On Cerro Juanqueana and the Meridian

1.
Cerro Juanqueana is visible for miles.  The small rounded mountain rises above a river valley where patches of green foliage mark the course of an intermittent stream.  The landscape overlooking the river is barren, constructed from various shades of brown.  The lower slopes of the hill are mottled with sage, more or less the color of cardboard that has been left in the rain.  The hill’s higher chaparral is darker, the tint of chocolate where the rock outcrops on the summit and casts rounded shadows down the hillside.  The little conical mountain seems to have been scarred by a giant rake.  The cerro is marked by furrows cut into its slopes as if the rake were pulled sideways around the top of the peak.  The furrows cut into the hillside show as lighter yellow grooves indenting the matte beige-brown.  The sunshine is powerful here in the Chihuahuan desert and the roads are all gravel running over featureless chaparral and horizons where crumpled-looking, low nondescript mountains mark the limits of what one can see. 

Other hillsides in the area also seem to have been scored by a giant rake.  The marks are high on the knolls.  These places are called cerros de trincheras – that is, “hills with trenches.”  The largest of these prehistoric sites is Cerro Juanqueana.  If you go there, tread carefully in the stony debris on the hillsides – rattlesnakes and scorpions hide from the sun under cobbles the length of your forearm.  Wear a good hat with a broad brim because there is absolutely no shade on the steep, sixty-degree hillsides.  It’s best to travel in this area with the approval of Mexico’s archaeological authority, INAH.  The vans sanctioned by INAH are white with the letters of the government’s archaeological department prominently displayed.  At all costs avoid small Toyota mini-vans, particularly dark ones – this is the vehicle of choice of the Sinaloa cartel that controls the villages and ranches scattered across this barren land.  People are kidnaped here from time to time and there have been shootings and murders.

Cerro Juanaqueana is only 60 miles from the border and near the Casa Grandes ruins at Paquime, one of northern Mexico’s largest and most important prehistoric site.  But it feels a lot farther from Antelope Springs, the closest town in New Mexico, than the hour-long drive.  Except for a few ranches hidden under the low brown hills and some Mormon Colonia, there’s nothing here.

About three-thousand years ago, Indians in the area gathered to sculpt the cerro’s steep slopes into concentric terraces.  There are 550 terrace embankments carved into the hill, some of them 400 meters long.  Ninety-nine rock rings also mark the site.  Although the scale of the work here in re-modeling the mountain is monumental – more 40,000 tons of earth moved – the materials are humble.  The terraces are constructed from larger cobbles, generally about the circumference of a loaf of bread, heaped to create an embankment ring along the steep hillside.  The space cupped between the embankment of stones and the hillside was, then, filled with smaller stones and earth excavated from the side of the cerro.  The effect is to create a terrace or level lip along the mountainside.  Although the work can be performed without tools, merely by pitching cobbles distributed across the hillside’s surface into heaps, the works erected on slope are durable – they have lasted as an indelible mark on the cerro since about 1150 BC when the slopes were terraced.

We don’t know who made the rings on the mountain.  However, the site is replete with metates and manos for grinding corn and seeds – more 300 basin metates have been counted around the cerro.  This tells us several things.  First, the people who lived here were sedentary and farmed fields somewhere near the cerro.  No traces of agriculture have been located on the terraces themselves and, so, unlike similar features found in the Mayan highlands, these level places made on the hillside were not farmed.  (This makes the labor necessary to build the monumental terraces all the more extraordinary – experiments in the field show that the terraces in Chihuahua require much more labor than those constructed in the Mayan world.)  Second, the number of metate and mano sets provide a basis for estimating population.  Apparently, about 187 people lived here, more or less, continuously over a period of about 200 years. 

The terraces are now buried in colluvial deposits –that is, debris washed down the slopes by flashflooding and rain.  The actual terraces surfaces are about meter below the present surface.  Shovel-excavations show that the terraces were apparently used as surfaces on which to erect some kind of living quarters.  We don’t know what these dwellings were like – they weren’t pit-houses, ubiquitous in the southwest, because there are no post-holes.  I suspect that the dwellings were shelters woven from brush like wickiups.  In any event, we know that people occupied the terraces because of dense concentrations of faunal remains under the colluvial surface deposits.  The Indians ate mostly corn and rabbit – about 90% of the bones are either jackrabbit or cottontail (ten times as many jackrabbits as the other species).  People also ate an occasional antelope, probably a rare luxury, and lots of small minnows that must have been eaten whole. The remains of these prehistoric meals can be carbon-dated with high accuracy and, so, we have confidence that Cerro Juanaqueana is about three-thousand years old.  There is no pottery because these people were pre-ceramic – pottery hadn’t been invented yet.  Corn and amaranth seed were grown domestically – that is, the species of grains are not wild but genetically modified for human consumption and, clearly, were gardened.  Many nicely fashioned arrowheads and lance-points have been found, including some razor-sharp obsidian blades imported from someplace to the north, probably 80 to 100 miles away.  Oddly enough, there’s no evidence that the people dwelling here used the river bottoms about a thousand yards away from the hill.  However, the river is seasonal, dry most of the year but prone to flooding and the braided stream bed is much eroded.  If there were gardens planted along the river, which seems probable, the stream has washed away all evidence of them.  Only one burial has been discovered dating to the era of the Cerro Juanaqueana’s flourishing – and this is a half day’s walk away at another trenched hill.  A teenage girl was buried in tightly flexed position near some landmark rocks – there were no grave goods found. 

Three things are important about the site.  First, it shouldn’t exist: the first towns in the area date from the late Basketmaker period, that is about 500 AD.  This is about 1600 years after the terraces at Cerro Juanaqueana were engraved on the hillside.  Archaeologists believe that Native Americans in this part of northwestern Mexico were nomadic foragers before 500 AD.  But the Cerro Trincheras (trenched hills) tell a different story.  Clearly, these people showed a high degree of sedentism – that is, a village of about 200 people occupied this site for two-hundred years.  (Minneapolis has only existed for about 180 years.)  No one was supposed to be farming maiz in this area at 1150 BC.  But the people at Cerro Juanaqueana and living by the other trenched hills were raising corn here, probably near the river.  Thus, the place is an anomaly, very interesting or as Stephen Lekson, the controversial archaeologist specializing in the Chaco phenomenon writes, it is “downright weird.”

Second, the hilltop ridges were probably defensive.  The people lived behind low rock walls on the mountainside.  Two or three foot cobble walls don’t seem like much of a fortification, but, one must remember that the weapons the defenders faced would be short-range: arrows heavily laden with lithic points and lances or instruments made for lunging.  The hillside is very steep and attackers advancing up the slope slippery with gravel and cobbles, probably under a hail of rocks thrown down by the villagers would have faced a distinct and, probably, deadly disadvantage.  Obviously, there was some species of war at that time Cerro Juanaqueana was built.  It’s a melancholy fact that there is alway war.  As Kraznahorkai suggests in his great novel, it’s not War and Peace but rather War and War throughout almost all of human history.  The enemies of Juanaqueana such as they were didn’t have the staying power to mount a siege – there is no water on the hill and a protracted siege would have been deadly to the villagers but clearly tactics here were to strike and, then, retreat with whatever loot your band had seized. 

Third, Cerro Juanaqueana is only a few miles from Stephen Lekson’s Chaco Meridian.  On this topic, we depart from the conventional wisdom on which Southwestern (the southwest of the United States) archaeology is premised.   Lekson, who is based in Boulder, Colorado, has proposed a bold theory that links the great houses at Chaco Canyon, the most important archaeological site in the West, with the Aztec Ruins just south of the Four Corners and the huge adobe city at Paquime near Casas Grandes in the northern Sonoran desert.  Lekson’s theory is that these three city-sites were founded intentionally on a north-south meridian that extends from the Aztec Ruins in the north through Chaco Canyon’s Pueblo Bonita and, then, south to Paquime.  (Although the ancients wouldn’t have known the meridian, an European invention, is happens to be the 108th degree of north-south longitude.)  Aztec Ruins, Paquime, and Chaco’s Pueblo Bonita, separated by 550 miles from north to south, are aligned within about one or two miles east to west.  This alignment seems to be intentional and meant something to the people who ruled these places. 

Cerro Juanaqueana is about 15 miles to the west of the Chaco Meridian and, so, it might be asked whether that monumental site should be included in Lekson’s narrative.  Lekson demures.  One way of attacking the legitimacy of Lekson’s Aztec Ruins, Chaco, and Paquime hypothesis is to find other archaeological sites that line up with those place but which are obviously unrelated.  For instance, the Medicine Wheel site on the west escarpment of Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains, also, happens to be approximately on the Meridian – yet, it would be difficult to the point of absurdity to connect a prehistoric Plains Indian site to the pueblo cities hundreds of miles to the south.  The problem with Cerro Juanaqueana as a Meridian monument is that it is simply too early – 1700 years from the inception of the Chaco phenomenon.  On the other hand, Lekson, in a footnote published in his remarkable book The Chaco Meridian: One-Thousand Years of Political and Religious Power in the Ancient Southwest (1999, substantially revised 2015), agrees that the terraces at Cerro Juanaqueana are sufficiently weird and monumental to make the cut – although he suggests this may take 15 years or more of additional study. In other words, he won’t rule out a connections of some kind, but, presently, doesn’t know how that relationship would be argued.  (On the basis of aerial photographs, Cerro Juanaqueana looks to me a lot like the six concentric rings and mound-works at Poverty Point in western Louisiana – another “impossible” site that dates to about the same time.  The Poverty Point embankments are renowned for being “completely useless”.)

Lekson’s theory is remarkably interesting and worth understanding in some detail.  His historical narrative centers on Chaco Canyon and, so, a preliminary account of Lekson’s understanding of that place is necessary.  Chaco Canyon, as most people know, is the most important archaeological site in the southwestern United States. I’ve been there and can attest to its peculiar, ominous fascination.  First, the site is extremely remote – you drive for fifty miles on bad roads to reach the federally protected archaeological zone.  The territory is vast, empty chaparral with massive unexplored badlands, a place without towns or, even, any decent roads – now and then, you pass a Navajo ranch with a modest government pre-fab house standing next to the ruins of an old hogan.  Ragged-looking kids on horseback herd sheep across the desolate plain.  The ancient structures in the park, in many instances, are backed up against two-hundred foot chalky cliffs.  These people didn’t build with baked adobe – the walls are assembled from hewn stone, cyclopean ramparts looming over enormous kivas, structures with hundreds of cell-like rooms packed behind the formidable masonry.  The canyon is naked rock, a couple miles wide surrounding some salt flats where, perhaps, water floods through the landscape when it rains.  The canyon is nondescript and could be anywhere in the desert southwest, twenty miles of low crumbling cliffs with a few similarly nondescript and colorless buttes rising above the plains.  The vast walls and labyrinths of irregularly-shaped cubical rooms, passages between the cells marked with t-shaped masonry doors, have a brooding, sinister aspect.  When I crawled into the maze, I quickly became disoriented and almost panicked.  Inside the network of small chambers, of course, now all open to the blazing sunlight, there are blind passages, dead ends, and, if the way were not marked, you would immediately become lost, a prospect that I found very alarming.  When the labyrinth was roofed, it would have been even more horrible.  Experts imagine that many of the most interior rooms would have been totally dark and almost airless, possibly deadly to enter.  A number of so-called Great Houses, structures with D-shaped lay-out, were built in the canyon and, also, on the chaparral above the chalk cliffs.  Huge mound-shaped berms surrounded the Great Houses.  When archaeologists dug into them, expecting midden deposits, they found almost no organic debris.  In fact, there are very few burials in the canyon or its environs and little trace of agriculture.  The leads to the unsettling conclusion that no one really lived in the Great Houses – these structures were not pueblos or villages; they were something else.  A mile or so away from the canyon, on the plain, there are many “unit pueblos” – that is, small adobe structures that housed family groups of 15 to 30 people.  These are dwellings that look nothing like the Great Houses. 

The National Park service, when I visited Chaco Canyon, tells a couple of untruths about the place.  (Perhaps these errors have been since rectified.)  First, there is a suggestion that when Chaco Canyon culture flourished – between 800 and 1250 AD – the climate was different and more amenable to agriculture. This has proven to be untrue – Chaco Canyon is remarkably desolate now and was equally desolate a thousand years ago.  The place can’t sustain agriculture.  Food had to be carried to the complex of buildings by porters from the Chuska Valley, said to be the agricultural bread basket of Chaco, but about fifty miles away.  Second, the Park Service claims that the modern day Pueblo people, now mostly inhabitants of the upper Rio Grande between Bernalillo and Taos, are the descendants of the people who built Chaco Canyon.  (The previous name for these people, Anasazi – meaning “the enemy of my ancestors” in Navajo – is no longer de riguer.) The connection to the modern pueblo people, who pride themselves on efficient agriculture, revere the kachinas, and are resolutely egalitarian, is problematic.  A Hopi colleague of Lekson, considering the relationship between Chaco and his people, cites with approval the archaeologist’s observation that the pueblo Indian society arose “in reaction to, and rejection of Chaco, after 1300.”  In other words, the pueblo way of life is a repudiation of Chaco’s arrogance and power.  The Navajo always detested the place and what it represented – Athabaskan-speaking people, they were fundamentally hunter-gatherers forced by warfare, to adopt sedentary customs (sheep-herding and agriculture) and their culture was never even remotely equivalent to what seems to have happened at Chaco.  One of the most startling (and alarming) sites in Chaco Canyon is Chetro Ketl, a vast structure with formidable carved stone ramparts partly destroyed by a rockfall.  Big boulders from the crumbling yellow-white canyon escarpment have smashed and buried some of the labyrinth of small cell-rooms –the huge round boulders lie atop the masonry walls like colossal broken-knuckled fists.  The Navajo interpreted the rock-fall as the wrath of God, punishment inflicted on the Great Gambler who ruled the world from these structures.  The Great Gambler tricked mere mortals into playing games of chance with him and, then, enslaved his victims when their wagers were lost.  The Great Gambler came from some place else – in the early 20th century, the Navajo even said that he was probably a White man.  His grandmother was a giant old woman who carried a huge rock made from iron (most likely a meteorite) on her shoulders.  As far as the Navajo were concerned, the social experiment embodied by Chaco had been a catastrophe and should never be repeated in any way anywhere.

During my visit to the park, a man was lecturing in the Visitor Center’s small theater.  He had a group of about eight people with him.  I now think it was a Crow Canyon tour of Chaco.  (Crow Canyon is an archaeological conservancy associated with Mesa Verde.)  I recall that the man lecturing to the group said that the Great Houses had never been dwellings, at least, in the modern sense of the word.  “Instead,” he said (and I have remembered this for twenty years or more), “they are better conceived as opera sets.”  The group left the Visitor Center in a couple of jeeps.  They were planning to climb out of the canyon and, then, hike to administrative center of the Chaco complex, Pueblo Alto on the plain to the east of the canyon.  (I now know that this hike would have taken them up the daunting, but well-designed Jackson Staircase, a group of steps carved into the living rock of the cliff side leading up to the huge great house isolated in the desert about a couple miles away.)  The ancient staircase to the rim of the canyon also provided access to the Great Northern Road, a thirty foot wide causeway cut into the plain and striking north across the empty terrain toward the river valleys fifty kilometers away where the Aztec great house had been built.  In fact, Chaco stands at the center of radiating roads, all of them wide and curbed with boulders leading in the direction of the outlier Great Houses – that is, other big masonry structures located around the canyon center within a radius of about 250 kilometers.  Even as I write these words, I envy the happy people who hiked up the canyon wall and, then, walked to Pueblo Alto.  I’m too old today to walk five miles, particularly in the nightmarish heat of the desert, and, from photographs showing the Jackson Staircase, it’s not clear to me that I would be able to make it up those sheer steps chiseled in the bone-white cliff.     

The National Park Service, when I was in the park, asserted that no one knew exactly why Chaco Canyon’s vast and mostly empty Great Houses had been built.  Beginning in 1999, Lekson claimed that he had solved the problem.  For years, scholars debated the nature of the Chaco polity.  It was asserted that the eerie emptiness at the center of Chaco’s sphere of influence signified a hitherto unknown political system – some sort of theocracy ruled by mathematician-astronomer priests or, perhaps, an “acephalous chieftaincy”, that is, social system ruled by a chief except without a chief.  Some of these ideas circulated about the Mayans when I was in High School – their acropolis-temples hidden in the jungle were thought to be the realm of philosopher scientists, engaged in one task only, the study of celestial time.  The Mayans were thought to be uniquely peaceable and kindly.  This was before Linda Schele and others broke their linguistic code and were able to read Mayan glyphs.  We now know that the Mayans lived in city-states similar to the warring principalities in renaissance Italy.  Mayan city-states were ruled by dynastic families fully as violent as the great war lords like the Medici in Florence and the condottieri who ruled in Ferrara, Venice and other towns in Italy.

The Aztec empire consolidated numerous city-states in Mexico.  The Aztecs were a true empire on the imperial Roman scale – they conquered independent principalities, forced them to pay tribute, and garrisoned their cities.  Nahuatl, the language spoken by the Aztec emperors in Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico City) had a name for these sorts of duchies – they were called Altpeme, the plural for Altpetl (that is “water-mountain”).  An Altpetl was a city-state generally comprised of 10,000 to 15,000 (with some boasting 40,000 or more) people ruled by noble families that claimed celestial lineage from their subjects born from the earth.  Altpeme maintained their own religious and language traditions, although their rulers spoke Nahuatl in order to transact business with the Aztecs.  Prior to the Aztecs imposing their political will on these city-states, the altpeme were engaged in, more or less, perpetual warfare, forming and, then, breaking alliances between individual dukedoms – the elite families intermarried to form alliances, but these were tentative and, mostly, unstable.  An altpetl possessed a capital or central village where the ruling elite maintained palaces, more or less off-limits to the commoners. Usually, the capital or central village supported a market that attracted peasant farmers and tradesmen. 

Lekson claims that this model for social organization describes Chaco.  At its height, Chaco supported approximately 60,000 people, most of them living in scattered family pueblos or small villages, a densely populated “suburban” zone, as it were, surrounding the Great Houses in the canyon and located on its rim.  The Great Houses were mostly vacant, built to impress the people living in the unit (family) pueblos and the villages – these people grew maize and other crops that supported the polity.  Noble families lived in the Great Houses with their retainers.  Most of the structures at a Great House were uninhabited or used only rarely for religious or ritual purposes.  Periodically, it can be assumed that fearsome sacred dances and sacrifices occurred in the plazas at the Great Houses – these rituals, likely involving distribution of food, were intended to terrorize or intimidate the peasants into obedience.   Lekson suggests that the Chaco nobility probably sponsored a market, but the remains of that place have not been found.  Since the population density was low in “downtown Chaco”, as Lekson calls it, the polity seems to have an “empty” or vacant center – this is because peasants were afforded access to the majestic palaces only rarely, on ceremonial occasions.

American archaeology has long-labored under institutional racism.  Until the last forty years or so, there has been an aversion to ascribing complex political and social structures to North American Indians.  The notion was that Indians living north of the (wholly arbitrary) border were nomadic, hunter-gatherers, by and large, foraging a vast and empty territory.  But, anyone reading accounts of the first contacts between Europeans and Indian tribes will be struck by the fact that renaissance explorers describe the Indians as living in large villages, often with palisades and other fortifications, and ruled by “kings.”  The Spaniards, originating in a medieval feudal system, similarly assimilated the Indians to familiar social forms on the Iberian peninsula – the tribes had caciques, lived in cities that were more beautiful and well-designed than their European counterparts, and made war through a sort of chivalry, jaguar-knights who formed an elite nobility.  We are only now appreciating that the social structures of North American Indians, destroyed in a few generations by disease and genocide, were complex and, often, hierarchical.  Lekson says that if the buildings at Chaco Canyon were found in Egypt or Syria or Greece (and particularly Crete) they would immediately be recognized as palaces.  The fact that the Great Houses were built where they weren’t supposed to be – in the southwest 1200 miles from the high civilizations in Mexico led archaeologists to mis-identify them.  The Great Houses signify, in Lekson’s view, an altpetl ruled by dynastic noble families with a social system that probably formed around 500 AD and lasted a thousand years.

Lekson observes that Chaco Canyon supported an extremely large aggregate of pit-houses at a place called Shabik, a place on the 108th meridian.  All Chaco and proto-Chaco sites are, to use Lekson’s vocabulary “weird” – “weird” means interesting and rich with exotic trade goods.  Shabik was, in effect, a village before villages were supposed to exist in the American southwest.  It represents some kind of social phenomenon preceding the establishment of the Great Houses at Chaco.  North of Chaco is a place called Blue Mesa and Sacred Ridge.  This place, now under the waters of Lake Nighthorse, an impounded reservoir on the Animas River, was about four miles south of Durango, Colorado.  Blue Mesa and Sacred Ridge were also very strange places.  The settlement was really several congregations of pit-houses, but with odd dwellings much larger than the structures customary around 750 to 800 AD – in fact, the pit-houses look something like kivas, have benches in them, and are 50% larger than the dwellings elsewhere in the area.  Furthermore, the Sacred Ridge basin, now drowned by the lake, was dominated by a tower located within line-of-sight of the pit-house villages.  The tower was made to be seen since it was visible from all dwellings in the valley.  As with Chaco, the tower seems to have been a “vacant center” – it wasn’t a fortification or a dwelling as far as can be determined.  Blue Mesa and Sacred Ridge were immediately north of Shabik on the meridian.  The valley was abandoned around 800 AD after a horrific massacre.  About 31 people, men, women and children, were killed and their remains subjected to something called “Extreme Processing.”  The deceased seem to have been savagely tortured – they were hobbled by having their ankles smashed to pieces and the soles of their feet scalped.  Then, the victims were hacked into tiny pieces in two of the kiva-shaped pithouses.  Individual bones were crushed and ground on metates made for processing corn.  (One metate and mano ensemble was found with broken teeth still cradled on the grinding stone.)  The bodies were reduced to 35,000 splinters of bone and, then, the wood vigas supporting the roofs of the big kiva-shaped pithouses were set on fire and burned.  Analysis of the bone fragments shows that the people ground to pulp in the two pit-houses were ethnically distinct from the others living at Sacred Ridge and Blue Mesa, families that had immigrated to the valley apparently from somewhere else, but who had been living with the natives of the place before being “ethnically cleansed.”

After the massacre at Sacred Ridge, the elites in that place seem to have migrated back down the 108th Meridian to Chaco.  The great houses at Chaco Canyon were built at that time – between 850 and 1150.  Chaco was aggressive, large, and controlled a sphere of influence extending about 250 kilometers from the palace complexes in the canyon.  Archaeologists know that the palaces and their supporting population living within a five mile radius of the Great Houses were provisioned by porters carrying corn and other foods to the canyon from fields as far as 150 kilometers from the city.  (The use of the word “city” has been contested in application to Chaco.  This is because the palace compounds central to the polity were not densely inhabited and didn’t operate trade markets as far as we can determine.  However, if a city is defined as a system with a clearly delineated center and a periphery that is economically and socially dependent on that center – the current definition used in anthropology – then, Chaco was, indeed, a city-state.)   Chaco is “as full of weird stuff as a Santa Fe flea market, Lekson explains.  The palaces kept scarlet macaws imported from Mexico and there were clay pedestals specially designed for the display of exotic feathers.  (Lekson reminds us that when Cortez demanded that the Aztec lords produce their wealth, they didn’t pony-up gold, but, rather, the feathers of exotic birds native to the tropical rain forests in Chiapas, Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica.)  People had copper bells from Meso-America and the great lords drank hallucinogenic cacao from Mexico is tall ceramic flutes. Human sacrifices occurred at Chaco, the dead neatly laid out with extensive grave goods but with ceramic pots substituted for their (missing) skulls. 

An important formula for Lekson is this: Chaco = Aztec Ruins + Paquime.  Around 1125 - 1150, the center of Chaco civilization was abandoned.  Lekson’s hypothesis is that part of the Chaco nobility followed the 108th meridian north to Aztec, a huge Chaco ruin about 50 miles north of the canyon.  The other moeity or half of the elite began a trek to the south that resulted in the foundation of Paquime, an adobe city in Chihuahua, Mexico about 650 miles from the deserted palaces at Chaco.  Everyone agrees that Aztec Ruins is a Chaco “outlier” and a very significant site – also “weird” in many ways.  Paquime’s relation to Chaco is denied by most practicing archaeologists specializing in Southwest prehistory.  Indeed, Paquime is generally argued to be a Mogollon culture site, albeit one that is massively more elaborate and urban than other known examples of those villages.  Casa Grandes, a massive adobe tower at the center of a huge network of irrigation ditches, about fifty miles south of Phoenix is, usually,described as Hohokom or Mogollon – the terms are used, more or less interchangeably.  Modern-day Phoenix contains the remains of several large Hohokom (Mogollon) pueblos –the “Grand Pueblo” near the Sky Harbor airport at Phoenix even has a small L-shaped ball-court built on the model of Aztec and Mayan playing fields.  Lekson’s innovation is to claim that Paquime, built on the 108th meridian is, in fact, a Chaco site, designed around a Great House of the kind found at Chaco Canyon, Aztec Ruins, and other places. Lekson’s formula describes estimates of the population of Chaco as compared with Aztec Ruins and Paquime – if we add the number of people living in Aztec Ruins to the numbers thought to have dwelt at Paquime, the total is the presumed population of Chaco.

Why does Lekson think Paquime is a Chaco site?  This argument proceeds on the basis of architectural traits that are diagnostic of Chaco culture.  Three arbitrary, and, therefore, distinctive features found in Chaco structures are vertically bifurcated interior rooms, colonnades, and stone-disc support systems.  Both Aztec and Chaco display rooms that have two levels.  A corridor bisects the room and the vertical space (floor to ceiling) is divided on both sides of his aisle into an upper lower compartment.  The shelf-like compartments are built by inserting vigas into the rooms about half-way up the walls and, then, using thatching or some other sort of woven material to create a shelf.  No one knows why this was done, but this quirk is found at all major Chaco sites and, further, has been identified at Paquime all across the site.  Chaco’s Chetro Ketl great house was built with an exterior colonnade, pillars creating alcoves along the facade of the structure.  (Colonnades are common in meso-American architecture throughout Mexico and the Mayan world and, apparently, signify public buildings.)  There are no known colonnades at Aztec Ruins, although we know that site is a Chaco culture location for other reasons.  Lekson also points out that only 5% of Aztec Ruins has been excavated and, although this is unlikely, perhaps there is a colonnade lurking somewhere underground.  Interior platforms were hidden in the structure and would not have been visible except to those admitted access to the palace compounds.  Therefore, we can be reasonably sure that this feature wasn’t simply imitated by the people who built Aztec Ruins and Paquime.  Of course, the colonnaded facade is an ostentatious public display and, so, perhaps, might have been simply mimicked by ambitious builders in Chihuahua – indeed, imitated from Aztec public buildings to the south.  But the third feature diagnostic of Chaco culture is wholly enigmatic and completely concealed.  This is the use of heavy stone discs as foundation support for load-bearing walls or great kivas.  Sandstone was chiseled into disks about 20 to 40 inches in diameter and about six inches thick.  These disks were stacked under the center posts in great kivas at Chaco and Aztec Ruins; they are found in many locations at Paquime supporting load-bearing elements in larger rooms.  This construction feature is installed below-grade and, therefore, is hidden by the building that it supports.  (The discs don’t represent a solution engineered to solve construction problems at the three sites; the discs, sometimes stacked like pancakes, as Lekson says, are not really functional – we don’t know what they mean.)  There are a number of other features that create “family resemblances” between the canonical Great Houses at Chaco Canyon and buildings at Aztec Ruins and Paquime – for instance, tau-shaped doors and facilities for housing macaws.  But the three distinguishing features that Lekson identifies suggest that the people who built the Great Houses at Chaco were related to those who constructed Aztec Ruins and Paquime. 

Aztec Ruins is a complex case.  First, there’s no doubt that this site is part of Chaco world.  Chaco princes built arrow-straight roads.  These roads are very wide and level, marked by curb-stones, and extend across long stretches of barren desert and chaparral.  Of course, the Chaco people didn’t have wheeled carts and no beasts of burden – porters carried things in wicker baskets on their backs.  Therefore, no reason exists for the construction of a 20 foot wide, graded road.  Furthermore, these roads are strangely abstract – they run directly into canyons or buttes, vanish for awhile, then, appear on the other side of the obstacle.  It seems that these roads were more schematic and ceremonial than practical.  Many of the roads begin at a Great House, radiate away from the structure than, simply, end in the open terrain.  A dozen miles later, a new road will pick up the alignment of the truncated one and, then, lead to another Great House outlier. 

The best documented Chaco structure of this sort is the Great North Road.  This road runs for miles, beginning at Tsin Kletsin, a great house on the south plateau overlooking the canyon.  The road passes through the canyon and leads to Pueblo Alto, the northernmost great house in the Chaco core.  From Pueblo Alto, a number of roads radiate in various directions.  However, the road linking Tsin Kletsin and Pueblo Alto continues due north for 50 kilometers, sometimes angling slightly to the east or west to avoid obstacles, but remaining within one degree of true north on the 108th meridian to end up at the door of Aztec Ruins.  Clearly, the people at Chaco and Aztec were bound together in some sort of cultural unity by the Great North Road.

Aztec, however, is architecturally peculiar.  Conventional Chaco great houses are D-shaped that is walled half-circles.  Aztec, at least where excavated, completes this circular form but complicates it by tri-wall construction.  A number of buildings at Aztec show this tri-wall feature – that is circular buildings in which three concentric walls encircle a central kiva equipped with bench extrusions from the inner (or fourth) wall.  (In fact, Aztec shows bi-, tri-, quadri walled circular structures – the buildings have a door on outer ring that opens into room within the second ring of walls; between the rings there are small cubicals, presumably accessed from above because they do not interconnect and can’t be reached from the room that connect to the outside.  The inner kiva is accessed through its smoke-hole for its hearth.) There is one of these tri-walls at Chaco at Pueblo del Arroyo – one of the last structures built in Chaco -- and several in various outliers.  However, the big ruins at Aztec have at least three tri-walls.  The last structure built at Aztec was a kiva-like enclosure ringed by four-walls.  Shortly after it was built, the quadri-wall was intentionally burned – again, the significance of this act is unclear but, it seems, to correlate with the abandonment of the city and the dispersion of its population in the direction of the historic pueblos located at Acoma, on the Zuni and Hopi lands, and at the Tewa villages north of Santa Fe.  This last tri-wall was burned and abandoned some time around 1275 – this date said to mark the end of the Chaco culture’s hegemony in the Four Corners area.  Lekson associates Aztec as a cultural innovation that drew upon Chaco traditions but interpreted them in a radically different way.  Acoma, Hopi, and Zuni oral histories assert that their people originated at the beautiful “white house”, but, then, migrated away from that place because “bad things” had happened there.  Lekson thinks the “white house” is Aztec Ruins.  These same tribes maintain that a large number of the original people “went south”.  This happened when a seer told the people to divide into two halves and, then, select either a bright blue egg or a plain brown one.  The people who picked the beautiful blue egg agreed to stay on the mesa at Acoma.  The blue egg was hoped to hatch a scarlet macaw, but the bird was only a crow.  Nonetheless, this group of people built their pueblo at Acoma, banished the noblemen, and lived as farmers – later, the Kachina rain gods came from the mountains and they worshiped them.  (The Catholic triune God arrived with the armor-plated conquistadors a couple centuries after that and was also accepted as a deity.)  The people who picked the dull brown egg waited until it hatched – inside was a scarlet macaw and so they went south and vanished from the world of the pueblo people. 

Paquime, Lekson maintains, is the place to which half of the people went after the collapse of Aztec.  This is where his meridian hypothesis may be tenuous, although he’s lawyerly, manipulative, and very persuasive in marshaling evidence in support of his contentions.  Pottery and ceramic-sequences are hostile to this theory since Paquime’s material culture seems to be Hohokom-Mogollon.  Ceramic chronology is a vital to most archaeological theory – in fact, the so-called modern scientific era of archaeological studies is characterized by field researchers defining pottery sequences by which to date sites.   Lekson breezily dismisses this sort of evidence.  He argues that the elites at Chaco could acquire any kind of pottery that they wanted by exchange and that, therefore, ceramics don’t mean more than that the people in the canyon traded with other tribes and used their goods.  He notes that the only distinctive pottery produced at Chaco were the tall, narrow flutes for drinking cacao – everything else was derived from neighboring traditions and, probably, produced remote from the canyon.  Accordingly, Lekson argues that the fact that Paquime looks like a Mogollon site on the basis of its pottery doesn’t require that the ruling elites be Mogollon – the ceramics at the site are opportunistic, a product of the fact that Paquime was built in the middle of older pueblos that it annexed and that were Mogollon. 

In a footnote, Lekson tells us that Vine Deloria, the famous Native American activist, was a practicing lawyer and encouraged the author to develop his arguments in a more forensic, courtroom-friendly style.  Accordingly, Lekson develops his “proof” that the Meridian connects Aztec Ruins through Chaco to Paquime on the basis of three parameters: means, motive, and opportunity – that is, did the Chaco elites have the means, motive, and opportunity to raise their cities along the 108th meridian?

Means to find true south and maneuver in that direction are readily established.  “Boy scouts,” according to Lekson can readily determine true south with no tools more sophisticated than a gnomon, that is a staff driven into the ground and string.  The gnomon’s shadow determines direction and tracing a 360 degree circle on the ground around the upright staff creates a compass that can be divided into quadrants to determine the cardinal directions.  This can be accomplished in a matter of minutes and, then, a sight-line can be established in the direction selected – here directly south along the 108th meridian.  Chaco surveyors knew how to do this –the Great North road runs true north for fifty kilometers to Aztec ruins and, in principle, there’s no reason a sight-line to the south couldn’t be drawn by people moving in that direction, day-after-day.  In fact, the extremely accurate determination of north and south seems correlated to daily re-establishment of compass directions and, then, sight lines.  Small errors that are intrinsic to the process will correct themselves if a large number of compass sightings are implemented – it’s a matter of statistics.  Lekson surmises that the survey-sightings were part of some kind of priestly ritual and had religious implication.  Chaco surveying was also a kind of worship or prayer.  Straight ritual-roads were not primarily means of conveyance, but, also, highways through time liking the mythic place of origins, the White House, with the present and future.

Motive may also be effectively argued.  We know that Chaco elites were obsessed with north-south axises.  Modern Pueblo people regard only one direction as true and unerring – this is the North.  All planetary and celestial phenomena revolve around the so-called “heart of the sky” – this is true North.  Truth, clarity, and eternal things are signified by the north.  Thus, establishing north-south meridians was important at Chaco.  In one case, a large subsurface kiva underlies a Great House.  The Great House was built on a north-south alignment that passes directly over the kiva.  This obviously created logistical difficulties but the alignment was regarded as pre-eminently important.  The builders erected weight-bearing piers atop the kiva in order to erect Great House walls and maintain the (presumably) sacred alignment of the structure. 

Lekson identifies the ritual phenomenon of moving in a direction accurately as a central motive in the development of his surmised meridian.  This is consistent with an understanding of ancient temples and palaces that ascribes the meaning of the structure to the work required to build it.  Building itself was sacramental.  (This idea underlies the secret society of the Freemasons).  The people who built the pyramids consecrated it with their labor – the labor was an end in itself.  Similarly, the concept of moving purposefully and accurately in a specific direction was meaningful to Chaco elites – the act of tracing the Meridian was itself a form of worship.  Lest we regard these ideas as fanciful, Lekson notes that every Islamic mosque is oriented toward Mecca.  Each mosque has a niche or a qibla that points toward Mecca.  There is a meridian-orientation in Islam.  Therefore, we can’t dismiss out of hand, a similar orientation among Chaco elites – there are indisputable examples of this kind of thinking even in our modern world.

Opportunity is established by chronology.  Here is where Lekson seems to run into difficulties with ceramic sequences.  Much of the pottery at Paquime seems to show Mimbres’ influence (Mimbres was a Mogollon culture in New Mexico).  Mimbres’ ceramics are among the most beautiful in the world, esthetically pleasing objects of the highest order, and this sort of table-ware is ubiquitous at Paquime, suggesting a connection to the New Mexico villages in the Mimbres’ valley.  Lekson argues that the move from Chaco to Paquime crossed through the Mimbres valley and, therefore, the elites undertaking that passage would have, certainly, acquired a taste for the uniquely beautiful ceramics produced in that place.  Thus, the Mimbres’ pottery found at Paquime is consistent with well-heeled elites passing through the Mimbres sphere of influence. 

Lekson’s account of “opportunity” to commit the ideological crime of the “meridian” is fundamentally chronological.  Shabik was on the meridian and abandoned a little after 700 A.D.  Sacred Ridge followed, also on the meridian, and flourished until about 800 AD when the massacre took place. The elites, then, moved to Chaco and built their great houses (palaces) in the canyon.  This cultural center dominated the southwest with its roads and extensive outliers through 1125 - 1150.  The elites, then, moved north on the Meridian to Aztec Ruins.  Around 1250, Aztec Ruins was abandoned and, by 1300 AD, Paquime is flourishing.  The movement across the southwest on the meridian is not a mass migration – rather, only elite nobility moves from place to place.  The substrate of peasants remains on the land in their unit (family) pueblos and, later, their larger tenement-style and communal pueblos.  Historic pueblo people are radically egalitarian and, generally, peaceful.  (There are exceptions – for instance, the slaughter at the Hopi pueblo at A’wotovi around 1700.)  These characteristics of historic pueblo society are a reaction against the top-down authoritarian rule of the Chaco elites.

Lekson doesn’t end his story with Paquime.  Hundreds of miles south of Paquime there was a enormous city-state pueblo at Culiacan.  Culiacan was known in historic times and seems to have reached its zenith a little after 1500.  Lekson is convinced the Culiacan, also on the meridian, was the final city colonized by Chaco elites.  Culiacan still exists as a modern city that Lekson thinks is probably “pleasant enough” if you know “the rules of the place.”  But Lekson admits he doesn’t know those rules and, if he went there to do field work, he would end up ‘disappeared’.  Culiacan is the headquarters for the Sinaloa drug cartel and it is one of the most dangerous places on the planet.  Accordingly, Lekson says that he can’t develop proof for what he knows intuitively – Culiacan also was part of the Chaco world, circa 1500 and continuing into the modern era.       


2.
Successful archaeologists have some elements of obsessive compulsive disorder.  They spend immense amounts of time looking at the ground, scrutinizing the terrain for tiny broken and discarded objects, and, then, labor for years to assemble these fragments into some kind of coherent narrative.  This narrative, of course, is what ultimately matters to non-archaeologists – we want to know what the data means.  But archaeological professionals are leery of interpretations.  This is because they accept the scientific proposition that all interpretations are provisional and, therefore, necessarily false to some degree.

Technical literature in the field tends to be written in a manner that is intentionally dull.  Most field reports are merely lists of objects and locations with very limited analysis of what this data means.  It seems to me that there is a level of disdain for so-called “interpretation” among professional archaeologists.  Once, I discussed a book by Timothy Pauketat with a highly regarded archaeologist specializing in Olmec studies.  Pauketat’s book about the prehistoric city at Cahokia in eastern Illinois had been a modest success - a lot of copies were sold.  The Olmec expert knew Pauketat slightly and expressed just the faintest disdain for the book – “your colleagues don’t forgive you if you write a popularization,” the man told me. 

Curiously, it seems that issues of “theory” have become increasingly important in archaeology as well as in sociology and, recently, in comparative literature.  A “theory” signifies an ideology, although, perhaps, hidden, an agenda that drives analysis.  “Theory” necessarily underlies all scientific endeavor and, therefore, it is necessary to make the theory visible –to expose it’s assumptions and limitations.  Thus, even no-nonsense writers like Lekson tend to raise theoretical considerations in their work.  But, notwithstanding “theory”, another interesting phenomenon is at work in archaeological studies – the archaeologist’s style comes to resemble the characteristics of the social phenomena that he (my examples are male) studies.

Chaco culture was flamboyant, dramatic, even theatrical.  Lekson writes in a melodramatic highly charged vernacular prose – he teases and, then, reveals; he sets up straw-men to knock down; he anticipates counter-arguments and dismisses them with flourishes of rhetoric.  The Chaco elites were aggressive and prone to histrionic violence.  Lekson is happiest when attacking adversaries.  He tends to be boastful and nakedly assertive.  The Chaco built big linear roads linking landscape features and structures that were significant to them.  Lekson’s argumentation lines things up along his meridian and, then, builds connecting links.  The Chaco elites loved scarlet macaw feathers.  Lekson decorates his prose with puns, jokes, hyperbole – he describes the use of the imported birds at Chaco as involving “macaws and effects” principles.  Sometimes, there’s a loopy, half-stoned quality to Lekson’s prose, possibly related to his home base at Boulder, Colorado.  People in Boulder are radically left-leaning except when they’re not – the place engenders contrarians of all kinds, enemies to established thought, including right-wing idealogues who live in Boulder just for the purpose of stirring up trouble.  (I knew a former NASA rocket-scientist who was from the place: He called in “Fort Boulder” after its origins and observed that about every month “someone gets a bee in their bonnet and rides out of Fort Boulder to save the world.”  Of course, he was disdainful but wouldn’t live anywhere else.)  The Chaco elites may have been similar – one imagines them aristocratically gulping down hallucinogenic chocolate in yard-long ceramic mugs.

Poverty Point’s poet-laureate of archaeology is Jon Gibson.  Gibson’s published work on Poverty Point is exceptionally interesting and, also, demonstrates the stylistic convergence between student and the thing studied. Gibson, who is now 77, has spent his professional life excavating at Poverty Point and communities peripheral to that place located in east central Louisiana, about twenty miles to the west of the Mississippi – Poverty Point is 55 miles northwest of Vicksburg.  As I have earlier remarked, Poverty Point looks a bit like Cerro Juanaqueana, albeit squashed flat.  The city of mounds was built between 1800 and 1400 BC, that is, far too early for an urban site to exist according to conventional archaeological wisdom.  But there’s no doubt that the place was a city by all definitions – first, it was densely populated and, second, the core or center of a peripheral apparatus of smaller villages and what Gibson styles “work camps.”  Poverty Point consists of six elliptical embankment rings, arranged in a half-circle around a low escarpment that overlooks the vast swamps, bayous, and ox-bow lakes extending to the main channel of the Mississippi.  The concentric ring embankments comprise earthworks that would be 4000 yards long if stretched out head to tail.  The rings are not fortifications, because six aisles or corridors slash through them.  Six large mounds are located along alignments established by the corridors cut through the embankments.  One of the mounds in the shape of a flying bird is about 70 feet high. 

Midden deposits show that the embankments were where the people inhabiting this place lived.  They built their houses atop the mounds and threw garbage into the swales between the embankments.  Like most hunter-forager groups they ate just about everything including frogs, alligators and rodents.  Poverty Point people also consumed seeds and various sorts of wild fruits and gourds.  However, their staple was fish – the lagoons and bayous to the east of Poverty Point teem with fish, as much as a million pounds per acre of wetland.  Poverty Point was anything but poor.  In fact, Gibson describes the city as existing in a kind of earthly paradise, abundantly, even, voluptuously fruitful.   Although sedentary – the place dominated the region for 350 years – there is no trace of agriculture – this was a hunter-gatherer culture that somehow built a city.  Through most of its history, Poverty Point lacked ceramics – people cooked in carved soapstone bowls or used hearth-ovens.  Fires were established in these pits which were filled with so-called PPO – Poverty Point Objects.  PPO are thumb-sized spheres or tube-shaped objects fashioned from hand-molded clay (loess) and, then, baked until hard.  PPO retained heat and allowed the people to cook in the hearths without burning their food.  Soups could be made by assembling contents in a soapstone pot and, then, dropping in a PPO to heat the water.  Tens of thousands of these objects have been found at Poverty Point and its associated camps – the objects are considered diagnostic of the culture. 

Gibson characterizes himself ethnically as a “southerner.”  He was raised in rural Louisiana in LaSalle Parish.  His non-technical book describing Poverty Point field work and studies is The Ancient Mounds of Poverty Point, Place of Rings (University Press of Florida, Tallahassee 2000).  Like Lekson, Gibson writes in an engaging, though non-confrontational style.  (By contrast, Lekson begins Chapter 1 in the Meridian with a series of exhortations concluding with “Fill up, because we’re diving into the deep end and not coming up for air!”  Gibson, as a polite and courtly southerner, would regard this kind of prose as simply rude.)  Gibson’s prehistoric Poverty Point is the exact antithesis to Lekson’s brutal and hierarchical Chaco.  Gibson regards his tribe at Poverty Point as committed to egalitarian principles of kindness and sharing.  No one had more than anyone else – there were no noble families and no commoners, no warfare, no violence; everyone lived in harmony on their six semi-circular embankments, these earthworks were a mandala for a cosmos in divine equilibrium.  There are six embankment earthworks because the world has six dimensions – east, west, south, north, up and down.  Evil came from the west and, therefore, the circles opened to the east where the life-giving sun rose and were closed to wicked spiritual influences emanating from the opposite direction.  Some of the corridors cut through the embankments were celestially aligned.  The ring of the city, accordingly, was a diagram of the universe. 

Gibson’s imagined Poverty Point people are gentle, courteous, and idealized southerners.  In short, they are like the author who has studied them.  Gibson clearly loves his pre-agriculture Arcadians – he is prone to writing sentences of this kind: (the mixture of kindness and mutual obligation at Poverty Point) “was potent, supercharged with selfless doers who in their tireless travail raised standards of living to new heights.”  Much of his book has this flavor, something that I find charming, but that some readers might reject as saccharine.  The Ancient Mounds of Poverty Point is a rigorous study – in fact, some chapters are close to unreadable lists of exotic minerals and different types of lithic lance and atlatl points.  Gibson likes statistics and lards the book with them.  (In pre-ceramic cultures, lithic tools are used to establish chronological sequences: in other words, the way rock adzes, penetrators, biface hoes, and lance-tips are made tells us who made them, where, and at what time.)  He is a gifted artist and his sketches of ancient mounds and artifacts enliven the book – he also draws elegant images of the ancient people using their tools although the form of the man is always depicted as a black silhouette.  Humble to a fault, the only portrait of Gibson in the book shows him sitting in a pit that he has dug, cooling off against the heat of the day – you just see the top of his baseball cap and his luxuriant sideburns in the image.  In his own quiet way, Gibson is as persuasive as Lekson, although he ignites fewer fire-works and his conclusions, all based on generosity and kindness don’t have the gloomy Sturm und Drang of Lekson’s interpretations. 

Gibson’s first chapter is a fairly elegant jargon-free summary of theoretical trends in archaeology.  He notes that mid-century archaeology was cultural – artifacts provided clues to timeless prehistoric cultural characteristics.  Cultural history was supplanted by processual archaeology – in this analysis, the process by which social structures were formed is the subject of study; the field worker looks for transitional forms, early examples of social systems that reached their climaxes generations or, even, hundreds of years earlier.  Post-processual archaeology is founded upon the notion that the mentality of ancient people can be ascertained from the traces they leave.  We can reconstruct how ancient people’s thought about their world, how they “constructed” the world, by examining archaeological evidence.  Gibson considers himself post-processual, an adherent, when he was young, to the ideas of Claude Levi-Strauss.  (Post-processual archaeology seems now supplanted in the academy with studies that emphasize the political or social agency of classes that were hitherto considered subservient and, therefore, ahistorical – in Meso-American studies archaeologists try to figure out how peasants or women acted as agents of change in their societies.  This emphasis is irrelevant to Gibson because his Povery Point People lived in an ideal classless society in which women’s labor was considered as meritorious as the work that men did.) 

The mentality that Gibson uses to reconstruct life at Poverty Point is that of a rural southerner.  Whatever else they were, the Poverty Point people were, first and foremost southerners, who behaved according to the social paradigms of the rural parish where Gibson was raised.  Although stated in this way, Gibson’s conclusions may seem arbitrary, I think his arguments as reasonable and have a patina of common-sense persuasiveness.  Gibson was raised among rural people who were self-sufficient and supplemented their wages by hunting and foraging.  These people were reliant on kin for assistance in hard times and recognized that doing favors for others was the glue of social obligation.  Gibson uses the rather odd locution “the power of kindness” for this system of reciprocal obligations.  When someone does a favor for you, your response is “much obliged” – that is, articulating that you are now “obliged” to perform a reciprocal favor.  The reciprocal favor should have a value slightly greater than the good deed done for you – this is the distinctively Louisianan notion of lagniappe.  Lagniappe signifies this “little bit extra” accompanying the reciprocal good deed.  Southerners as distinct as Gibson, the Poverty Point People over 3000 years ago, and Huey Long all relied upon lagniappe as the lubricant that made their social system functional.  Gibson illustrates these concepts by anecdotes from his youth in rural LaSalle Parish.  These autobiographical memories are touchstones for Gibson – they establish in a common sense way a proposition that is mystical: Gibson understands the Poverty Point People because, intellectually, he is really one of them.

It’s worth parsing the outlines of Gibson’s theory to understand how his demiurge –the power of kindness – works.  Like Rousseau, Gibson accepts that there is inequality among men.  However, this inequality is homely and practical – some men are just better fishermen than others; no one knows why but it’s an observed fact.  Fish are highly perishable and, so, if you catch more fish than your neighbors, you will necessarily share those fish with them – otherwise, the catch will rot.  (I’ve experienced this in Minnesota – when I was a kid, men would come back from fishing trips to the north lakes or Canada with a superabundance of walleyes and muskies.  These fish would, then, be distributed as gifts to people in the blue-collar neighborhood where I was raised.)  Sharing food in this way creates a system of mutual obligation – if you give me some fish, I’ll be willing to help you pile up dirt to make a mound on which to erect your dwelling.  Around the 18th century BC, Poverty Point fisherman figured out how to use nets to catch fish when the water was running high and with a current – that is, in winter or flood season.  The technology that allowed Poverty Point fisherman to successfully net their prey in bad weather was the weighted plumb-line net.  The tips of nets were weighted with carefully fashioned tear-drop-shaped orbs of hematite, a heavy stone that pulled the net down to the bottom of the lagoon even if the water was high or a current was flowing.  Poverty Point is built on a long, narrow terrace, the Macon ridge that runs for about a hundred miles above the Mississippi swamps. This ridge was formed from loess – that is, wind-blown silt and this soil formation is wholly devoid of stones and rock.  The nearest rock deposits were gravel about 40 miles away.  Therefore, the people at Poverty Point, who were, of course, stone-age hunters and gatherers lacked the single most important resource necessary to survival, that is, stone from which to fashion tools, including the plumb-weights for their skein nets.  Hematite and other exotic stones are quarried in the Ouachita Mountains in present-day Arkansas about 125 miles away.  The settlement at Poverty Point became a center for the processing and redistribution of exotic rocks.  These stones could be conveyed to Poverty Point by river, using pirogues or canoes.  The volume of exotic, imported rock found at Poverty Point is simply staggering – there may be as much as 30 tons of imported rock strewn around the place. 

The exotic minerals are equally distributed throughout the entire site.  There is absolutely no evidence that anyone had more of this commodity than anyone else.  There are no palaces, no hoards, no caches, and no burials have been found and, so, no grave goods.  Everyone in town had the same amount of imported rock to chip into tools.  Similarly, the “work camps” discovered all around Poverty Point were also equally equipped with appropriate tools – adzes to use in skinning and processing deer, atlatl points, and hoes employed to rake up swamp-roots that were ground to make soups and flat-cakes.

Gibson’s interpretative theories seem plausible enough but they founder on one key point.  How did Poverty Point pay for the 30 tons of exotic rocks laboriously hauled to them and traded into their city?  Here Gibson admits being baffled – we don’t have any evidence that the other tribes supplying Poverty Point with exotic rock received anything in exchange.  Of course, something had to provided in consideration of all that chert, flint, greenstone, agate, and soapstone.  (There was even an blade made from Wyoming obsidian.)  But what was it?  Gibson says that what was given was “perishable or ideological”, but this is unclear.  Ultimately, Gibson says that what the traders with Poverty Point received for their exotic rocks was “hugs and handshakes, fun and festivities, wives and husbands, alliance-building and non-aggression pacts, revivals and rituals” – ultimately, the rocks were imported as a sort of gift.  This doesn’t seem exactly plausible although I admire Gibson for his sanguine view of human nature.  In this aspect of his treatise, Gibson’s love for his Poverty Point people colors his interpretation – the Poverty Point tribe was so remarkably kind, generous, wise and enterprising that foreigners would travel 600 arduous miles by river, pushing pirogues full of rock downstream, just for the opportunity of socializing with them.  Poverty Point was a kind of New Orleans or Memphis – it was fun to just be there in the bright lights of the big city.  Like all archaeological interpretations, the idea is a fiction but one that is pleasant to imagine. 

Southern culture is foreign to me and, to my eyes, much of Gibson’s analysis may be questionable.  But I recall once when I was in Atlanta, I ate in a franchise restaurant.  At the end of my meal, the waiter came to my table and, basically, offered me “seconds” – “Have you had a gracious a-plenty?” the waiter asked  Of course, I didn’t ask for more food, but it was strange to me that the offer was made.  I was a little tongue-tied and the waiter looked at me with an odd expression as if I were some kind of exotic barbarian. 

 


















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