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

1. Introduction

1 T he Pajarito Plateau, a name meaning “little bird” proposed by Edgar Lee Hewett and in common use by the early twentieth century (Hewett ), is a series of highly dissected mesas extending some  miles south from the Chama River between the Rio Grande on the east and the Jemez Mountains on the west. Overwintering in the “Tiguex” province near present Bernalillo in the early s and conducting reconnaissance as far as “Valladolid” (probably Taos) to the north along the Rio Grande, the party of FranciscoVásquez de Coronado would have been well placed to see or hear about any towns on the Pajarito. Apparently there were few or none. Yet between  and  years earlier, this had been one of the most densely occupied areas in the Pueblo Southwest. This volume is about the prehispanic colonization, growth,and eventual depopulation of the Pajarito Plateau, emphasizing Bandelier National Monument.The typical visitor to Bandelier today spends a few hours in Frijoles Canyon,including half an hour or so in the museum and bookstore, a stroll past Big Kiva through Tyuonyi, and a few minutes exploring some of the cavates carved into the Bandelier tuff on the north side of the canyon. Only the adventurous few who continue upcanyon to“Ceremonial Cave” or the fewer still who venture out of Frijoles into the backcountry begin to appreciate that the ruins clustered around the visitor center represent the final episode of a -year-long cycle of colonization,aggregation,and abandonment. Such cycles happened many times in the prehistoric Southwest.The villages along the Dolores River of the mid- s; the imposing Great Houses occupying many strategic portions of the San Juan Basin from the s through C H A P T E R O N E Introduction Timothy A. Kohler the mid-s, modeled after the grandest of all in Chaco Canyon;and the huge canyon-head ruins of the mid-s in the bean fields of Southwest Colorado were all outcomes of similar processes, though each of these episodes has its unique characteristics. Underlying all of them are shared ecological and social processes that we hope to unravel in this volume, using the Pajarito as exemplar. But this is also the history of specific peoples, some of whose descendants still live in or near pueblos along the Rio Grande (Map .) and whose social memory extends back into the period we will be examining.These direct historical connections should enrich our understanding of the archaeological record without blinding us to the possibility that there may be no ethnographic analogies for or special insights into some aspects of the archaeological record. Two important transitions may have limited continuity of practice between now and then. The first encompasses the great population movements of the late s throughout the Southwest and the pervasive aggregation shortly thereafter. The second, of course, is the disruption caused by the arrival of the Spanish and eventually the Euroamericans. But before turning to the particular peoples who lived this story,let’s look at the broader outlines of the interests motivating this research. Approaches to the Problem of Village Formation Maximum dispersion is the settlement pattern of the state of nature. —M. Sahlins (1972:97) For  years after their initial colonization of the Pajarito, virtually everyone lived in small hamlets. (We will refer to small habitation sites, with fewer than  rooms or so, as hamlets, settlements with some  to  rooms as villages , and sites with more than that, towns.) Within  years of the colonization, most people lived in villages or towns. This progressive aggregation is of interest for a number of reasons.In some places in the world,for example ,in SouthwestAsia,aggregation precedes urbanization, but in others, settlements always remain dispersed.What is the interplay between migration and population growth, local histories, resource use, climate change, social rules and constraints,and economic striving that leads to aggregation here? Surprisingly, as we’ll see in the last chapter, we discovered that the processes leading from hamlets to villages seem to be different than those leading from villages to towns. For the Pajarito Plateau, Hewett (:–) thought the reasons for aggregation were clear: “These large communities [such as Tsankawi and Otowi] were the result of a concentration for mutual aid of neighboring clans that had long been diffused over a considerable area. They were formed rather rapidly, perhaps in a generation...crowding together for mutual assistance against a common foe.” The foe Hewett suspected was the Navajo: “Tewa traditions tell of long...