Chaco

CHACO CULTURE NATIONAL PARK, N.M. — Monday’s work began as planned. The students in Steve Plog’s J-term class were settling in for hours of data entry and photography. It was a change of pace after a weekend of all-day hikes that had taken them high onto New Mexican mesas to see the ruins of great houses built by Anasazi people as early as 850 A.D. They had shinnied up a crevice and clambered down snowy slopes. They’d examined rock art and gazed up at a cliff painting marking the explosion of a supernova in 1054.

But opportunity quickly knocked in the form of two park rangers with the offer of a tour miles from the area known as “Downtown Chaco” to examine the berms and ditches these ancient people had built to channel their scarce water supply. With the temperature in the high single digits, the students donned boots and long johns and piled into SUVs, traveling on and sometimes off snow-covered washboard roads. They passed a herd of elk along the way.

At the first stop, a ruin known as Kin Klizhin, park archaeologist Dabney Ford gestured in several directions, pointing out sightlines to other great houses and shrines to explain how this place related to some of the more than 3,000 prehistoric sites that have been identified in and around the canyon.

“This place was hoppin’ a thousand years ago,” she said. Located in the Four Corners region where New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah meet, Chaco was in fact the center of civilization from about 850 to 1250 A.D. for the ancestors of today’s Pueblo and Navajo people. In spite of hot summers, bitterly cold winters and arid conditions, the people of Chaco and surrounding communities built massive stone “great houses” with multiple stories and kivas, the round subterranean rooms used for gatherings and rituals.

And while scholars know Chaco was a major center, there’s debate on its actual purpose. Did people live in the hundreds of rooms in the biggest great house, Pueblo Bonito? Or was the canyon occupied only seasonally, used for religious ceremonies or as a trading center, with just a few permanent residents?

Chaco was always a part of oral tradition, but its first recorded sighting in historic times was by Spanish explorers and settlers in the 18th century. The earliest visitors from the United States came in the mid-19th century, and archaeological work in the canyon began in 1896 under the direction of George Pepper, who was hired by the American Museum of Natural History.

The Federal Antiquities Act of 1906, the nation’s first law protecting antiquities, in fact, was prompted by a Chaco controversy. Richard Wetherill, a Colorado rancher who sold pottery and other materials from ancient sites (legally at the time) to museums, lived in the canyon for several years and even claimed a homestead there. The Chaco Canyon National Monument was established in 1907, and excavation and preservation work continued throughout much of the 20th century.

Today, with new attitudes and new techniques in archaeology, and in deference to the beliefs of the Pueblos that their ancestors and their lands should not be disturbed, preservation is encouraged. The digital archive at U.Va. will help scholars decipher the clues to the puzzles of Chaco.

“Chaco is addictive”

Steve Plog’s career in archaeology had humble beginnings — a job as a dishwasher and camp photographer on an Arizona excavation his older brother was working on. He worked on projects in Mexico and the American Southwest as his undergraduate and graduate studies in the field advanced, and digs became a family affair, with his wife, Carolyn, and their young daughter and later a son joining him.

He first visited Chaco Canyon in 1969, as a college student, and he never tires of returning and introducing it to newcomers. “Chaco is addictive,” he says. “It really is a place that’s hard to appreciate until you come out here.”

But his research didn’t focus on Chaco at all until five years ago.

During six years as an associate dean of Arts & Sciences, Plog had plenty of exposure to the growing phenomenon of digital archives. After he left the dean’s office, he spent the 2001–2002 academic year in Santa Fe at the School of American Research. He immersed himself in recent work on Chaco, “which had gotten an increasing amount of interest in the ’90s.” The idea of creating a digital archive of the archaeological work done on the canyon began to germinate.

Before a massive National Park Service research project at Chaco in the 1970s, “people would go to one site but not think about how it related to others,” Plog explains. “The National Park Service identified roads and outliers, and in association with that people were beginning to look a little more at trade and exchange.

“It became very clear that the Southwest was very interconnected and that Chaco was a major part of it, particularly during the period of 850 to 900 up to 1150. If there was a center of the Pueblo world, Chaco was it.”

But data from a century’s worth of archaeology are scattered around at about a dozen sites. Researchers would have to crisscross the continent, from the Southwest to the East Coast and back again to do the material justice.

“The more reading I did the more I felt that, despite all the work that was being done at Chaco, the amount of data available to test hypotheses were limited.”

He pulled together about a dozen Chaco scholars and digital scholars in Santa Fe to discuss the possibility of a digital archive. By the summer of 2003 — a blink of an eye in academic funding schedules — the Mellon Foundation was funding his project to the tune of a three-year grant of $683,000, “a huge amount of money for archaeology,” Plog says.

The group decided to focus on five of the 3,000 or more recorded sites that are in Chaco Canyon or relate to it: Pueblo Bonito, three small sites around Casa Rinconada and Aztec, another national monument that is an outlier north of Chaco. Data come primarily from two sources, the National Anthropological Archive of the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, plus a dozen other places, including the park archive in Albuquerque.

Plog started a three-year fellowship at U.Va.’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) in 2003 and worked with associate directors Worthy N. Martin and Daniel Pitti and senior programmer analyst Robbie Bingler on the project.

The materials in the park archives at Chaco weren’t included at first, but as the project got going Plog realized that the history of stabilization of the sites, efforts begun in the 1930s, should be part of the project. When the January Term opportunity came along, “I called and asked, ‘If I brought a group of students out, what could they do?’ Dabney [Ford] immediately said, ‘The stabilization records.’”

So three years’ worth of J-term students have spent hours bending over scrapbook-like volumes of black-and-white photos and typed records, photographing the pages and entering the information into a database. There are 80 bound volumes, some as much as six inches thick, and more that aren’t bound. As of January, the work was up into the low 70s, and Plog is optimistic that the project will be finished by the time the grant runs out at the end of 2007. “I think we’ll do everything we promised to do and more,” he says.

A sense of camaraderie

This year’s J-term, Exploring the Pueblos, began with the chaos of New Mexico’s biggest snowstorm in 50 years. It took three days for all the students to arrive in Albuquerque, where Pueblo cultural events on their schedule were cancelled due to weather. Their 10 days in Chaco followed visits to Taos and Santa Fe.

Long days of hiking and archive work ended with a communal dinner prepared by Carolyn Plog and an evening of camaraderie. “The January Term is very intimate,” says Stephanie McGuire (Studio Art, Anthropology ’07), who may one day combine her interests as a field artist on an archaeological site. “You get to know people really well. I love the evenings we have together.”

The Plogs encouraged that camaraderie with a cookie-decorating party before the holidays and a New Mexican dinner and slide show of the trip afterward at their home in Ivy. “It’s incredible the amount of thought he puts into making the entire experience a great one,” says Katie Bray (English, American Studies ’07).

Most of the six undergraduates in the class had taken Plog’s course on archaeology of the Southwest, and each anticipated getting something different out of the trip.

Nick Radko (Environmental Sciences, Archaeology ’08), for example, used his background in geology to understand the canyon’s rock formations, and with his love of the outdoors and hiking, the J-term “fits my interests perfectly.” For Stephen Bradford (Politics, Environmental Thought and Practice ’09), Chaco was ideal for considering the rise and fall of civilization. Carter Willard (Sports Medicine ’08) enjoyed seeing the behind-the-scenes work the data entry exposed her to. And, being from Charlottesville, “I like to go away anytime there’s a break,” she says.

And they were uniformly amazed at the experience. “You read books about the ruins, but you get out here and it’s just amazing,” says Bray. Samantha Fladd (College ’09) agrees. “I’ve seen them all in books, but it really doesn’t compare with being here and seeing it firsthand and walking through the pueblos themselves.”

It’s a reaction Plog never tires of.

“What surprises me is that in some ways the students you appreciate the most are the ones who go out there and don’t know what’s coming. They’re so excited about it. In a lot of ways I come back feeling best about them,” he says.

“Even if they’re not going on to become archaeologists, I’ve done something to open their eyes, expose them to something they’ve never seen and will never see again.

“Or — they will see it again, because it intrigued them so much.”