Space, evolution, and function in the houses of Chaco Canyon

Abstract

From A.D. 860 to 1130, ancestral Puebloan peoples constructed more than a dozen multi-storey structures along a 14-km stretch of Chaco Canyon in the arid mountain desert of the Four Corners area in the American Southwest. These so-called 'great houses' ranged in size from 54 to 800 rooms. For the past 145 years, archaeologists have sought an understanding of the social organization that produced such monumental structures. Despite intensive study, the function of great houses in Chacoan society is unknown. Using space syntax access analyses, this research examines within-and amonggreat house spatial organization and evaluates social organisational models.Space syntax is used to analyse 11 discrete roomblocks from three excavated great houses.Access graphs are constructed and used to generate syntactic data. Using a three-phase temporal framework previously developed for the great house period, changes over time in patterning, spatial phenotypes, and functional genotypes are identified. The results of this research are used to evaluate the spatial implications of the currentlyproposed Chaco great house models. Syntactical analyses suggest that it is unlikely that any one of these models fits all the great houses. The syntactical evidence is best explained by a mixed-use model for great houses rather than a single function model.

The Use of Spatial Analysis to Study Prehistoric Settlement Architecture

“…Given the conclusions in Section 1.3, it seems likely that not all archaeological material will be equally suited to quantitative access analysis. That this is so is confirmed by five previously published studies of access analysis on archaeological material from a number of different times and places: Bulgarian Chalcolithic tell sites (Chapman 1990); Saxon and medieval monasteries and nunneries in England (Gilchrist 1994); ninth to twelfth century houses from the Chaco Canyon area of the American South‐west (Bustard 1997); the twelfth to fourteenth century house blocks of the Arroyo Hondo Pueblo in the American South‐west (Shapiro 1997); Neolithic Çatalhöyük in Central Anatolia (Düring 2001).…”

“…2.3.1. Questionable assumptions about access and movement The remaining three studies (Bustard 1997; Shapiro 1997; Düring 2001) applied quantitative access analysis to large samples of completely excavated buildings that used roof‐top entrances in addition to, or instead of, ground‐floor ones. In each case, the presence of roof‐top rather than ground‐floor entrances required the researcher to make a number of assumptions in order to compensate for the fact that the spatial configuration of the roof‐top levels had disappeared from the archaeological record.…”

Exploring spatial structures of settlements by saturation

“…In this way, the relationship between the physical space and the sociocultural structure can be quantitatively measured (Lin 2001). Most subsequent space syntax researches, such as Bustard (1999), Asami et al (2002), Yang (2004), Kigawa et al (2006), Wang (2006), Hillier et al (2007), and Yu et al (2009) are based on the aforesaid measurements.…”

Placing social interaction: An integrative approach to analyzing past built environments

“…Since the 1990s, it has been successfully applied to a number of chronologically and geographically diverse data sets, including pueblos of the American Southwest (Bustard, 1999;Ferguson, 1996; van Dyke, 1999), the monumental architecture of the ancient Andes (Moore, 1996), the Neolithic and Bronze Age architecture of the Near East (Banning, 1996(Banning, , 1997Brusasco, 2004;Cutting, 2003;Düring, 2001), the ruins of the Roman city of Pompeii (Grahame, 2000;Laurence, 1994) and the castles and manors of medieval Europe (Fairclough, 1992;Richardson, 2003). Such research highlights the potential for access analysis to provide insight into various aspects of social behavior.…”