URBAN GENESIS AT CHACO: Case Study of the Origin of Civilizations. Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Chaco canyon was inhabited for nearly five hundred years before the Chaco culture began to flourish. The architectural tradition that had developed during this period served as the formal precedent for the much larger structures that the Chacoans would design. The continuity of Chacoan architectural vocabulary with preexisting domestic architecture at the site is a strong indicator that the complex Chaco culture developed in situ, from within the local cultural tradition.
From the fifth to ninth centuries, Pueblo settlements evolved from crude pit-houses into a complex dwelling type named the unit pueblo (Prudden 1903, 1918). Unit pueblos already included the basic elements that were later enlarged and elaborated upon in great-house design: the room-block, the pit-structure, the common outdoor area, and the mound. The formal continuity of the great-house with the unit pueblo helps to explain many aspects of great-house design, while the sudden jump in scale from unit pueblo to great-house highlights the dramatic changes in social structure that both enabled and induced the Chacoans to build great-houses.
Two other Chacoan building types are also derived from unit pueblos. One, mentioned already, is the Chacoan kiva: it derives from the ninth-century pit-structure, which was in turn a descendant of the eighth-century pithouse. This building type evolved somewhat independently from the other components of the unit pueblo. Kivas continued to be a semi-distinct building type during the Chaco era, built as part of both dwellings and great-houses, and occasionally as discrete structures located some distance away from other buildings.
The third derivative of the ninth century unit pueblo is its functional descendant: Chacoan domestic architecture. Chaco archaeologists often call the domestic architecture in the canyon small sites (McKenna and Truell 1986) to distinguish these structures from the large sites, the great-houses.
Cordell, Linda S. Prehistory of the Southwest (Academic Press, 1984).
Mindeleff, Victor and Cosmos. A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibloa (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1891).
Prudden, T. Mitchell. "The Prehistoric Ruins of the San Juan Watershed of Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico." American Anthropologist 5:224-228 (1903).
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