Great House Research Articles

Early Pueblo Period Population Aggregation and Dispersal in the Petrified Forest Region, East-Central Arizona

The Western Puerco region of east-central Arizona figured prominently in foundational studies of the Early Pueblo period (AD 650–950) yet remains on the periphery of recent research. This article presents new survey and chronometric data from three communities located in a densely occupied portion of the Western Puerco, the Petrified Forest. These data suggest that the Petrified Forest hosted the earliest known aggregated settlement in the region, ca. AD 700–800, before residents transitioned to a dispersed settlement pattern that remained in place through the Chaco era. Neighboring portions of the Western Puerco, however, only hosted settlements of a similar size from AD 840 forward. Chaco great houses were founded in these communities during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Unlike better known examples of aggregation in the northern San Juan region that unfolded within only a few generations, similar developments in the Petrified Forest were likely the culmination of hundreds of years of local population growth, increasing sedentism, and use of prominent natural features on the landscape. The lack of fit between the causal factors proposed for village formation in the northern San Juan and eighth-century aggregation in the Petrified Forest suggests alternative models are needed to explain the formation of early population aggregates in the Western Puerco and across much of the western portion of the northern Southwest more broadly.

Step by step: tenant accounts of securing and maintaining quality housing with a housing choice voucher

ABSTRACTPrevious research on renters’ experiences in the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program is robust, but much of it has been conducted in the context of mobility interventions providing added resources. In contrast, this study focuses on HCV renters’ experiences searching for housing without the support of a mobility intervention. In semistructured interviews, 34 HCV renters describe their housing search processes and outcomes. We find that renters struggle to secure housing in their preferred neighborhoods due to limited information and financial costs such as application fees and security deposits. Discussion focuses on practice and policy reforms that might support greater housing choice.

Performance Space, Political Theater, and Audibility in Downtown Chaco

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.

Predicting private landowner hunting access decisions and hunter density

ABSTRACTUrbanization and shifting landowner demographics are changing how and where hunting occurs. We surveyed nonindustrial private landowners (N = 1,843) in North Carolina, USA to examine how demographics and land-use predict whether hunting occurred and hunter density. The optimal logistic regression model correctly predicted whether hunting occurred on 96% of properties. Larger properties, male property ownership, longer ownership tenure, income generation from a property, and landowners originating from rural environments were positively related to whether a property was hunted. Properties with older landowners and properties surrounded by greater housing and road density were less likely to be hunted. Hunter density declined with property size, longer ownership tenure, and the presence of a landowner or family member(s) hunting the property. In the future, increases in hunter density on small properties may facilitate wildlife management through hunting as landscapes become more urbanized.

Network analysis of intrasite material networks and ritual practice at Pueblo Bonito

The Chaco World, centered on the San Juan Basin of New Mexico, in the Southwestern U.S.A., was organized largely around ritual activities, including the use and deposition of a wide range of rare and unusual objects. The great houses of Chaco Canyon were foundational in the development of these ritual activities. Biographical or assemblage-oriented approaches are well suited to studying ritual behavior and have been successfully applied to understanding religious ritual at Chacoan great houses, especially the site of Pueblo Bonito. While formal network analyses (and traditional statistical analyses) are typically used to evaluate relationships between archaeological sites, we argue that network analysis also has great utility in expanding existing biographical approaches to Chacoan ritual. Applying network methods to a network of general artifact classes (like turquoise or pipes) from different room contexts within Pueblo Bonito helps to understand the co-associations of objects grouped together through common use or deposition, likely in the course of ritual activities. These co-associations help expand our knowledge of ritual behavior within Pueblo Bonito, indicating distinctions between architectural spaces based on specialized ritual practices. This analysis also has important implications for Chacoan social organization, supporting existing arguments for a Chacoan house society model.

“Puutx We'Wnxi Uma Kiwe” comunicación desde la Madre Tierra: Una mirada de la comunicación propia, desde la práctica comunitaria como un camino de vida

El presente artículo comparte desde el pensamiento y la práctica de vida; cómo el pueblo Nasa del norte del Cauca en Colombia, interpreta y camina “Puutx We’wnxi Uma Kiwe”, la comunicación desde la madre tierra, entendida como una relación espiritual y natural que transmite mensajes de vida y nos convoca a todos los seres, como sus hijos e hijas a cuidarla, defenderla y liberarla. Hace énfasis en las formas ancestrales mediante las cuales, el pueblo Nasa se comunica naturalmente con la Madre Tierra “Uma Kiwe” y nos convoca con urgencia al cuidado del territorio “la casa grande de todos los seres”. Es la perspectiva del espacio que no puede ser considerado mercancía, ni sometido a las políticas económicas de explotación y saqueo por poner en grave riesgo la vida misma. Finalmente, discute las experiencias de articulación que se producen entre los medios, formas y espacios de la comunicación propia, con las herramientas y técnicas de información, como estrategia política de organización y de lucha del movimiento indígena, y para la visibilización, concientización y movilización para el cuidado y protección del territorio en un contextol en el que Uma Kiwe, nos convoca a entender sus mensajes y liberarla, para que sus hijos vivamos en libertad y dignidad.

KINSHIP AND COMMUNITY IN THE NORTHERN SOUTHWEST: CHACO AND BEYOND

Archaeogenomic studies of a burial crypt in Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, have demonstrated the presence of an elite matrilineal descent group that spanned most of the 300+ years the great house was occupied, confirming, among other things, the deep antiquity of matrilineal ideologies among the Ancestral Pueblos of the northern Southwest. This article explores the sociopolitical implications of matrilineal descent, matrilocal residence, and Iroquois-Crow alliance structures among the Ancestral Pueblos of Chaco and elsewhere. It argues that matrilineal ideologies helped shape community forms and intercommunity relations throughout the Pueblo Southwest. It argues further that kinship provides insights into Chaco's eleventh-century expansion that dispersed “outlier” great houses over much of the southeastern Colorado Plateau. The article concludes with a call for archaeologists and cultural historians to pay more attention to kinship, the principal idiom of social, economic, and political relations in nonstate societies.

Gothic piles and cynical follies revisited: A quizzical tour through country house literature of the long eighteenth century

The eighteenth century witnessed an expansion in domestic tourism that allowed increasingly diversified visitors to access the grand homes of those for whom more lavish types of travel had furnished their seats, in town and country alike. Numerous travel guides and literary texts engage with the ongoing ‘country house’ tradition of praising the home, gardens, and owner of such places. However, the shifting social contexts in which both these buildings and the ideologies they embodied often drew writers to satirise critically the great houses they ostensibly admired. This essay examines how the Gothic aesthetic infused the broader country house tradition with a novel way of assessing the uneasy tension between tradition and innovation catalysed by the changing circumstances of the eighteenth century by examining the links several key writers forged between Gothic architectural structures and literary texts. It examines Horace Walpole’s Gothic projects in both The Castle of Otranto and Strawberry Hill; Mary Leapor’s Crumble Hall ; William Beckford’s Vathek and Fonthill; Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey ; before settling on a detailed discussion of Norman Abbey in Byron’s Don Juan , the literary equivalent of his own seat at Mansfield which, in turn, became a key spot on the tourist trail.

How Agriculture Took Hold in the Mesa Verde Region: A Review of Recent Research on the Late Basketmaker-Early Pueblo Periods (A.D. 500-920)

Major research projects and significant publications over the last two decades have fundamentally reframed our understanding of the Basketmaker III and Pueblo I periods in the Mesa Verde region. Whereas the last state historic context summaries for these periods, which were published in 1999, focused on the specifics of chronology building, site type definitions, settlement patterning, and other nuts and bolts issues, recent advances in database software and an increasing emphasis on regional research have turned our attention to the larger issues of how agriculture took hold and thereafter transformed the landscape north of the San Juan River. The relatively low populations and small-scale horticultural economies of the Basketmaker II period virtually disappeared between A.D. 500 and 600, to be replaced by a more intensive maize-dependent agricultural economy centered on large communities. The rapid expansion of early Pueblo agricultural settlements across the Mesa Verde region and the subsequent formation of large villages were in part fueled by the accelerating population growth that came with agricultural dependence. In turn, the late ninth-century breakup of these large villages contributed to population migration to the south of the San Juan River and the tenth-century emergence of what ultimately became the Chaco great house system. This review updates the 1999 Basketmaker III and Pueblo I overviews.

A total viewshed approach to local visibility in the Chaco World

The Chacoan great houses and great kivas of the U.S. Southwest are monumental, both in their scale and in conveying meaning. Visibility is key to understanding how and by whom that meaning was experienced. Although often discussed in Chaco studies, visibility has been infrequently tested. Here, the authors consider 430 great house and great kiva locations, and evaluate their visibility within their local landscapes. Using a total viewshed approach, they provide new evidence to suggest that great houses, but not great kivas, were often placed to be highly visible to individuals in the surrounding landscape. These patterns may speak to the social and physical properties of the structures.

What’s new in Chaco research?

This special section of Antiquity reports on new research on Chaco Canyon and its surrounding region in the northern U.S. Southwest. Two of the contributions are based on new excavations within Chaco Canyon—one at the largest great house of Pueblo Bonito by Patricia Crown and W.H. Wills (2018), and the other on Chaco’s water management by Vernon Scarborough et al. (2018). The second pair of articles are based on the regional data compilation and analyses of great houses and great kivas, which form part of the larger Chaco World. The article by Mills et al. (2018) applies social network analysis to a large database of ceramics to look at changing connectivity in the Chaco World over three centuries. Katherine Dungan et al. (2018) use an innovative total viewshed approach to examine when and to what degree great houses and great kivas were placed in visually prominent locations. This introduction reviews new findings of the past decade and contextualises the following four articles within the current literature. It does not provide a comprehensive review of the Chaco literature, and the reader is referred to other reviews, most recently by Plog (2010, 2018), Schachner (2015) and Plog et al. (2017). These can be compared with earlier syntheses (Mills 2002; Lekson 2006, 2009) to underscore the pace of new research.

The complex history of Pueblo Bonito and its interpretation

Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon is one of the most iconic pre-Hispanic archaeological sites in the U.S. Southwest. Archaeologists refer to it as a great house in recognition of its massive scale, and often describe it as the centre of the Chaco world. Yet questions remain about Pueblo Bonito’s origins, sequence of construction, duration of occupation and abandonment. Here, the authors present new research that helps to clarify the early phases of occupation, and illuminates some of the problems inherent in reconstructing a building that was a perennial work in progress.

A Great House of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Westmorland House in West Smithfield, London

An inventory dated 8 March 1629, made for the 1st Earl of Westmorland, was found to contain the details of some of the contents of property in London called Westmorland House. The descriptions and values given suggested that it was a high-status and substantial property, but almost no trace of it was found in the historic record. Examination of cartographic and historical records, including the inventory of 1629, has revealed the likely location, form and history of the property, showing it to be a lost ‘Great House’ whose fortunes were closely linked to the events of the seventeenth century and the changing fortunes of the Earls of Westmorland.

Ritual Fauna and Social Organization at Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon

Chaco Canyon served as a regional center for the Northern U.S. Southwest from AD 850–1130. Reconstructions of the social organization of great houses within the canyon have varied, with models alternately drawing on ethnographically described “Eastern” (predominantly moiety-based) or “Western” (predominantly clan-based) Pueblo organizational systems. Ethnographic research demonstrates the significance of animals in Pueblo social and ritual life, and associations between social groups and certain animals remain important today. Whole animals, skulls, and claws are heavily involved in ritual practice, the organization of which is intricately intertwined with social organization. In this paper, we examine spatial and contextual patterns in the deposition of these remains to understand social organization at the best-studied Chaco great house, Pueblo Bonito. Two central patterns emerge: distinctions in the taxa deposited within the eastern and western halves of the pueblo, and the long-term significance and restricted use of macaws in the foundational northern arc.

Taphonomic considerations on pinworm prevalence in three Ancestral Puebloan latrines

For archaeological studies it is always necessary to consider taphonomic factors that could have influenced in ancient material preservation. Parasite eggs are usually highly degraded in ancient sites dated from all periods of time and taphonomic factors are mentioned to explain absence and low quantity of eggs found. In this study, we compare parasite egg recovery of three Great House latrines: two from Aztec Ruins (Rooms 219 and 225) and one from Salmon Ruins. We compared through statistical regression the recovery of eggs with the abundance of two classes of decomposers: mites and nematodes. These microorganisms have relation with nematode larvae and parasites remains degradation, respectively, mostly in moist environments. Pinworm was the only parasite found in the sites studied. Prevalences were 32.8% at Salmon Ruins, 72.7% at Aztec Ruins Room 225 and 14.3% at Room 219. Egg preservation was considered good at Salmon Ruins and Aztec Ruins Room 225. At Room 219, the eggs were badly preserved and there was a significant statistical correlation with mites (multiple r (18) = 0.64/P = 0.002). This correlation could indicate that mites could be involved in preservation, and consequently that pinworm prevalence in this latrine is underestimated. Abiotic factors such as humidity could have possibly favored the biological relation. Considering the extreme egg degradation at Room 219, it is not possible to strictly compare parasite data with other Ancestral Pueblo sites, even with Room 225, located at the same site. Room 225 prevalence is the highest found in Ancestral Pueblo sites until now. Taphonomic analysis shows that decomposers operated at different levels of severity, despite the latrines' close location.

Collective action, state building, and the rise of the Calusa, southwest Florida, USA

Our work at Mound Key, the Capital of the Calusa Kingdom, identifies a large structure on top of Mound 1 that likely was associated with a powerful long-lived lineage. The rise to power for this group coincided with a significant amelioration of the shallow-water estuarine environment of Estero Bay during the Warm Medieval Period. We interpret this commitment to place as a way for successive members of this lineage to transmit political and social capital. We propose that prior to the sixteenth century the Calusa, and the broader landscape these groups inhabited, were organized much like the great houses were at the community level. A series of small polities participated in a fluctuating heterarchical system, that were likely the result of political jockeying of high ranking houses at larger settlements. We argue that long-lived houses with their accrued political and social capital were in the best position to take advantage of events that afforded the differential exercise of agency among their peers, allowing for new, novel, and seemingly more complex engagements. We use this case study to examine the role of collective action for the development of the Calusa Kingdom observed by the Spanish explorers during the sixteenth century, and its broader comparative lessons for state building among similarly organized societies.

Relative Housing Wealth and Labor Market Behavior

This paper analyzes how relative housing wealth affects labor supply. Using China's great housing boom as a natural experiment, we examine this empirical question and find that an appreciation in relative housing wealth significantly reduces the average working hours. We also find that this reduction is mainly driven by female homeowners. Our results suggest that the effect of relative housing wealth varies across education backgrounds, marital status and sectors of employment, and it is more pronounced among female homeowners who are under-educated, married and self-employed. A set of robustness checks corroborate the validity of our identification strategies and test the sensitivity of the results. In addition to explaining the empirical link between relative housing wealth and labor supply, this study improves our understanding of people's economic behavior caused by wealth fluctuations.

New evidence of ancient parasitism among Late Archaic and Ancestral Puebloan residents of Chaco Canyon

Archaeoparasitology provides a unique perspective on the health and habits of ancient cultures through the identification of parasite remains in archaeological materials. We identified eggs of the human whipworm, Trichuris trichiura, in coprolites recovered from Late Archaic (1926–1751cal.BCE) and Ancestral Puebloan (1039–1163cal.CE) sites in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Our findings represent the earliest record of T. trichiura in North America, the first record of the species from Chaco Canyon, and the first record of a macroparasite from a Late Archaic site (Atlatl Cave) on the Colorado Plateau. T. trichiura is common in the global archaeoparasitology record, but until now it was not known to have infected Ancestral Puebloans. Environmental barriers to transmission and lack of contact with infected Mesoamerican cultures have previously been used to explain the absence of this species from the Southwest. The new evidence of T. trichiura presented here raises questions about the cultural context which led to the arrival and persistence of this parasite in both a Late Archaic cave and an Ancestral Puebloan great house at Chaco Canyon. We propose that the moisture requirements of T. trichiura transmission may have been met through anthropogenic modification of the local environment, and that the presence of this species at Chaco Canyon suggests contact with infected Mesoamerican cultures. We also report the presence of the pinworm, Enterobius vermicularis, and unidentified larval nematodes in the Chaco Canyon archaeological record.

Portable Modernisms: The Art of Travelling Light by Emily Ridge

Reviewed by: Portable Modernisms: The Art of Travelling Light by Emily Ridge Susanne S. Cammack Portable Modernisms: The Art of Travelling Light. Emily Ridge. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Pp. 224. $105.00 (cloth); $105.00 (paper); $105.00 (eBook). Luggage in the early twentieth century was glamorous in its materiality and its possibilities for mobility. In Portable Modernisms, Emily Ridge sets out to explore how luggage—valises, purses, suitcases, trunks, etc.—serves as an apt metaphor for much of modernity. Her work covers an impressive breadth of material, from trade journals discussing how best to display luggage in store windows to Punch's satirical depiction of ways to "Carry a Suit-case in an Unsuspicious [End Page 607] Manner" that might as well have inspired Monty Python's "Ministry of Silly Walks" sketch. Borrowing methodologies from thing theory and material culture, Ridge argues that the literature of modernity is particularly influenced by the culture of portability and its omnipresent materiality. Ultimately, portability in all its iterations—from literal luggage to metaphorical rootlessness—shaped modernism and its literary output. Ridge begins by examining the literary evolution from the "house of fiction" to the "civilisation of luggage," phrases used by Henry James in his 1908 Preface to The Portrait of a Lady (1880) and by E. M. Forster in Howards End (1910), respectively. The "house of fiction" has idiomatically come to mean that fiction is structured largely like a Victorian house and is "something solid and hermetic, often synecdochically representative of a larger social whole" (32). This understanding of the phrase, however, is not an accurate representation of James's meaning: "[a] close reading of his model reveals a disfigured structure in the throes of transition" and presents the house's potential collapse, according to Ridge (37). She compares this structure to a "proto–modernist Tower of Babel" rather than a solid Victorian house (37). And considering the phrase was used by James as an introduction to his book nearly thirty years after its initial publication, the potential collapse of the Victorian model seems logical. The year after James's Preface, Forster considers the "civilisation of luggage" from the vantage point of one of fiction's great houses (and "houses of fiction") in Howards End. Ridge examines Forster's reluctance to venture too far into modernism and "portability," but the house's future is precarious throughout the novel, which also emphasizes the undercurrent of portability and transience in the new twentieth century. Despite Forster's mixed feelings about the shift toward portability, he provides us with its catchphrase and launches Ridge's exploration. Perhaps the most striking form of portability Ridge establishes in her first chapter is a well–traveled hatbox described in Max Beerbohm's short story "Ichabod" (1900). The hatbox is covered in a curated collection of traveling labels that serves as a "private autobiography" of the owner's travels, an articulation of self, and a narrative text in its own right (cited in Ridge, 42). Had Odysseus had such a hatbox on his travels, Beerbohm asserts, "Homer would have seen in it a sufficient record, a better record than even he could make, of Odysseus' wanderings. We should have had nothing from him but the Iliad" (44). The hatbox becomes a "playfully reimagined" form of the Homeric Odyssey twenty years before James Joyce's Ulysses, becoming a symbol of the modernist author "writing and dwelling in motion" (51)—like Joyce who wrote parts of Ulysses upon an upturned packing-case-turned-desk (54). This establishes a trend in modernist writing that emphasizes "routes over and above roots" (56). Ridge then argues that the "civilisation of luggage" holds particular potential for women since a woman's bag, purse, or luggage can become a "subversive emblem" for female self–sufficiency and autonomy (20). The more a woman takes control of her portable property, the greater the implications for a woman's rights to landed property and political autonomy; therefore, the New Woman, the suffragette, and the enfranchised woman are all connected to the question of who controls a woman's bags. For instance, in an 1894 Punch illustration, a Miss Sampson offers to carry a Mr. Smithereen's bag; the...

O que é Portugal? O que somos e porque o somos by Manuel ClementeO segredo da justiça by Pedro Garcia MarquesHumanidade(s): considerações radicalmente contemporâneas by Isabel Capeloa GilA Filologia e o Presente by Hans Ulrich GumbrechtBrexit: uma questão de racionalidade política by Annette Bongardt and Francisco Torres

Reviews 127 as also transpires in other parts of Cruz de Guerra, as much as he admires the Jesuits’ intellectuality and their love of knowledge, he is very harsh on the vow of celibacy. Himself forced to enter the seminary at the age of ten, Rocha, the son of landowners, abandoned the cloth when he moved to Portugal. As with most of Rocha’s narratives, Cruz de Guerra peers into his own past, which is entwined with that of Goans both outstanding and ordinary, both at home and abroad. Though his viewpoint is far from romantic or sentimental — at one point he describes Goan Freedom Fighters breaking into his ageing parents’ great house to steal a gun — and he is highly critical of Goans, he is determined to narrate episodes that show Goans at their best. One such example would be the undeniable link between the Hindus and the Catholics, as the final piece in the book, ‘Recordando uns episódios em Goa: tempo português em viragem’ [Remembering some Goan Episodes: Changing Portuguese Times], attests. It recounts the author’s experience in the Seminar of Rachol, the heart of Catholicism in Goa, when Rabindranath Tagore’s play Sanyassi, on Hindu philosophy, was performed. Another example would be his love of local customs and Goa’s language, Konkani, when he chooses to narrate that on the same occasion, in that same temple of erudition, where mostly Latin was spoken, a young Christian from Mardol got up on stage and, in the style of the popular tyatr, delivered a monologue about the vicissitudes of a cowherd when an ox runs away from the herd to go after a cow! What makes Cruz de Guerra a page-turner is Rocha’s ability to switch not only between genres and topics, but also between narrative tones. If he can be severely critical, he can also be amusing and entertaining. Manuel Clemente, O que é Portugal? O que somos e porque o somos (Lisbon: Universidade Católica Editora, 2015), 45 pages. Print. Pedro Garcia Marques, O segredo da justiça (Lisbon: Universidade Católica Editora, 2016), 75 pages. Print. Isabel Capeloa Gil, Humanidade(s): considerações radicalmente contempor âneas (Lisbon: Universidade Católica Editora, 2016), 60 pages + bibliography and notes. Print. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, A Filologia e o Presente, trans. by Ana Maria Carneiro (Lisbon: Universidade Católica Editora, 2017), 50 pages + notes. Print. Annette Bongardt and Francisco Torres, Brexit: uma questão de racionalidade política (Lisbon: Universidade Católica Editora, 2017), 46 pages + notes. Print. Reviewed by Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick In 2015 the Press of the Catholic University of Portugal (UCP) started a new series, with the title of Argumentos, which now includes twenty-five books, the latest of which is devoted to sacred art and architecture in Braga. Although Reviews 128 the Press (Universidade Católica Editora) has been publishing for twenty years in a diverse range of academic fields and disciplines, including not only the Humanities and Social Sciences but also Law, Business, Engineering and Theology, it does not enjoy much visibility outside those fields. The new series could change that, as it is interdisciplinary, very topical and accessible. Published in cooperation with the Fundação Cupertino de Miranda and priced at five euros per volume (€4.50 initially), there are many reasons for it to become a success and reach a wider audience beyond the restricted groves of academia. Unlike the comparable series published directly by the Fundação Cupertino de Miranda — also very topical and priced even lower, with the paperback versions costing just three euros — which is widely available to the general public in special displays placed in most supermarkets as well as bookstores, this series still needs better distribution if it is ultimately to reach the wide audience it addresses in Portugal. Conversely — and this is both unusual and very welcome — the books can be purchased from Amazon UK for a still modest five pounds plus postage. The topics covered are wide-ranging, encompassing some questions more restricted to an academic interest while others speak to anyone wishing to be informed, be it on euthanasia, the question of Europe, or the impact of refugees...