Tradition in a region-wide context, underscoring its importance and continuing relevance for contemporary Archaic period research in the Southwest.

Oshara Revisited: The Archaic Period in Northern New Mexico (Maxwell Museum of Anthropology Anthropological Papers (10))

Chapin, Nicholas

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Books by Maxwell Museum of Anthropology