URBAN GENESIS AT CHACO: Case Study of the Origin of Civilizations. Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Before examining Pueblo community structure, the idea of 'Histoic Pueblo' should be reconsidered. Pueblo means either 'village' or 'people' in Spanish, and was applied by conquistadores to the settled peoples who lived in towns along the Rio Grande and the plains to the west. The Spaniards (and later Anglos) were unaware of the cultural diversity among the people whom they had lumped together as 'settled villagers.' After the region was annexed in 1848, Anglos retained the Spanish word as a proper term for all of these people: Pueblo.
Unfortunately the term Pueblo is a misleading generalization. The 'Pueblo' are actually four distinct cultural groups who do not regard each other as a common people. They do not even speak related languages. Referring to figure 2.2, the languages spoken in the various pueblos can be classified into four different families: Shoshone, Penuti, Keres, and Tano. Grammatically, these language families seem to be as divergent as the Semitic, Indo-European, and Altaic language families of the Old World. Three of the four linguistic groups are related to languages spoken by other, non-Pueblo peoples: Shoshonean languages are also spoken by inhabitants of the Great Basin; Penuti by a few groups in southern California; and Kiowa (related to Tano) by Great Plains peoples. Only the Keres linguistic family, is unrelated to any other languages outside the Pueblo region. Using language as our criteria, the Pueblo 'cultural region' is in fact the borderland between three cultural realms, with only the Keres peoples falling entirely within the Pueblo region. The absence of any pan-Pueblo identity is exemplified by the absence of any common term for all of these groups was applied externally by the Spaniards. No equivalent term for 'Pueblo' exists in any of the various languages which they speak.
Paradoxically, all of the people referred to as Pueblo share a common cosmology and similar ritual practices. The similar appearance of Pueblo villages could be explained as environmentally-determined adaptations; but the fact that their creation myths and ceremonies are so similar--and distinct from the beliefs of their linguistic kinsmen in neighboring region--suggests that at some point, three of the groups adopted the cosmological beliefs of the fourth, or that all of these peoples shered a common experience and developed a common cosmology at some period in the past.
The complexity of the current situation exacerbates the problems of relating Chaco to the Historic Pueblo cultures. Should the Chaco culture be compared only to its direct descendants? If so, which of the existing Pueblo cultures are descended from the Chacoans--indeed are any of them descended from the Chacoans? These problems will be discussed at length at the end of this chapter.
Yet even with these problems in mind, there are still very good reasons to compare the Historic Pueblo and Chaco cultures. To begin with, each of these societies existed in a similar natural environment. Until recently the Pueblo also subsisted on the same foods and used similar construction techniques as did the Chacoans. In a comparison of Historic and Chacoan material cultures, then, the variables of subsistence-strategies and resource-availability can be held constant. On the other hand, differences in the design of Chacoan and Pueblo communities are easier to identify and interpret than such differences between Chaco and other cultures in similar, but not identical environments: the Andes, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, or Central Asia.
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