Keres: Endgendered Key to the Pueblo Puzzle

Almost a thousand years separate the flourishing of Chaco Canyon from the Keresan Pueblos of today, yet their distinctive and regionally overwhelming native priesthoods provide a direct link between these people and their place, as still confirmed by their neighbors. The carefully preplanned construction of Chacoan towns in the open—away from cliffs, walls, caverns, and pinnacles—further emphasizes their human-defined shapes as D or O quadrants linked by roads, beacons, and pilgrimages. After a long “engendering” development during the Archaic period, these priesthoods became enshrined by the building of more than a dozen greathouses at Chaco, with others in outlying “clan” districts, that continue to benefit all of the Pueblos to this day.