The Elites of Pueblo Bonito (2018) | Hacker News Reader

The Elites of Pueblo Bonito (2018)

thefifthwave.wordpress.com

23 pointsmooreds15 comments

When the end came, it came fast.

Were people generally better off, after? We call the time after the fall of Rome a Dark Age, but farmers certainly kept more of their harvest, for centuries.

The end came for Chaco Canyon slowly as it became unsustainable. The end never really came for the Chacoans, they just moved.

Define 'better'.

I'm not being (entirely) flip. After leaving Chaco they built a few more great houses, but ended up in a more hospitable environment with presumably lower environmental stress. Many different community styles seemed to form - variations on the Chaco culture. It's up to interpretation, but it seems likely that there were egalitarian and generally peaceful living coupled with social experimentation, but still stressed by environmental factors. Then the Spanish came, and relations were extraordinarily inhumane - slavery, massacres, famine, and so on.

It's a lot of conjecture - no written records, and after the treatment by first the Spanish and then US Government the descendants are almost entirely silent on the matter despite having significant oral traditions on these matters.

> One long wall followed an 18-year cycle of the moon – a remarkable feat of cultural memory for a people who lacked writing and whose life expectancy for men was 35 years (for women it was 24).

Is this the usual fallacy of using the life expectancy of birth as if that was the age when average adult expected to die? Because even without googling, I'm pretty sure that once someone from this civilization survived childhood, his expected age raised considerably, to 50-60 years.

Yes, just another fanciful element of this article. In general, if you made it past 18, expectancy ranged from 40-50 years. These populations were generally in very high stress - anemia was nearly universal, once farming started stools show universal evidence of pin worms and other parasites, and so on.

For example, the book "Centuries of Decline during the Hohokam Classic Period of Pueblo Grande" shows a mean lifespan of 20.1 years at Pueblo Grande, but 40.9 years if you make it to 18. https://books.google.com/books?id=DopkDQAAQBAJ

That's not Chaco, but gives the general idea.

This article is "just so" storytelling if the worst kind. Little or no evidence is produced for any of its conclusions -- just assertions that the historical Pueblan people "obviously" must have had a technological elite that desired separation from the riff-raff. It's completely ahistorical -- nothing but fact-free cultural projection.

Talk about cultural projection...

> The massive ruins of Chaco Canyon reminded the modern Americans who first encountered them of the Aztecs. Given their love of clean straight lines, symmetry, and order, and their penchant for monumentality, a more apt parallel to the Anasazi, I think, would be the old Romans. Like the Roman colony, Pueblo Bonito was built to a plan.

Either he doesn't know the aztecs, or any other culture from the region. He had to go to Rome, discounting other great cities like Tenochtitlan (Aztec, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenochtitlan), Teotihuacan (Toltec? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teotihuacan), Palenque, Chichen-Itza, Tikal from the Mayans, or Monte Alban from the Zapotec people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Alb%C3%A1n)....

Besides the extensive trade and travel done with what we now call Mexico, there was also a lot of trade, or at least travel, to CA at the time; beads formed from seashells gathered from the CA coast were a common feature of clothing and daily use items.

The writer of the article is ignorant, and the comparison to Rome is offensive.

It's a pretty bad article based on current thinking about Chaco. I have no doubt his guide was pretty good, but I suspect his retention and understanding of what he was told got things scrambled, and then he went off on his own tangents.

There's a lot of work being done tying Chaco to the broader region. The most forward thinking would be Steve Lekson's (UC Boulder) work, he proposes a migration along a meridian between Chaco, Aztec, and Paquime. I don't really subscribe to that particular view, but I am not a researcher and my opinion is worthless as far as that goes.

I found much of what is written in that article to be debatable at best, fanciful at worst. I'm not sure it is worth going into it line by line.

If this is a topic that interests people, books by David Roberts and Craig Childs give an excellent overview of what was going on at this time period, albeit in a very personal manner (e.g. do you care how David gets along with a hiking companion?). Then there are a significant number of books that are accessible to the lay reader without requiring you to read "methods and materials" types of research reports. But Roberts and Childs will give you the gist. I particularly like Childs' "House of Rain".

I do wonder if the Anasazi didn't have some form of written communication. It hardly makes sense that they could run a large enterprise without writing; and how did they manage to communicate and coordinate everything without it?

Just dealing with trade over a long distance alone, would itself seem to indicate that they developed some form of accounting.

They most likely used quipu for this I think. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu

Thanks for that information... Very interesting!

Quipu are from the Andes in South America. It's several thousand miles away.

There's no evidence of writing in pre-contact Pueblo cultures. There are some rock pictographs that might have symbolic meanings, that's about as close as it gets. It's a bit of a mystery why Central American writing systems didn't make their way this far north.

They absolutely didn't. This is well established.

What they did have is signal towers. There are towers throughout the 4 corners regions that enabled communication from (for example) SE Utah (Bears Ears) over to CO (mesa Verde), down to AZ or over to NM (Chaco, Salmon, et al). It is of course unknown the extent and nature of the communications. Not all communication were via the towers; sites have been found that are in visible sight lines with towers but are just bare hill tops, bare except the extensive fire damage created by undoubtedly decades of fires lit there.

My ancestors were not the Anasazi. That's a derogatory term used by the Navajos. Current term is Ancestral Puebloans. Ancestors of the Hopi, the Zuni, the Tiwas, Tewas, Towas, and a few others, all which have preserved our histories. Function of the rooms and site are known, the names of who lived in what apartment is known for many cases, etc.

The Chaco complex was multilingual. Some languages were isolates.

Yes we had written language both in things written down long term, and in letters and accounts that were sent great distances. The written language, like Chinese, is not phonetic, and can be read by people from the culture across unrelated language families.

Believe me, no western scientist, anthropologist or archaeologist is interested in the truth of any of this and we've all stopped offering or even bothering.

Pretty much everything in the article above is wrong in some way. Even the thing he describes as a dividing wall is not at all, it's the side of an elevated set of structures. The NPS has models of what it used to look like in the visitor center that show his theory is totally incoherent. There's no way any competent guide would have told him it was a dividing wall. However there are many senile retired archaeologists and anthropologists from the old school of extreme ignorance and supremacy who work there during the summer as volunteer rangers and so he might have been told just about anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com