Culture and Ecology of Chaco Canyon and the San Juan Basin

268 Chaco Project Synthesismigrated north, and lived and organized society inChaco Canyon for their benefit. The Mesoamericanswould have brought advanced skills in road-building,water control, and building construction. Interactionbetween the regions fell apart when the Anasazisettlement of the Four Comers area collapsed, dueeither to environmental deterioration that caused withdrawalor local rebellion or to the appearance ofaggressive nomadic tribes that infiltrated the area. ForDiPeso (1968a, 1968b, 1974), after A.D. 1030 theculture center from which Mesoamericans, originallyfrom Tula, operated was Casas Grandes, Chihuahua.In his model, cessation of interaction was tied to thecollapse of the Toltec empire in the A.D. 1100s.Aztec traders, called pochteca, provided a modelfor how the Mesoamerican core expanded into distantlands. Members of the pochteca belonged to a guild,but sometimes they operated alone as they went longdistances into new lands for rare resources. Oncelong-term trading relationships had been established,caravans were organized to go to places where facilitieshad been set up and agreements worked out.Entrepreneurial families lived in enclaves andmanaged the economic aspects of these interactions;they also brought their religion and their warriors toprotect them. Pochteca were high-status members ofthe society and possessed luxury items that localpeople did not have. It was expected that the placeswhere they lived and worked in foreign areas woulddiffer from those of the local population, and that theywould control the possession and use of the objectsthey brought with them for trade. Although thepochteca model was specific to the Aztec, similartypes of trade guilds with trocadores (Kelley 1980)were posited for ancestral groups, including theToltec, who were contemporary with Chacoan people.Frisbie (1978, 1980) and Reyman (1978b) examinedthe possibility of Mesoamerican high-statusburials in Chacoan sites. Such Mesoamerican burialsare often accompanied by dogs, numerous gravegoods, and ceremonial items. Taller individuals tendto have more grave goods than the average-sizeperson. Thus, the burials in Pueblo Bonito couldrepresent the Mesoamerican leaders in Chaco (Frisbie1978). When Reyman (1978b) examined data fromthree sites in the Southwest, he concluded that themagician from Ridge ruin was a pochteca-like leaderwho died en route, and that Burials 13 and 14 inRoom 33 at Pueblo Bonito were either members of thepochteca or in their employ, but that the warrior inAztec ruin may have been a high-status individual buthe was not apochteca. More recently, Turner (1993;Turner and Turner 1995, 1999) considered toothtransfigurement on a burial from Room 330 in PuebloBonito, which is nearly identical to a practice commonin Mesoamerica, to indicate the presence of a southernwarrior in Chaco Canyon.To date, no Mesoamerian skeletal remains havebeen identified among the human remains in ChacoCanyon (Akins 1986; Schillaci et al. 2001). The adultmale maxilla from Room 330 that Turner and Turner(1999:128-129, 473-476) indicated had tooth transfigurement(no. 326095) has a fused right upperincisor and canine that may mark a congenital pattern,one that was also seen in another adult in Room320A. Unfortunately, their report did not indicatesuch fusion in any burials attributed to Room 320A;the closest similar description they record is for Burial327077, which exhibited an enlarged right lowersecond incisor and lack of canine. Akins (1986:TableB.l) includes Burial 327077 among those from Room326. In her craniometric study, this individual fellwithin the population from the western rooms ofPueblo Bonito; Schillaci et al. (2001) clearly retainedthis burial within the Pueblo population. If theassumption of a congenital relationship between thesetwo burials is accepted, the transfigurement on thetooth in Room 330 represents a Pueblo man and not aMexican who moved north. This individual may havetraveled south, possibly to Teacapan, a site in theMarismas Nacionales region on the border betweenSinaloa and Nayarit, that Turner and Turner (1999)indicate is contemporary with the Chacoan culture andwhere the practice of tooth disfigurment is documented(Gill 1985:195). This Chacoan may havelived among the population, been adopted into asociety, and learned new techniques before bringinghis new knowledge, a number of shells, and possiblyother material back to Chaco Canyon.Almost all Mesoamerican artifacts present in theSouthwest could have been brought by only a fewindividuals (Haury 1976: 347). Based on a comparisonwith seventeenth-century Spanish in New Mexico,however, Frisbie (1985) suggested that many artifactsmay not be needed to represent the presence of aforeign group among the Pueblo people. Frisbie