Abstract
Chaco Canyon, NM, USA, was the center of an Ancestral Puebloan polity from approximately 850–1140 CE, and home to a dozen palatial structures known as “great houses” and scores of ritual structures called “great kivas”. It is hypothesized that the 2.5 km2 centered on the largest great house, Pueblo Bonito (i.e., “Downtown Chaco”), served as an open-air performance space for both political theater and sacred ritual. The authors used soundshed modeling tools within the Archaeoacoustics Toolbox to illustrate the extent of this performance space and the interaudibility between various locations within Downtown Chaco. Architecture placed at liminal locations may have inscribed sound in the landscape, physically marking the boundary of the open-air performance space. Finally, the implications of considering sound within political theater will be discussed.
Highlights
We reported that the physical relationship between modeled soundscapes and the locations of shrines throughout the wider landscape may be evidence of ritual performance space, where the shrines themselves marked the bounds of that space
While the platform mounds at Pueblo Bonito imply aspects of political theater and public performance, placing those features into a context of landscape archaeoacoustics highlights just how important a role they played within Chacoan society and culture
The mounds were constructed in an ideal location to serve as the stage for political theater that would have been observed by all within
Summary
This location was home to a dozen palatial structures known as “great houses” and scores of ritual structures called “great kivas”. Archaeoacoustics is the study of the evidence of sound in the archaeological record This can be achieved by studying the acoustical properties properties of artifacts, artifacts, sites, or landscapes. Phenomenology, has been critiqued as been methodologically integral parts of the lived experience [33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42]. Phenomenology, has critiqued as weak, as it has traditionally upon qualitative, observations [34,35,43,44,45,46,47,48,49]
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