Great houses for whom?: Chacoan monumental architecture in cross-cultural, cognitive, and ethnohistorical perspective

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a new interpretation of Chacoan Great Houses, multistoried masonry structures of the 9^th-12^th century U.S. Southwest, using insights from animist ontologies, cognitive science, cross-cultural analysis, and ethnohistory. Throughout time and space, societies have constructed buildings to serve as dwelling places for animate, divine entities immanent in material objects. We call these structures god houses and briefly review examples from numerous societies across the ancient/extramodern worlds and indigenous U.S. Southwest. We then apply this understanding to argue that the architectural logic and material assemblages of Chacoan Great Houses, and especially Pueblo Bonito, suggest identification as god houses, a notion that rephrases the usual distinction between ‘domestic’ and ‘ritual’ interpretations of Great Houses to consider the nature of the beings that dwelled within them. Our argument enriches investigations of the Chaco world by highlighting the role of religion and relations with non-human beings in the development of monumental architecture, regional organization, and inequality in the precontact U.S. Southwest.

KEYWORDS:

• Chaco Canyon
• temple architecture
• monumentality
• cognitive science of religion
• cross-cultural comparison

Acknowledgments

These ideas were first presented at a symposium honoring the career of Steve Lekson; we thank Steve for his inspiration to think about Chaco beyond the Southwest and his ongoing encouragement and guidance (even if he adamantly maintains that Great Houses were “not temples” [Lekson 2018, 263n2])! We also wish to acknowledge the influence and support of John Stein, whose interpretation of Chacoan Great Houses as temple architecture in the 1980s was far ahead of its time. A special thanks too to Lillian Makeda for connecting the authors and thereby catalyzing the completion of this paper. Conversations with and feedback from Sam Boyd, Wade Campbell, Cathy Cameron, Rich Friedman, Art Joyce, Scott Ortman, Tim Pauketat, Felipe Rojas, Anna Sofaer, and Rob Wiseman were particularly helpful. All errors remain ours.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We follow anthropologist Philippe Descola’s usage of extramodern (rather than non-Western, premodern, or traditional) to describe societies with ontologies that ‘grant to many nonhumans the dignity of being agents’ (Descola 2020, 40).

2. Despite arguments to the contrary (Bering 2011), evidence for the cognitive naturalness of religion does not negate the existence of deities (Barrett 2011, 149-152).

3. Assuming the Diné workman was 30 or 40 years old during the 1897 excavation of Pueblo Bonito, he would have been born during the Navajo Wars/Long Walk periods (AD 1850s, 1864-8). The (presumably older) medicine man who was the source of the information would therefore predate major Anglo-American interference in Diné cultural teachings, linguistic fluency, and so forth.

Additional information

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant number DGE 1650115.

Notes on contributors

Robert S. Weiner

Robert S. Weiner is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on Chaco Canyon, with particular emphasis on monumental roads, religion and ritual, gambling, and Diné (Navajo) oral traditions. More broadly, he is interested in the history of religion from the Paleolithic to present, cognition, monumentality, and comparative approaches.

Ema L. Smith is an undergraduate at Colorado College with interests in sociology, art history, and architectural history.