Sociopolitical, Ceremonial, and Economic Aspects of Gambling in Ancient North America: A Case Study of Chaco Canyon

Abstract

This paper builds upon DeBoer's (2001) assertion that models of ancient North American cultural systems can be enriched by incorporating gambling as a dynamic and productive social practice using the case study of the Ancient Puebloan center of Chaco Canyon (ca. AD 800–1180). A review of Native North American, Pueblo, and worldwide ethnography reveals gambling's multidimensionality as a social, economic, and ceremonial technology in contrast to its recreational associations in contemporary Western society. I propose that gambling was one mechanism through which leaders in precontact North America—and, specifically, at Chaco Canyon—integrated diverse communities, facilitated trade, accumulated material wealth, perpetuated religious ideology, and established social inequality. I present evidence of gambling at Chaco Canyon in the form of 471 gaming artifacts currently held in museum collections in addition to oral traditions of descendant Native cultures that describe extensive gambling in Chacoan society.

Gambling in Ancient North America

“…However, a few sites and locales have yielded sometimes vast numbers of objects associated with various ethnographically and historically attested games. Some of the larger examples include Pueblo Bonito, New Mexico, associated with the Navaho myth of the Great Gambler (Weiner, 2018); Wilson Butte Cave, Idaho, and villages in the Parowan Valley, Utah, where scores of tabular, two-sided bone dice have been found (Bryan, 2006;Hall, 2009); the Lake Midden site, Saskatchewan, and the Ice Glider site, South Dakota, where polished bison rib darts used in a Plains variant of the snow snake game number in the hundreds (Majewski, 1986;Walde, 2003); and the Promontory Caves, Utah, where excellent preservation conditions have allowed the recovery of cane, wood, and other perishable gaming pieces that could number in the thousands (Hallson, 2017;Yanicki & Ives, 2017). In other cases, singular objects or monumental features that are found in many different places, like chunkey stones and ball courts, attest to the wide distribution of their associated games.…”

What’s new in Chaco research?

“…Regardless, hospitality during ceremonial events would have been an important part of life in the canyon, given the density of evidence for hierarchy and religious ritual. Chaco Canyon gatherings may have included ritualised gaming practices, such as gambling (Weiner 2018).…”

Kinship and Community in the Northern Southwest: Chaco and Beyond

“…4.The frequently cited argument (e.g., Wobst 1975; see also Kantner and Kintigh 2006:174 and most recently Weiner 2018:39) that endogamous communities require a population of several hundred individuals to be genetically viable is perhaps a relevant issue for the very long term, but most Ancestral Pueblo communities lasted a few generations at most and likely experienced considerable turnover in personnel (see discussion in Ware 2014:161).…”

“…Both intellectual trends encouraged the now widely held view that the historical Pueblo ethnographies—especially those of the acculturated Eastern Pueblos—are largely irrelevant to understanding Ancestral Pueblo social practices and institutions. As a result, the direct historical approach, one of the most promising methods for overcoming kinship's interpretive challenges (Ware 2017), was abandoned in favor of more abstract modeling (Whiteley 2018). But as Bruce Trigger (1989:342) pointed out, in the absence of written records the direct historical approach is perhaps the only method we have of reconstructing culturally specific aspects of religion and other practices that leave behind few unambiguous material remains—like kinship.…”

“…And where matrilocal residence combines with matrilineal descent, female ownership of house and prime farmland tends to dominate as well. Finally, the Rio Grande Tanoan Pueblos (Tewa and Tiwa) are now thoroughly bilateral, but their surviving kinship terminologies preserve traces of both crossness and skewing , 2 suggesting that the descriptive “Eskimo” terminologies of the Tewa and Tiwa replaced an earlier classificatory Crow (matrilineal) terminology (Whiteley 2018). Peter Whiteley suggests that the Tanoan descriptive bilateral shift likely occurred fairly late, under Spanish colonial influence (Eggan [1950] advanced a similar hypothesis; Hill [2018] provides additional support).…”