Pueblos

Development of the Pueblo Form

Until about 700 CE, in the northern Southwest of the United States, people lived in below-ground pit houses. The first crude above-ground structures were of wattle and daub (a woven stick and twig framework coated with mud) and provided extra storage space for pit house dwellers. During the next 200 years, this form developed into the unit pueblo, a crescent-shaped suite of five to 10 rooms (usually masonry) used for both domestic and storage purposes. In front of the rooms were one or two pit structures, probably used for domestic as well as some ceremonial purposes (a prototype for the kiva, described below), and beyond that, there was a trash midden that contained domestic trash but that was also a sacred space where the things of everyday life went back to the earth.

By 900 CE, a new form of pueblo structure developed and was eventually found over much of the northern Southwest: the Chacoan “great house.” Great houses were massively and elaborately built with thick walls, stout roofs, and a carefully planned layout that was strikingly different from the accretional, unplanned room blocks characteristic of historic pueblos. Encompassing 100 to 800 rooms and up to five stories tall, great houses were first built in Chaco Canyon, a remote valley in northwestern New Mexico. Although similar in underlying form, great houses differed dramatically in scale from the unit pueblos that continued to be built, usually in a community surrounding a great house. Great houses were apparently used primarily for ceremonial purposes by the surrounding community that lived in unit pueblos. By 1100 CE, great houses could be found across the northern Southwest and were associated with wide, straight roads, suggesting that this remote canyon was the center of a large interacting region.

The political system that underlay the Chacoan region almost certainly had both economic and religious functions although the scale and nature of this system remains a topic of investigation for Southwest archaeologists. When the Chacoan system collapsed about 1150 CE, many great houses were remodeled and used for domestic purposes, likely serving as a model for the subsequent traditional pueblo style.

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