Archaeological Investigations at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

美国国家科学基金会将为新墨西哥州查科峡谷的考古实地研究提供资金支持。新墨西哥大学的W. H. Wills和Patricia L. Crown。该项目旨在研究一千多年前发生在美国西南部半干旱的科罗拉多高原的快速社会变革初期，水管理的作用。考古学家称之为“博尼托时期”（约公元850 - 1140年），这一转变的标志是在由小家庭定居点组成的分散的农业社区中出现了被称为“大房子”的大型砖石建筑。一些大房子是多层结构，有500多个独立房间，有些建在查科城外，但最大、最著名、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中的十几个大房子之一，而峡谷又是一个非常高密度的考古遗址的物理中心，也是新墨西哥州西北部较大的圣胡安盆地的特征。研究人员提出，查科是一个广泛的社会网络的文化中心，从大峡谷延伸到里约热内卢格兰德，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，它建立了新墨西哥州和亚利桑那州普韦布洛人的基本文化模式。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在从家庭经济向涉及公共住宅和大量建筑劳动力的企业体系转变的可能因素方面几乎没有取得任何进展。在某种程度上，缺乏共识似乎源于对大屋开发早期当地环境和文化条件的了解不足。大房子是在几代人的时间里设计和建造的，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，或者将遗迹埋在巨大的墙壁下。这项由美国国家科学基金会支持的研究项目将试图通过研究普韦布洛博尼托深埋的文化沉积物和特征，来提高我们对这一重要变化时期的理解。通过重新打开国家地理学会在20世纪20年代挖掘的深沟，并使用新的分析方法重新检查横截面，可以进入该遗址的这些部分。最初的挖掘只是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由地质学家、生物学家和考古学家组成的团队，以确定人工建造的土坯特征是否在20世纪20年代被注意到（但基本上被忽视）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。这项研究的更广泛影响包括更好地理解从小规模社会网络向以农业为基础的密集等级社会过渡的社会经济过程，以及更好地理解干旱环境中灌溉经济的可持续性。参加本研究的研究生将在实地方法和新的考古理论应用方面得到重要的训练。该项目特别致力于在人类学和相关领域培训美洲原住民学生，这些学生将成为研究美国西南部祖先考古学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.