Collaborative: Continuity and Change in Community Organization in the Casas Grandes Region, Chihuahua, Mexico

University Of Oklahoma Norman Campus, Norman OK

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support Drs. Michael Whalen and Paul Minnis will conduct three seasons of archaeological fieldwork in the Casas Grandes region. Although located in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico, Casas Grades is one of the pueblo-style cultures that are best known from the adjacent southwestern U.S. At its apogee (ca. A.D. 1200-1450) Casas Grandes has been characterized as the largest and most complex prehistoric community in the puebloan world. It is further recognized both as the center of one of the major interaction systems of the region and as a link between the cultures of Mesoamerica and those of the U.S. Southwest. Despite its acknowledged status as one of late prehistoric North America's few indigenous complex societies, the Casas Grandes polity has been so little studied that most aspects of its size, structure, level of centralization, and mode of operation remain obscure. Dr. Whalen's and Minnis' work in Chihuahua since 1989 has been designed to remedy this situation, first with a large settlement pattern survey and more recently with a program of excavation at selected sites. In contrast to the original and highly influential interpretation which has prevailed for the last 25 years, recent work agues that the Casas Grandes polity was not, as had been argued, highly centralized, but rather existed at an intermediate level of sociopolitical complexity. It was not able to exert uniform control over its near neighbors. More likely it represents a less comprehensive, less centralized situation of irregular control in a politically unstable context. This idea has been developed as far as possible from the survey and limited excavation data available. Its further explication requires data on how and to what extent the regional center of Casas Grandes impacted its neighbors. This complex question will be approached through excavation at outlying settlements. Apparent at Casas Grandes is a leadership package that involved economics, prestige goods, and ritual. Drs Whalen and Minnis will trace the extent to which these attributes spread over the surrounding areas.