Chaco Rock Art Matters

In this paper, I make the simple argument that the rock art in Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico needs to be taken into consideration to understand Chaco culture. It is imperative that we pay attention to this ample graphic component of Chaco's past in order to clarify perceptions of Chaco itself, as well as its place and social status in its regional context. Within the wide scope of archaeology in the Americas and elsewhere in the world, ancient images are examined for the insights they provide into the social affiliations, ideologies, cosmologies, and worldviews of the past—cultural dimensions that are often best expressed in the arts, including various graphic media. In the history of southwestern archaeology, however, rock art, a prolific visual document, has been treated as a thing apart, and its potential contribution to understanding the past is consistently ignored. In its disregard for the wealth of imagery displayed in the canyon's landscape, archaeological research in Chaco Canyon follows this pattern to the detriment of our knowledge.

The defining characteristic of Chaco culture is its architecture. While hundreds of single-story small house sites are fully contemporaneous with the large multi-storied buildings, Chaco Canyon is well known for the latter—the spectacular "great houses" built by the Ancestral Pueblo people (also known as the Anasazi) largely between 900 and 1140 CE (Figure 1). These planned constructions may contain hundreds of rooms and large open plazas, and solidly built, they have endured the test of time. Associated are elaborate water-control systems, roads, and great kivas, evoking many questions in regard to the nature of Chaco society and its regional significance. The distinctions evoked by the great houses, however, are not apparent when it comes to ceramics and rock art, both of which, in general, conform to regional norms.

Before the initiation by the National Park Service of the Chaco Project in 1971, the Pueblo ruins in Chaco Canyon were considered just another facet of the widespread Ancestral Pueblo farming culture that stretched from southeastern Nevada across the southern half of the Colorado Plateau to the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico. Chaco originally took its place alongside the Mesa Verde and the Kayenta, all of which were regarded as regional manifestations of the San Juan Anasazi, distinguished by their architecture, pottery types, and so forth. Beginning with the Chaco Project, framed by an increasingly sophisticated archaeological discipline, numerous questions were posed about the social implications of Chaco's large-scale, enduring architecture. Chaco culture soon was described as the "Chaco Phenomenon" for lack of a better understanding of things Chacoan (Irwin-Williams 1972). Among the models offered to explain Chaco and its very large buildings was the idea that Chaco Canyon functioned as a ritual or political focus within the San Juan region. In addition, the rich burials and the variety of ceremonial objects found in Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl, including imported items, support the concept of a ceremonial center (Plog and Heitman 2015). Accordingly, in spite of the numerous cultural continuities with neighboring archaeological remains across the Colorado Plateau, Chaco

Figure 1.

Walls of Chetro Ketl, Chaco Canyon. (Photograph by the author.)

developments between the 11th and 12th centuries were recognized as exceeding the known parameters of Ancestral Pueblo remains elsewhere (Judge 1979:902). Chaco has continued to be viewed as a "center" of some kind, although the nature of that "center" is still under debate (Plog 2010:388). Many of these models, however, were and have remained in the realm of speculation, and some researchers are currently backing away from viewing Chaco as a centralized system, especially politically (e.g., Mills 2002; Reed 2011:120).

How can studies of Chaco rock art contribute to this discussion? Elements of material culture that are broadly visible, like rock art, are likely to contain, purposely rendered or simply by happenstance, social symbols advertising group association. Images in the landscape, derived from a culture's symbolic and stylistic repertoire, collectively denote a general cultural presence, ethnic identity, or possibly even a specific sociopolitical affiliation, over...