Great Houses, Shrines, and High Places: Intervisibility in the Chacoan World

Abstract

Phenomenological archaeologists and GIS scholars have turned much attention to visibility—who can see whom, and what can be seen—across ancient landscapes. Visible connections can be relatively easy to identify, but they present challenges to interpretation. Ancient peoples created intervisible connections among sites for purposes that included surveillance, defense, symbolism, shared identity, and communication. In the American Southwest, many high places are intervisible by virtue of the elevated topography and the open skies. The Chaco phenomenon, centered in northwestern New Mexico between A.D. 850 and 1140, presents an ideal situation for visibility research. In this study, we use GIS-generated viewsheds and viewnets to investigate intervisible connections among great houses, shrines, and related features across the Chacoan landscape. We demonstrate that a Chacoan shrine network, likely established during the mid-eleventh century, facilitated intervisibility between outlier communities and Chaco Canyon. It is most likely that the Chacoans created this network to enable meaningful connections for communication and identity. We conclude that the boundaries of the Chaco phenomenon are defined in some sense by intervisibility.

How to Make a Polity (In the Central Mesa Verde Region)

“…Chaco researchers are increasingly embracing regional analyses that imply a broad spatial scope for Chacoan social integration, if not explicitly arguing for a Chacoan polity. Van Dyke and colleagues (2016) demonstrate that shrines, stone circles, and herraduras enhanced visibility between great houses and created a network of visual dominance over the landscape that seems to peak after A.D. 1000. Chacoan road systems betray regional-scale planning (if not functional economic integration) (Kantner and Hobgood 2003), and roads and directional alignments between outlier great houses in the middle San Juan suggest subregional coordination for the observation of celestial events (Coffey 2016:14).…”

Regional Ways of Seeing: A Big-Data Approach for Measuring Ancient Visualscapes

“…Second, I wanted to enact a phenomenological investigation of these cultic places and experience the environment firsthand (Susmann 2019b:1–11, 121–139) 5 . Observing ourselves and others in the modern landscape opens our minds to the potential pathways, views, and perceptions of past users (Barrett and Ko 2009:276; Given 2004:168; Tilley 1994:73–75; Van Dyke et al 2016). Phenomenology therefore helps us “build a place-based narrative of the [worshiper's] journey and to explore (through the analogue of our own bodies) the kind of perceptions—and emotions—attendant on moving through such spaces” (Wescoat 2017:69).…”

Ancestral Pueblo settlement structure and sacred landscape at Castle Rock Community, Colorado

“…Such intervisibility, and its significance during times of conflict, has been documented cross-culturally in different areas of the Southwest, such as on Perry Mesa in central Arizona, in the Kayenta region in north-eastern Arizona, in the Chaco World, and in experimental studies of intervisibility between Navajo pueblitos of the Dinétah region in northwestern New Mexico (e.g. Haas & Creamer 1993;Ahlstrom & Roberts 1995;Wilcox et al 2001;Bryan 2009;Van Dyke et al 2016;Kantner & Hobgood 2016). Similar visual communication between sites that could provide warning in times of danger has also been recorded both archaeologically and in written sources for early medieval strongholds in Europe (e.g.…”