Early Pueblo Great House Communities and Their Leaders: The Transformation of Community Leadership in the Mesa Verde and Chaco Regions, A.D. 625–1025

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between architecture, community organization and leadership . The last decade of research has revealed that the earliest “great houses” are found not in the Chaco region, but instead within the centers of ninth century Mesa Verde villages to the north. The communities focused on these first great houses proved to be politically, economically, and demographically unstable and failed by the early tenth century. Significant declines in Mesa Verde regional population beginning by A.D. 880 and continuing through 940 appear to have contributed to demographic growth in the Chaco region and the emergence of a “second generation” of great houses. The design of these later tenth century great houses is a hybrid model of two distinct patterns of community organization and leadership found in the earlier Mesa Verde villages . These later great house communities appear to have combined the “mechanical” solidarity of kinship and dual organization ties of local communities with the more “organic” solidarity of ritual and economic leadership at a regional level (Durkheim in Division of Labor in Society. Free Press, Glencoe, New York, 1964). Symbols representing these leaders or their great house societies can be seen in tenth and eleventh century rock art at key points on the landscape. These portrayals and the long lives of these great houses suggest a more resilient system.