Early procurement of scarlet macaws and the emergence of social complexity in Chaco Canyon, NM

Abstract

High-precision accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) 14C dates of scarlet macaw (Ara macao) skeletal remains provide the first direct evidence from Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico that these Neotropical birds were procured from Mesoamerica by Pueblo people as early as ∼A.D. 900–975. Chaco was a prominent prehistoric Pueblo center with a dense concentration of multistoried great houses constructed from the 9th through early 12th centuries. At the best known great house of Pueblo Bonito, unusual burial crypts and significant quantities of exotic and symbolically important materials, including scarlet macaws, turquoise, marine shell, and cacao, suggest societal complexity unprecedented elsewhere in the Puebloan world. Scarlet macaws are known markers of social and political status among the Pueblos. New AMS 14C-dated scarlet macaw remains from Pueblo Bonito demonstrate that these birds were acquired persistently from Mesoamerica between A.D. 900 and 1150. Most of the macaws date before the hypothesized apogeal Chacoan period (A.D. 1040–1110) to which they are commonly attributed. The 10th century acquisition of these birds is consistent with the hypothesis that more formalized status hierarchies developed with significant connections to Mesoamerica before the post-A.D. 1040 architectural florescence in Chaco Canyon.

Eleventh-century shift in timber procurement areas for the great houses of Chaco Canyon

“…Although Chacoan exchange networks extended as far as Mesoamerica for prestige items (34,35), the procurement of basic, labor-intensive resources from multiple distant landscapes, with shifting dynamics of use, is a prominent feature of Chacoan society. Testing for similar patterns at other pre-Columbian and historic sites in North America would be a fruitful endeavor and is possible now because of a dense network of long tree-ring chronologies and the rich collection of archaeological wood material housed at the University of Arizona and National Park Service archives.…”

Ritual drinks in the pre-Hispanic US Southwest and Mexican Northwest

“…In the US Southeast, historic documents describe men consuming large quantities of black drink and then vomiting as a form of ritual cleansing (9). Cacao consumption in the US Southwest and Mexican Northwest fits a pattern of importation of other ritually significant Mesoamerican items, including live scarlet macaws and macaw feathers, pyrite mirrors, pseudo-cloisonné objects, and copper bells (5,(19)(20)(21). Of the six sites with definite cacao residues discussed as group 1 samples above, Pueblo Bonito, Aztec Ruins, and Kinishba have such Mesoamerican trade items (21), whereas the excavations at the Lake Roberts Site, Site 315, and Upper Santan Village have not recovered other Mesoamerican imports.…”

“…We selected fragments of ceramic drinking vessels from sites that represent a range of time periods and locations. Because we were specifically targeting residues from a plant species whose range extends no farther north than central Mexico (1), we primarily selected ceramics from sites that had other Mesoamerican trade items, particularly scarlet macaws, another species native to the humid lowlands of Mesoamerica (3)(4)(5). We also selected some samples from villages that lacked other known Mesoamerican trade items to avoid biasing the sample (Table 1).…”

Long-distance wood procurement and the Chaco florescence

“…Shared ceramic styles, raw materials such as chipped stone and wood, and extraordinarily high concentrations of raw and finished turquoise, marine shell, and copper, as well as scarlet macaws (Ara macao) and cacao (Theobroma cacao), indicate that Chacoan exchange networks spanned the San Juan Basin and beyond, likely extending 1,000-2,500 km into present-day Central America. For many scholars, the ability to orchestrate labor and the maintenance of these long-distance networks was a means by which political elites consolidated and signaled their power (10,11).…”

“…The application of new theoretical approaches, technologies, and methods during the last decade has yielded a number of significant discoveries, ushering in an exciting period of research on Chaco Canyon (10,(18)(19)(20). This innovative analysis of sourcing the wood Chacoans harvested to build their great houses constitutes another important contribution to research on Chaco Canyon.…”