Corporate Group Formation and Differentiation in Early Puebloan Villages of the American Southwest

Abstract

The development of corporate groups and social differentiation has long been studied by scholars interested in the historic development of Puebloan societies in the American Southwest. Recent discussions of these issues have suggested that corporate group organization and differentiation were formalized during the transition from pithouse to pueblo architecture from A.D. 700 to 1000. In this article, I examine the history and process of the pithouse-to-pueblo transition in the northern San Juan region from A.D. 700 to 900. Unlike in most parts of the ancient Southwest, the architectural transition in this area was accompanied by a significant settlement change resulting in the founding of large, permanent villages housing hundreds of residents. I present an analysis of architectural differences within McPhee Village, one of the largest of these settlements, that documents variability in corporate group organization and socioeconomic power near the end of this transitional period. This study contributes to a growing body of archaeological literature that highlights the importance of internal social dynamics and corporate strategies within early village societies.

The Coevolution of Group Size and Leadership: An Agent-Based Public Goods Model for Prehispanic Pueblo Societies

“…As briefly reviewed above, the first hints of leadership in our area appear in the mid-late AD 700s, and become more strongly expressed by the mid-800s [13,18,33].…”

“…In general hierarchy is rather subtly expressed in the Pueblo archaeological record. During portions of the Pueblo I period (in the AD 700s and 800s) villages in the VEP area had some households, probably including the heads of successful lineages, who lived in substantially larger pithouses than others and likely coordinated ritual and hunting activities and perhaps social usage of stored foods [13,18,33]. This rather modest social differentiation apparently laid the foundation for a much-less-subtle expression of hierarchy in the following Pueblo II, Chaco-dominated period.…”

Ancestral Pueblo Archaeology: The Value of Synthesis

“…The longer interval encompasses the latter portions of the Pecos classification (Basketmaker III and Pueblo I-V) (Kidder 1927) and begins with the accelerated population growth characteristic of the Neolithic demographic transition (Kohler and Glaude 2008;Kohler et al 2008a;Wilshusen and Perry 2008). Major transformations include the initial formation of aggregated villages (Wilshusen et al 2012a; Young and Herr 2012), the pithouse-to-pueblo transition in residential architecture that accompanied changes in household and corporate group organization (Feinman et al 2000;Schachner 2010;Wills 2001a), the rise and fall of Chaco Canyon as the preeminent sociopolitical center in the region (Lekson 2006a;Mills 2002), massive changes in the aggregation and distribution of populations from AD 1275 to 1450 (Adams and Duff 2004;Adler 1996;Spielmann 1998a), and the invasion of Spanish colonists in the 16th and 17th centuries (Barrett 2002;Flint 2008;Kessell 2010;Liebmann 2012a;Mathers et al 2013;Preucel 2002;M. Wilcox 2009; see Liebmann 2012b for discussion of the problematic use of this temporal division on perceptions of Pueblo history) ( Fig.…”

“…The structure of earlier Ancestral Pueblo economies has received less attention, but studies of Chaco period exchange (Toll 2001(Toll , 2006) and that of even earlier eras (Allison 2008;Webster 2012) document similarly expansive networks and specialized production of a range of objects. Specialized production and extensive exchange likely has deep roots in the Ancestral Pueblo area, extending back at least to the early Pueblo era and the formalization of larger corporate groups and increased competition over social status (Feinman et al 2000;Schachner 2010). Forms of exchange and production driven by other factors, such as market transactions (Kohler et al 2000(Kohler et al , 2004, are deserving of further attention given the apparent prevalence of both local and regional economic specialization, the volume of goods moving within socioeconomic systems, growing evidence for market-based systems in adjacent parts of the Southwest (Abbott et al 2007), and recent rethinking of the archaeological study of market exchange in general (Garraty and Stark 2010).…”

Explaining the Past in 2010

“…One result of organization into corporate or lineage “houses” was the potential for social differentiation between these groups. Gregson Schachner's article (2010) on the northern San Juan region of the Southwest pinpoints this process at the transition in the early eighth century C.E. from scattered single‐family pithouses to large, aggregated pueblos.…”