Sponsored by: AIA-Santa Fe Society
Lecture by Keith Kintigh (Arizona State University). The Chaco Era has received a tremendous amount of archaeological consideration over the last 45 years. Far less attention has been paid to understanding the organization of northern Southwestern societies following the collapse of Chaco–a time was once viewed as a dark age, a time of cultural backsliding. However, imposing sites with Chaco-inspired public architecture provide evidence of large communities, dating between A.D. 1200 and 1275, that laid the organizational foundations of well-known Pueblo IV towns. We excavated portions of two such Zuni-area settlements and did extensive systematic survey around those two sites and a third, Spier 81. The Hinkson Site has 32 residential room blocks surrounding a great house complex that includes an unroofed, oversize great kiva, a nazha, and roads. The Hinkson site appears to be the center of a 250 square kilometer community with 70 room blocks and nearly 900 rooms. The Los Gigantes Site in the El Morro Valley has similar expressions of public architecture but many fewer roomblocks in the immediate vicinity. Recognition of these multi-room block communities with public architecture permits a rethinking of post-Chacoan, Ancestral Pueblo social organization south of Chaco and provides a more plausible bridge between the Chacoan and Pueblo IV periods in the Zuni region.