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The Neolithic Arrives in the American Southwest

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The Neolithic Arrives in the American Southwest Breaking ground NORTH AMERICA New York COLORADO The Neolithic arrives in er, North the American Southwest Atlantic Ocean The Neolithic Revolution was not a single event, Denver MESA VERDE ated but took place at many different times and places NATIONAL PARK Crow Canyon Archaeological Cent Archaeological Canyon Crow : AGES around the world. Bill Lipe reveals how this momentous M I ALL unless otherwise st unless otherwise transition gave rise to the Dillard site near Mesa Verde. 24 CURRENTWORLDARCHAEOLOGY Issue 68 UNITED STATES BeloW Looking west-southwest across the Dillard site, with an archaeological screen in the foreground and Ute Mountain in the distance. The Dillard site is the earliest fully Neolithic settlement in the Mesa Verde archaeological area. ABove Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde National Park: in the AD 1200s, people in the Mesa Verde region built villages on canyon rims and in natural shelters below the rims. Intercommunity conflict was common at this time, and the canyon settings offered increased security. largest site, and the civic and ceremonial centre of this sprawling, low-density community, is the Dillard site. Here, there is a great kiva, a large circular structure that indicates that social institutions devoted to community organisation had been established. This building was in use from about AD 600 to 700, and is the earliest great kiva to be excavated in the Mesa Verde archaeological area. The term ‘Neolithic’ was coined by Sir John Lubbock in 1865 to distinguish the ‘new’ stone age from the old one – the Paleolithic. In the 1920s, new life was breathed into the concept by the Australian-born British archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe. He recognised that the Neolithic represented isitors to the Mesa Verde that archaeologists from the Crow Canyon National Park in the Archaeological Center have discovered American Southwest come evidence for the emergence of a fully The most in search of the spectacular fledged Neolithic society of maize farmers, significant but mysterious 13th-century dating to c.AD 600-700. PuebloV Indian cliff dwellings that nestle They are investigating sites that events in the under the protection of the dramatic lie within a present-day residential overhanging rocks. Yet, just a few miles development, which contains at least 65 human story away, one of the most significant chapters sites from the Basketmaker III period (c.AD were being in human history was being played out 500-750) scattered across at least 650ha. more than 600 years before those cliff Most of the sites are small, and not all would played out here. dwellings were built. It is at the Dillard site have been occupied at the same time. The www.world-archaeology.com CURRENTWORLDARCHAEOLOGY 25 ABove & RIGHT Basketmaker III decorated pottery sherds. Pottery-making was not a specialised occupation, and most households made their own pottery. The styles of manufacture and decoration changed over the next several hundred years, allowing archaeologists to use potsherds to determine when sites were occupied. a true revolution in how humans lived. systems all ultimately depend on the half of the Southwest. Though the ancestral As farming replaced the older hunting- Neolithic Revolution that occurred in Pueblo Indians moved in the late 1200s to gathering lifestyle, it triggered a cascade Antiquity. Or rather, ‘those’ revolutions, as places in New Mexico and Arizona where of other changes – mobility gave way to archaeologists investigating the Neolithic their descendants now live, the Mesa year-round villages; new technologies, such around the world find it happened, not Verde region still looms large in their oral as pottery for cooking, were developed; as a single event, but in multiple places histories and traditions. population increased dramatically; and through the culmination of multiple permanent social institutions capable processes that usually took hundreds, Settled community of managing larger groups of people if not thousands, of years to unfold. For four field-seasons, Crow Canyon began to be formed. At the Dillard site, One area where this occurred was the archaeologists have focused their discovery of the great kiva demonstrates Mesa Verde archaeological region that attention on the Dillard community. this last element of Childe’s revolution had stretches across south-eastern Utah and In addition to excavations, they have used appeared, and a well-developed Neolithic south-western Colorado, down into New surface survey, remote sensing, and auger community was in place. Mexico. Between the late AD 500s and probing to investigate some of the small Today’s huge world population and 1300, its central portion was the most residential pithouse sites scattered over our large-scale economic and political populous part of the upland (non-desert) the study area. Most of the excavations, however, have focused on the Dillard site itself. Here, the team found a complex of tightly clustered pithouses, pit rooms, and the great kiva. Fieldwork has established that the community began in the late AD 500s, and endured until about 700, with the great kiva being in use from about 600. This was a community made up of farmers whose crops and farming skills were well adapted to the area’s meagre annual rainfall of only 35cm. Their fields were located close to their houses in areas of deep, wind-deposited silt. Maize (Zea LEFT The northern part of the American Southwest, showing the Mesa Verde archaeological region in the northern part of the San Juan River watershed. The central Mesa Verde region was the most populous part of the area. In the late AD 1200s, its ancestral Pueblo population moved south and south-east to areas of Arizona and New Mexico. Locations of the present-day Pueblo communities at Hopi, Zuni, Acoma, and along the Rio Grande are shown. Albuquerque, with a population of 560,000, is the largest city in New Mexico. 26 CURRENTWORLDARCHAEOLOGY Issue 68 UNITED STATES LEFT A large, partly excavated residential pithouse. (Southwestern archaeologists typically excavate only part of structures such as this, to preserve deposits and features that could be excavated at some time in the future when additional methods of investigation may have become available.) The main chamber of the pithouse is shown, with its central firepit, and several additional pits and postholes. The antechamber is in the background. ABove An artist's reconstruction of a residential pithouse from the AD 600s (Basketmaker III period). Each pithouse was occupied by a nuclear or small extended family. The superstructure was supported by four posts and a rectangular framework of beams, with smaller logs and then smaller pieces of wood and a layer of dirt completing it. The antechamber was used for entry and exit, for storage, and as extra living and sleeping space. The subsoil is quite stable, and formed the lower portion of the house walls. mays) probably made up more than 75 accommodated all the heads of households from the great kiva shows a higher than per cent of their diet; squash, beans, wild in the community, or other similar-sized average ratio of serving-bowl to cooking-jar plants, and game filled out the menu. groups. It would have been a place where sherds – an indication that feasts often The pithouse residences had floors dug people gathered for events ranging accompanied these gatherings. The great well below the ground surface, and were from religious rituals to coming-of-age kiva must represent the emergence of occupied by a single nuclear or small ceremonies. Preliminary analysis of pottery organisations such as religious societies extended family. Each habitation site in the community had at least one pithouse; remote sensing and test excavations show that some had several. The dispersed scatter of pithouses must extend outside RIGHT The great kiva at the parts of the study-area boundary, so the Dillard site – owned by Jane full size of the community has not yet Dillard – was only partially been established. However, it is likely excavated, but some of the unexcavated floor features have that it had several hundred people at any been inferred on the basis of given time in the AD 600s. Although not research at similar structures. a typical ‘village’ with tightly clustered The great kiva had four main residences, the community would have posts that supported a sturdy functioned like a regular Neolithic village, framework for the roof and walls. The stone slabs shown on the with its own identity in the eyes of its map were found in the fill well residents, and with a recognised but above the floor, probably placed relatively egalitarian leadership. on the dirt roof and sloping walls The Dillard site discoveries show that to mitigate erosion. The structure it represents the completion of Childe’s was probably entered through a hatchway in the roof, as in kivas Neolithic Revolution in the Mesa used by Pueblo people today. Verde region. The site is at the highest The floor ‘vault’ and the two point in the cultural landscape, with pits just north of it are probably a commanding view to the east and symbolic representations of south, clearly the social centre of the Pueblo cosmology – the belief surrounding residential community. Its that people emerged from worlds below this one. Kiva is a most striking feature is a large meeting Pueblo Indian term referring to house, a 11.5m-diameter great kiva. underground structures still used This structure is large enough to have today for religious purposes. www.world-archaeology.com CURRENTWORLDARCHAEOLOGY 27 that drew membership from across the and far-western parts of the community. This is not to say that earlier Mesa Verde region, but the and smaller communities lacked leadership, central area, which later became but that here, practices promoting group by far the most populous, had only sparse identity and cohesion had become formal settlement until the very late AD 500s.
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