Matriarchs of Chaco Canyon

I had just finished my archaeology degree at York University when I went to live in Arizona for six months. In March 1985 my friend Laurie Reiser drove me from Tucson up into the high country of northern New Mexico.

For the Navajo nation, who arrived in the Four Corners region in the 1500s, these people were the Anasazi, the ‘enemy ancestors’. Elsewhere across the Southwest the remains of enormously impressive cliff-dwelling settlements, reminiscent of the Dogon villages of the Bandiagara escarpment in Mali, testify to widespread and successful settlement, heavily influenced by brilliant Mesoamerican ceramics and weaving and their crucial vegetable ‘guild’ of beans, maize and squash.

Chaco culture was confident and highly specialised. The crafting and precision of the dry sandstone walling of the pueblos is a marvel in itself, in places still standing to several storeys. Mastery of geometric forms, astronomical and solar alignments, unique T-shaped doorways and thermally efficient roofs with terraces accessed by ladders indicate a high degree of organisation and planning, and of cosmological awareness. Anthropologists have always been interested in trying to understand Puebloan society, even though no written narratives survive to tell of their lives. Highly decorated hand-coiled pottery, textiles, a wealth of domestic paraphernalia and the evidence of burials recovered by archaeologists, the apparent social exclusivity of some of the structures and the survival of a handful of Pueblo settlements into the modern era has encouraged more than a hundred years of ethnographic study, scholarly debate and even more wishful speculation.

The pueblos, or villages, of Taos, Hopi and Zuni, which sit either side of the Arizona/New Mexico border, retain many of their customs and traditions. Alongside the daily tasks, including grinding corn and cooking, their women seem also to have traditionally specialised in the production of decorated ceramics for food and water storage. Dazzling bi-chrome painted patterns have evolved and been handed down through the female line for many generations and anthropologists have tried to use clusters of discarded sherds on excavated Pueblo sites to try to reconstruct elements of the social dynamics of those societies – with limited success, it must be said. In particular, the matrilocal residence patterns of contemporary pueblos, in which married couples go to live in the wife’s parents’ home and where land is owned and bequeathed through the female line, creating tight-knit female household groupings, has prompted archaeologists to look for evidence of such patterns in the excavated settlements of the Anasazi.

A paper published in the journal Nature Communications in February 2017 has revived this old debate. Like the skeletal material from grave Bj581 in Birka,^# bones have been reanalysed from excavations conducted around the turn of the twentieth century – long before an appreciation of indigenous sensitivities prevented such intrusive investigations. In particular, scientists wanted to test the remains found in a very special room, no more than 2 by 2 metres (6½ ft square) in square plan and one of the first constructed at the settlement, as far back as the ninth century CE. Room 33, as it is known, functioned as a crypt – a highly unusual feature of Chaco settlement – accessed by a small hatch high in one wall. The founding burial, that of a male in his forties, killed by a single blow to the head, lay on a bed of wood ash and sand on which lay scattered several thousand turquoise beads from many necklaces and bracelets. He was accompanied by abalone shells brought from the distant Pacific coast and a conch shell trumpet, and covered in a thick layer of sand that was sterile except for a pair of ceramic vessels. Above him a second burial was placed, also with several thousand turquoise beads, before a plank floor was laid over the whole. Twelve further individuals were interred above the wooden floor during a period, now confirmed by radiocarbon dating, of over three hundred years. They were entombed with an immensely rich inventory of materials: more beads, a cache of flutes, ceramic bowls and pitchers and carved ceremonial wooden staffs. In adjacent rooms lay the remains of more staffs, pottery, jewellery and precious scarlet macaws from South America, highly prized for their marvellous bright feathers.

DNA, the genetic blueprint, was successfully extracted from nine of the individuals: six males and three females. To the surprise of the scientists, they showed identical mitochondrial DNA. The inescapable conclusion is that each was related to a single original female, either as mother to daughter, grandmother to grandson, or similar, which could be reconstructed as a hypothetical family tree spanning five generations.

What are the implications of such social structures for women’s lives? First, it meant that, unlike the communities of Early Medieval Europe, it was men who had to adapt their behaviours to those of their wife’s family. Instead of a Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir having to please her exacting and sceptical mother-in-law, a new husband would have to live up to the behavioural expectations of his wife’s parents. He must learn to get along with his wife’s sisters, brothers and uncles; he must adapt to their routines and family mores. For women, family solidarity was a powerful means of expressing identity and control over the running of the home. If the husband laboured in the fields and gardens, he did so on his wife’s plot. Family narratives were passed through the female line, too. Men wishing to maintain social bonds with their own brothers and sisters and their childhood friends must find spaces and activities where they might enjoy their own confraternal company – and there are suggestions that those kivas with fire pits and weaving looms might have been used by men as sorts of clubhouses: ‘men sheds’, to use the modern idiom. Anthropologists have identified evidence of matrilocal residence elsewhere – in the Nair community of Kerala in southern India, in parts of southwestern China and in the hunter-gatherer !Kung people of southern Africa.^∫

It remains to be seen whether scholarly scrutiny will cast doubt on the new findings. But to members of existing indigenous groups in the region, where matrilocality is still practised, the results will come as no surprise.