Culture and Ecology of Chaco Canyon and the San Juan Basin

The NPS Chaco Project 19A combination of deductive reasoning and use of datato inform on theory remained a practice throughoutthe project.Organiwtion of this VolumeThis volume is organized around four topics:studies of natural resources and the environment, thePreceramic period, the Pueblo use, and the Historicperiod. Because our understanding of the Preceramicperiod is limited (Chapter 3), we can only assumecontinuity between those who relied on hunting andgathering with some horticulture and later Puebloagriculturalists. If movement of people throughout alarger area occurred, there may have been periodswhen Chaco Canyon or at least some of its sites werenot used. How societies marked or shared thelandscape has not yet been deciphered. Thus, muchmore work on methods to discern continuity isneeded, not just to link these two major periods, butalso to link them within the Pueblo occupation.Chapters 4 through 9 discuss the Pueblo occupation.After some period of disuse, Navajo moved into thearea. They remain there today, sharing the landscapewith Euro-Americans. Chapter 10 presents theirhistory, and evaluates how Euro-American culturesaffected their herding adaptation. In Chapter 11, Ifocus on recent broad-based frames of reference thatplace this Southwestern case study within a worldwideframe of reference.In summary, the Chaco Project is unique withinNPS history and the history of archaeology. AsWilshusen and Hamilton (2005) note, it was one of thelargest cultural resource management programs everundertaken by the National Park Service. Its scopewas immense, and a project of similar scope has notyet been implemented by this agency. It occurredduring the period when "New Archaeology, " with itsmore rigorous methods and deductive logic, wascombined with systems theory and cultural ecology.Its staff included investigators trained in Southwesternarchaeology during the 1930s, as well as a number ofyoung students who availed themselves of many newtools to analyze previous models and propose newones. As my colleague Marcia L. Truell (personalcommunication, 1982) remarked, "it is only at the endof a project that we begin to ask new questions."Scholars continue to pursue answers to newerquestions (Mills 2002), but their database for ChacoCanyon still remains much the same-the datacollected by the Chaco Project-for their evaluation ofnew theories, some of which will be included in thechapters that follow.