Culture and Ecology of Chaco Canyon and the San Juan Basin

338 Chaco Project Synthesisadopted status based on ranked hierarchies as theycrossed this threshold. Those in areas with highsubsistence diversity adopted age-graded secretsocieties and other social entities to provide neededservices along their route to social complexity. Theseleaders arrange periodic feasts, organize funeral rites,and supply wives to more distant settlements.At the packing threshold, reasonable responsesare to shift to horticulture or pastoralism to increasethe amount of food available. These choices are probablya response to biases in the habitat. Thus, domesticationis a response to packing; it is not a directresponse to population pressure alone, but also todifferent rates of growth that can be affected byconditions in neighboring regions, processes of fusion,or circumscription. It appears later in settlements thatare less conducive to high rates of population growth(e. g., where pathogens affect food storage), andappears more rapidly in areas where there areconstraints on population expansion.Sedentism is not a prerequisite to agriculture;complete sedentism is not expected until almost alllabor investments are devoted to a single venue forproduction of non mobile food resources (Binford2001:438). Some labor investment strategies forplant-dependent foragers include ways to render plantsedible, storage, cultivation of the plants themselves,and selection of a limited number of domesticatedplants for cultivation.The fourth threshold (line 3, or 52.677 personsper 100 km 2 ) marks the end of non-ranked huntergathererpopulations. Modified hunter-gatherers(complex leaders), mutualists, horticulturalists andpastoralists, and extensified or mounted huntergatherersshare space on graphs derived from plottingthe species diversity against the loglo populationdensities.The last threshold (line 4, or 304.99 persons per100 km 2 ) marks the space in which all hunter-gatherersubsistence practices disappear.Binford concluded that complexity evolves intwo ways. One path is through the integration of previouslyindependent systems, such as forest-productspecialists or mutualists. In these instances, ownershipor wealth is bartered for food. The other path isthrough intensification, which may result in complexsocial organization when resources occur in patches,or, if subsistence diversity is high, in egalitariansocieties that maintain age- or sodality-related leaders.One [path to complexity] is associated withscalar changes in group size as, for example,among hunter-gatherers who areprimarily dependent upon terrestrial plantsand have the highest values for populationdensity. In these groups, increased complexityis represented by secret societiesand social differentiation based on anindividual's progress through a series ofaggregated sodalities.These societal structures are also embeddedin a social fabric that features ownership orunchallenged association of persons withspecific, highly productive locations forresource exploitation. Intensification is apparentin the increased labor inputsrequired at the time of harvest and preparationfor storage, as well as during thefood processing required for immediateconsumption. This pathway to intensificationis associated with decreased dependenceupon terrestrial animals of large bodysize and a shift of male labor into rolespreviously assumed by female laborers,particularly the collection and processingof plant materials.At the same time that group size increases,there is an institutionalization of regularregional interactions among the growingcommumtIes. Round-robin hosting andmutual participation in mortuary rites andeducational events are major expressions ofthe development of regional, institutionalizedinteraction, as are moieties, whichperform complementary functions thatcrosscut at least some of the residentialunits. (Binford 2001:432-433)There are, therefore, several paths that lead to thesame outcome. The similarities between horticulturalistson the eastern seaboard of North America, theplant-dependent hunter-gatherers of California, andthe Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest, all of