Archaeology of Bandelier National Monument: Village Formation on the Pajarito Plateau, New Mexico

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xv T he principles of Gothic style were being worked out near Paris amid large-scale forest clearance in western Europe. Bantu speakers controlling rich gold mines were building a kingdom along the Limpopo around Great Zimbabwe. Rapid developments in agriculture, transport, and manufacturing technologies in Sung China heralding a precocious industrial revolution were about to fall to the compound bows of Chinghis Khan’s spare cavalry. Around the confluence of the rivers now called the Mississippi and the Missouri in North America,the great chiefdom of Cahokia was beginning a long,slow decline. Within the Southwest, the polity centered in Chaco Canyon,withering under a -year dry spell on the Colorado plateau, had forfeited control over southwestern turquoise sources to Paquimé, Chihuahua, whence the valuable blue stone made its way south. In Mexico the Toltecs were losing power, and their capital at Tula, Hidalgo, was soon to be sacked. In North America, it was a bad time for large-scale political organizations and cultural hegemonies. The year was , plus or minus a decade, when the first maize farmers came to live on the wild and isolated Pajarito Plateau of north-central New Mexico.Their history over the following  years is the subject of this book. Perhaps their achievements seem modest in the company above, but I find this archaeology fascinating for two reasons.Part of the story of at least two Puebloan peoples still living along the Rio Grande, the Keres and the Tewa, is contained within the ruins of the Pajarito, the remainder being in their oral traditions. More generally ,between  and ,the ancient Pajaritans crafted villages out of dispersed hamlets and towns out of villages , echoing, with differences, changes in settlement, economic, and social organization experienced by most Neolithic peoples around the world. Why do populations aggregate? What changes in life accompany the formation of the village,which Critchfield (:vii) called “man’s oldest and most durable social institution... the fundamental basis of all civilized behavior”? These are the major questions of cross-cultural import addressed in this book. The research leading to this volume began in .I was a Resident Scholar at the School of American Research in Santa Fe when Robert P.Powers,then archaeologist at the Southwestern Regional Center of the National Park Service (NPS) in Santa Fe (now SupervisoryArcheologist, Archeology Program, Intermountain Support Office, Santa Fe), approached me about undertaking an excavation program at Bandelier National Monument in conjunction with a survey he was directing.I should not have been so eager as I was to get involved, given the obstacles of funding and logistics the project presented. Perhaps I would have thought twice if,a few years earlier while working in Dolores, Colorado, I had not trekked through Bandelier’s striking backcountry with the woman I was soon to marry; perhaps if I had not been reading The Delight Makers when he asked, my response would have been different. As it was, the project was to rule the next several years of my life. PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS With a Ph.D. from the University of Florida in the archaeology of southeastern North America and a position at a university in the Northwest, I was not an obvious candidate to be a research partner in this venture. I had no prior research experience in the Northern Rio Grande. This would be a handicap in any area, but the Northern Rio Grande is an haut lieu of North American archaeology, with a renowned history stretching back to Bandelier’s excavations around Pecos in  and proceeding through Hewett’s formidable accomplishments in the early years of the twentieth century. This was the area where Kidder made his name and is now buried; this was the area where the first synthesis of southwestern prehistory was hammered together. My modest qualifications for the collaboration consisted mostly of an interest in the origins and consequences of village life in the Southwest. My prior experience in southwestern Colorado had been in an area where a remarkably extensive program of excavation and survey had revealed a great deal of information about some of the earliest villages in the Southwest, those of Pueblo I times (ca. A.D. –). As Powers talked about the project at Bandelier, I realized that it presented a chance to test ideas that I had been working out with colleagues from the Dolores Archaeological Program over the last few years about why villages form. Bob’s own thoughts concerning this process proved similar...