Recent University of New Mexico Research at Chaco Canyon with some Background & Future, by W H Wills

About a millennium ago in the high desert of northwestern New Mexico, Chaco Canyon became a major Ancestral Pueblo culture center with monumental architecture, complex social organization and community life, and far-reaching influence.
Beginning in the mid 800s, people of Chaco, possibly aided by visitors, began constructing preplanned, massive, multistory stone buildings containing hundreds of rooms using distinctive, recognizably Chacoan masonry styles. Many of these “Great Houses” were laid out in cardinal directions, and several were linked by formal roads and were associated with formal earthen mounds, communication features, and elaborate water control devices. By 1050, Chaco had become the ceremonial, administrative, and economic center of the region, but its influence diminished between 1130 and 1300.
This presentation offers a wonderful historical overview of the University of New Mexico’s archaeological investigations at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, since the early twentieth century, with an emphasis on the 1969-1984 joint National Park Service-UNM Chaco Project. More recent UNM work has included studies of water control features, agricultural suitability modeling, and remote sensing applications that have built on the innovative research of the NPS-UNM Chaco Project.
Presenter W. H. "Chip" Wills received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 1985 and in 1986 joined the University of New Mexico Department of Anthropology, eventually to become a UNM Professor of Anthropology and Regents’ Lecturer. Since 1978 he also has been employed as an archaeologist, researcher, teaching assistant, adjunct lecturer, and visiting professor for the National Park Service's Chaco Center, the NPS Division of Remote Sensing, the University of Michigan, the University of Virginia, the Southern Illinois University Center for Archaeological Investigations, the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian Institution), and UNM’s Maxwell Museum of Anthropology.
Professor Wills is the author of the book "Early Prehistoric Agriculture in the American Southwest" and co-editor with Robert D. Leonard of "The Ancient Southwestern Community: Models and Methods for the Study of Prehistoric Social Organization." He has written and co-authored other volumes and dozens of articles in refereed professional journals, chapters in edited volumes, and encyclopedia contributions, and has more on the way. He has received numerous national and international awards and fellowships.
Dr. Wills’s research concerns how new socioeconomic organization has emerged in the past, especially with respect to agriculture and food production. At UNM his fieldwork has been in the American Southwest, primarily New Mexico, and has been fundamental to his work in four major problem areas:
1) the introduction of agriculture during the Late Archaic period, ca. 4000 to 3000 BCE.
2) the emergence of village communities during the Early Ceramic period, ca. 200 to 500 CE.
3) the development of hierarchically complex corporate groups after 1000 in the Colorado Plateau.
4) the formation of northern Rio Grande Valley Hispanic irrigation communities during the 18th century.
These research problems represent widely different time periods but his approach to each has been based on a common theoretical perspective in which broad patterns of economic change are explained as the product of interaction among relatively small social groups. In this presentation he relates how this perspective has guided recent UNM research at Chaco Canyon and its potential for future investigations.
Old Pueblo Archaeology Center’s “Third Thursday Food for Thought” Zoom webinars, on the Third Thursday evening of each month, feature presentations on archaeological, historical, and cultural topics.

[@thomaswilliams373]

Many remerciements for the info on the formation of the arroyo. Very helpful for my novel Kash Kachu (White House)

[@westho7314]

Long before maize was introduced to the southwest Cat Tails/Tules were a main staple in diet, tubers & roots prepared and consumed in many ways from making flour to eating as raw salad, rare source of natural sugar.

[@dldenison]

This is really good information, thank you for the video.

[@sharonhearne5014]

I consider visiting the Chaco area to be one of my finest experiences in my life and I have spent years studying art history and archeological history worldwide. It has been upsetting to read of some of the distressing events which may have occurred among the “exclusive and wealthier” occupants of Pueblo Bonito even if that area was not for permanent but primarily ritual celebrations.

[@jeanettewaverly2590]

I’ve known Chip forever. He’s the greatest!

[@SimonSozzi7258]

The Navajo were not "encouraged" to leave. They were forcibly removed.