Archaeological Investigations at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

来自国家科学基金会的资金将支持在新墨西哥州的查科峡谷进行考古实地研究，由W。H.作者声明：by J.新墨西哥州的皇冠。 本项目旨在调查一千多年前美国西南部半干旱的科罗拉多高原发生的社会快速变革初期水管理的作用。 考古学家称之为“博尼托阶段”（约。公元850 - 1140年），这种转变的标志是大型砖石建筑的出现，称为大房子，分散的农业社区由小家庭定居点组成。 一些伟大的房子是多层结构，有500多个独立的房间，有些建在查科外面，但最大，最著名和最具标志性的是查科峡谷的普韦布洛博尼托。 普韦布洛博尼托是位于峡谷的十几个大房子之一，这反过来又是新墨西哥州西北部更大的圣胡安盆地内非常高密度的考古遗址和特征的物理中心。 研究人员提出，查科是一个广泛的社会网络的文化中心，从大峡谷延伸到格兰德河，从落基山脉南部延伸到新墨西哥州南部的高地。 在西南土著社会的历史发展中，查科被认为是一个重要的转折点，它建立了基本的文化模式，在新墨西哥州和亚利桑那州的普韦布洛人中仍然很明显。然而，尽管在查科峡谷及其周围进行了100多年的考古研究，考古学家和其他研究人员几乎没有取得什么进展，他们对造成家庭-从以经济为基础的企业体系到涉及公共住宅和大量劳动力投资于建筑的企业体系。 缺乏共识的部分原因似乎是在大房子开发的早期阶段缺乏有关当地环境和文化条件的信息。 伟大的房屋是经过几代人的设计和建造的，这些大型建筑通常是在早期定居点的顶部生长的，最终摧毁了最古老的职业或将遗迹埋在巨大的城墙下。 由NSF支持的研究计划将试图通过研究深埋在普韦布洛博尼托地下的文化沉积和特征来提高我们对这一重要变化时期的理解。 进入这些部分的网站将获得重新打开深沟最初挖掘的国家地理学会在20世纪20年代和重新检查的横截面与新的分析方法。 最初的发掘只试图确定在沉积物中发现的某些类型的陶器之间的关系，而忽略了几乎所有其他类型的数据。 这项新工作将汇集一个地质学家、生物学家和考古学家团队，以确定20世纪20年代发现的人工建造的土坯特征（但在很大程度上被忽视）是否是灌溉系统的遗迹。 如果这些特征是运河，那么我们可以假设水控制是大房子社区兴起的关键因素。 这项研究的更广泛的影响包括更好地理解社会经济过程，这些过程是从小规模社交网络向以农业为基础的密集、等级森严的社会过渡的特征，并更好地理解干旱环境中灌溉经济的可持续性。 参加这项研究的研究生将获得实地方法和考古学新理论应用的重要培训。 该项目特别致力于培养人类学和相关领域的美洲原住民学生，这些学生将成为在美国西南部从事祖先考古学工作的新一代美洲原住民学者的一部分。

Funding from the National Science Foundation will support archaeological field research in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, directed by Drs. W. H. Wills and Patricia L. Crown of the University of New Mexico. This project is designed to investigate the role of water management during the beginning of a period of rapid social change that occurred in the semi-arid Colorado Plateau of the American Southwest just over one thousand years ago. Known to archaeologists as the "Bonito phase" (ca. A.D. 850 - 1140), this transformation is marked by the appearance of large masonry buildings called Great Houses in the midst of dispersed farming communities comprised of small household settlements. Some Great Houses were multistoried structures with more than 500 individual rooms, and some were built outside Chaco, but the largest, best-known and most iconic is Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon. Pueblo Bonito is one of more than a dozen Great Houses located in the canyon, which is in turn the physical center of a very high density of archaeological sites and features within the larger San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico. Researchers have proposed that Chaco was the cultural center of an extensive social network that stretched from the Grand Canyon to the Rio Grande, and from the southern Rocky Mountains to the highlands of southern New Mexico. In the historical development of indigenous southwestern societies, Chaco is thought to have been a major turning point that established fundamental cultural patterns still evident among the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico and Arizona.However, despite more than 100 years of archaeological research in and around Chaco Canyon, archaeologists and other researchers have made little progress reaching agreement on the likely factors responsible for the shift from family-based economies to corporate systems involving communal dwellings and massive amounts of labor invested in architecture. The lack of consensus seems to stem, in part, from a paucity of information about local environmental and cultural conditions during the earliest phase of Great House development. Great Houses were designed and built over periods of several human generations, and these large structures typically grew on top of earlier settlements, eventually destroying the oldest occupations or burying remnants under the massive walls. The research program supported by NSF will attempt to improve our understanding of this important period of change by examining deeply buried cultural deposits and features beneath Pueblo Bonito. Access to these portions of the site will be obtained by reopening deep trenches originally excavated by the National Geographic Society in the 1920s and reexamining the cross-sections with new analytical methods. The original excavations sought only to define relationships between certain types of pottery found in the deposits and ignored almost every other sort of data. The new work will bring together a team of geologists, biologists and archaeologists to determine whether artificially constructed adobe features noted in the 1920s (but largely ignored) are the remains of an irrigation system. If these features are canals, then we would presume that water control was a critical element in the rise of Great House communities. The broader impacts of this study include the better appreciation of the socioeconomic processes that characterize the transition from small-scale social networks to dense, hierarchical societies based on agriculture, and a greater understanding of the sustainability of irrigation economies in arid environments. Graduate students participating in this research will gain important training in field methods and new theoretical applications in archaeology. The project is especially committed to training Native American students in anthropology and allied fields and these students will be part of the emerging generation of Native American scholars working on ancestral archaeology in the American Southwest.