Kinship and Community in the Northern Southwest: Chaco and Beyond

Abstract

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.

Tracking Mississippian Migrations from the Central Mississippi Valley to the Ridge and Valley with a Unified Absolute Chronology

“…Ware (2018:643–645) offers a thought-provoking example of how social rank in another matrilineal, ranked-descent-group society is related to fission when there were food shortages. In Pueblo communities the lower-rank households and lineage segments may leave first to help establish new communities or to join existing ones elsewhere.…”

Identity and community structure in Neolithic Man Bac, northern Vietnam

“…This begs the question what, if anything, is the fundamental basis for membership of this putatively non-kin dependent group? Membership is not exclusive to KG5, 6I ablation or class 3/4 mortuary treatment, nor sex or age for that matter and as such may be more characteristic of a sodality albeit with some form of kin component (see Ware, 2018 on this issue with respect to American Southwest Pueblo sodalities 4 ). While we will continue to use the term sodality in this looser structural sense, the observation that 55.6% of class 3 or 4 graves, regardless of ablation status, belong to KG5, including the 9-year-old mentioned above, does suggest membership is primarily a function of kin affiliation.…”