Posted on 12/08/2015 2:56:06 PM PST by SunkenCiv
The wood in the monumental "great houses" built in Chaco Canyon by ancient Puebloans came from two different mountain ranges...
The UA scientists are the first to report that before 1020, most of the wood came from the Zuni Mountains about 50 miles (75 km) to the south. The species of tree used in the buildings did not grow nearby, so the trees must have been transported from distant mountain ranges.
About 240,000 trees were used to build massive structures, some five stories high and with hundreds of rooms, in New Mexico's arid, rocky Chaco Canyon during the time period 850 to 1140. The buildings include some of the largest pre-Columbian buildings in North America...
To figure out where the trees for the beams had grown, Guiterman used a method known as dendroprovenance that had not been used in the American Southwest before.
By 1060, the Chacoans had switched to harvesting trees from the Chuska Mountains about 50 miles (75 km) to the west.
The switch in wood sources coincides with several important developments in Chacoan culture, said Guiterman, a doctoral candidate in UA's School of Natural Resources and the Environment.
"There's a change in the masonry style--the architectural signature of the construction. There's a massive increase in the amount of construction—about half of 'downtown Chaco' houses were built at the time the wood started coming from the Chuska Mountains," he said.
By reviewing archaeological records, the team found other materials coming to Chaco from the Chuskas at the same time.
"There's pottery and there's chipped-stone tools--things like projectile points and carving devices," he said.
The new research corroborates previous research from the UA that used the chemistry of Chaco Canyon beams to figure out that Chuska Mountain trees were a wood source.
(Excerpt) Read more at popular-archaeology.com ...
Back in the ancient past I took a course in dendrochronology at the UofA. The technique to measure tree rings is indeed tedious and time consuming. One thing I learned that is applicable to today, is that though there is a very good correlation between springtime moisture (the season when trees grow a ring) and tree ring width, there is much less of a relationship between temperature and moisture during the remainder of the year.
A wet spring may indeed mean lower temperatures during that time but says nothing about moisture and temperature the rest of the year. This is the fallacy of using tree-rings as an indicator of global warming by such as that charlatan Michael Mann, he of the “hockey stick” graph.
Ah yes, the UA Tree Ring Circus. Never did any of that stuff, myself.
Interesting. One thing I couldn’t find was what wood are we’re talking here? Fir, pine, cypress, or some kind of hardwood? Oh well.
“In the 90s, I did some petrographic microscopy for the UA Anthropology Department on Chaco Canyon pottery, comparing the contained sand grains to various source rocks, some of which were from the Chuskas.”
Very interesting (speaking as an old geologist and wannabe physical anthropologist)... Were the results of the study published?
I left town shortly thereafter to go work in a mine, and don’t know whether the results were published. I was (still am) a geologist; the microscopy job was just to make a little cash.
Bit disappointing that they do not specify. From reading other references to other sites where they do specify the species, I would think Ponderosa Pine would be the most likely species.
Many parts of Chaco Canyon can be reinterpreted to mean very different things from the official archaeology.
To start with, it was the center of a major transshipment route all the way from New England to South America. Perhaps comparable to Chicago today. It was also something of a “banking center”, in that at the time the reserve trading currency was turquoise chips, tens of thousands of which have been discovered there.
Something that can be noted on the site are the many underground “kivas” or rooms, or at least that is the assumption, until you notice that adjacent kivas are stair stepped down, so may have instead been cisterns.
The buildings there often have basements, as well as several floors, and the different construction masonry techniques are very obvious.
About halfway from Chaco Canyon to Albuquerque is the Petroglyph National Monument, a black basalt mesa cliff face with some 24,000 petroglyphs on it. Perhaps it was the Free Republic forum from a thousand years ago.
FR has been having its own problems with indecipherable petroglyphs of late.
I have never felt as “at home” as I have at Chaco. It is certainly one of those places that you should experience. If you think “civilization” is a new thing, you need to go there and see what happened a long time ago.
I don’t suppose you remember any of the results...? (Cool side job by the way. I always loved viewing/working with thin sections...)
"The peaceful Zuni of New Mexico and Arizona are much studied, partly because their language, culture and physical appearance set them apart from other Native American peoples. Davis, an anthropologist who has made 10 visits to the Zuni pueblo, now offers the startling thesis that a group of Japanese Buddhists left earthquake-wracked medieval Japan and came by ship to the Southern California coast, eventually migrating inland to the Zuni territory, where they merged their culture and genes with Native Americans to produce the modern Zuni people around A.D. 1350. Davis uses "forensic" evidence--including analyses of dental morphology, blood and skeletal remains--to support a Japanese-Zuni connection."
They were not big folks.
It's about an hour to Bloomfield going west on US 550, or 45-50 minutes east to Cuba on 550. Past Cuba is Rio Rancho/Albuquerque for places to stay. Easily 1 to 1.5 hours from Cuba. It's a nice day trip from Rio Rancho.
Yes, similar things happened to all the pueblo Indians. The pueblo near Aztec, New Mexico is smaller, but has a similar timeline. They were there, then they left, at about the same time period as the Chaco culture people. One theory is that they pulled up stakes and headed east to the Rio Grande valley.
Zen, Zuni?
If the thesis is correct, they certainly moved into a bad neighborhood.
We have maps showing the migration patterns through Asia, Europe and the Middle East and I’ve seen maps showing the static location of the American Indians. But, I’ve never seen maps showing the migration patterns of the American (North and Central) native populations. That, I’d find interesting. I lived in Albuquerque for 5 years and regret that I never made it to Chaco Canyon.
About all I remember any more is that some of the pottery contained fragments of Chuska Granite. Long time ago, with a lot that’s happened in between.
Presumably Tipper could confirm that.
ping
One reason for low doorways in some cultures has been to make it hard for invaders to run in. It is a lot easier to clobber someone on the head if they have to bend over to walk in. Blam mentions that blood studies have been done. Does this include modern DNA comparisons between modern Zunis and modern Japanese or Ainu? It is well known that the Aztec language (Nahuatl) belongs to the family of Uto-Aztecan languages. The Utes are in the US. In some histories the Aztec are said to have originated from the savage freedom loving Chichimec tribes from northern Mexico. It is certainly possible that these were tribal groups driven out by the “civilized” tribes with their “urban” culture, that drifted down into northern Mexico, and some of whom eventually made it all the way to Mexico City where they developed their own warfaring civilization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichimeca
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.