Houses Great and Small: Reevaluating the 'House' in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

In recent years, a growing number of archaeologists have explored the potential of expanding Lévi-Strauss’s concept of house societies to better understand specific archaeological contexts. Looking specifically at the classificatory distinction between “great houses” and “small houses” within Chaco Canyon (A.D. 850–1180), I suggest this theoretical model might yield new insights with regard to four symbolic dimensions of house construction: the use of wood, directional offerings, resurfacing practices, and the bones of ancestors. Using Puebloan ethnographic literature and cross-cultural comparisons, I suggest a house model analysis may serve to integrate anomalous “ceremonial” dimensions of house construction in an effort to better understand how these structures shaped and wholly reflected changing patterns of social organization through directional associations, differential access to origins, and cyclical processes of ritual renewal. If we are to fulfill one of our basic obligations—the reconstruction of prehistoric developments and their ultimate development into historic groups—investigators must make use of all available material, as well as investigating the historical material for leads back into prehistoric times. —Schroeder (1954:597) In recent years, a growing number of archaeologists have explored the potential of expanding Lévi-Strauss’s (1982) concept of house societies to better understand specific archaeological contexts. In this chapter, I use ethnographic/ theoretical analyses by cultural anthropologists Carsten and Hugh-Jones (1995), The Durable House: House Society Models in Archaeology, edited by Robin A. Beck, Jr. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper No. 35. © 2007 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University. All rights reserved. ISBN 978-0-88104-092-4. Reevaluating the “House” in Chaco Canyon 249 Fox (ed. 1993), and McKinnon (1991) to discuss the applicability of such a model in Southwestern prehistory. Looking specifically at the classificatory distinction between “great houses” and “small houses” within Chaco Canyon (A.D. 850– 1180), I suggest this theoretical model might yield new insights with regard to four symbolic dimensions of house construction: the use of wood, directional offerings, resurfacing practices, and the bones of ancestors. With the use of Puebloan ethnographic literature and cross-cultural comparisons, the house model begins to draw out the symbolic logic inscribed within Chaco era architecture. In what follows, I hope to build upon and move beyond the more restricted interpretive domains such as kinship classifications, ritual, and polity that have characterized much of the work on the Chacoan florescence. To better understand what the florescence meant and how it organized people, I propose to explore the Chacoans’ vision of the cosmos and their place within it. Thus shifting the theoretical lens will serve to reorient interpretations away from the boundless exploitation of quantitative empirical estimates (labor, environment, room size) to more qualitative empirical estimates of what anchored their worldview. The house model may serve to integrate anomalous “ceremonial” dimensions of house construction in an effort to better understand how these structures shaped and wholly reflected changing patterns of social organization through directional associations, differential access to origins, and cyclical processes of ritual renewal. Over the past decade, Chacoan scholarship has focused less on the canyon core and more on the vast network of roughly 200 outlier communities in the San Juan Basin (Mills 2002:81; see Kantner 2005). These outlying great houses demonstrate degrees of architectural similarities and differences with those great houses in the canyon (Van Dyke 1998). Identification of road network segments and elucidation of a shared suite of architectural characteristics have yielded new perspectives on the scale of this cultural florescence in the San Juan Basin and raised new questions about the significance of parallel developments (Cameron 2002; Kantner 1999; Kantner and Mahoney 2000; Van Dyke 1997, 1998, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c, 2002, 2003, 2004). These studies have propelled researchers to ask synthetic questions about the nature and function of the Chaco world—a view privileged by a modern cartographic perspective. Given that the Chacoan phenomenon would not have been lived, experienced, or perhaps even understood in such a way, I offer the house model as a complementary program of research. Chaco Canyon in Context Chaco Canyon, perhaps more than any other single location in the American Southwest, has received attention from archaeologists in the long-standing pursuit of Puebloan historiography. As Barbara Mills (2002) and others have noted, over a century of archaeological research at Chaco Canyon now requires its own historical narratives (Elliot 1995; Gabriel 1992; Snead 1999, 2001). Located within the San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico, Chaco Canyon is both a location and a touchstone within studies of Southwestern prehistory. The canyon itself is approximately 30 km long, 90 to 180 m deep, and varies from 500 m to a