Ch.3: Pre-Chacoan Architecture

URBAN GENESIS AT CHACO: Case Study of the Origin of Civilizations. Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6

3.6 Overview of Pre-Chacoan Culture

Thus far I have tried to give a sense of the environment in which the first Pueblo dwellings evolved. The combination of features that developed in the first four hundred years of Pueblo housebuilding continue to be important throughout the rest of the tradition.

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries the domestic architectural tradition in the Chaco region continues to evolve. Stone-masonry techniques were developed, enabling the construction of multistory house-blocks. Domestic house-blocks at Chaco grew as large as forty rooms.

Meanwhile, pithouses were remodeled or rebuilt as highly formalized, deep pit structures. By the tenth century, these structures may have been entirely subterranean with a roof that was virtually flush with the surrounding surface.

Over time, the pithouse was used less as a dwelling and more as a chamber of assembly. At some point, the formal descendant of the pithouse came to have all of the specific social meanings of the Historic-era kiva. By the beginning of the Chaco era, the pit-structures had all of the features of the modern kiva and no features that were specifically domestic, such as meal-grinding slabs and food-storage bins, pits, and cists. Yet it is unlikely that the Chacoan kiva played the same social role as the Historic kiva. In the Chacoan great-houses, small kivas were built into the room-blocks; mid-size kivas were built both as part of room-blocks and in the public plaza; and one giant kiva was also set into the plaza. As mentioned earlier, on rare occasions 'great kivas' were also located on distinct sites. Furthermore, pit-structures continued to be built as part of the domestic structures as well, in the same relationship as in unit pueblos and similar to the relationship of kivas to room-blocks in Historic pueblos. These could be considered a fifth type, and possibly the only type which is truly ancestral to Historic kivas. If in no other way, Chacoan kivas were at least different in that they were more specialized than the single type of general-purpose kiva built in pueblos today.

The first Chacoan great-houses were essentially formal reinterpretations of the unit pueblo. The basic elements of unit pueblos and great-houses are the same: the room-block, the common area, the circular pit-structure. However, the scale and formality of each of these elements changed drastically in the great-house. The differences are great enough that it seems likely that great-houses were an entirely new building type, created to serve a new set of needs for a culture that was suddenly becoming much more complex.