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Comment by 8bitsrule | Hacker News Reader

In the tradition, the article shares a lot of tantalizing speculation. For example, did the Mayans really trade with Chaco for turquoise (the mineral)? Found one reference that said the Mayans did make the color.

Conceivably the Norse 'penny' reached Maine as a trade object. Etc. fun stuff to think about.

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The author is simply out-of-date. Turquoise found in Central and Southern Mexican sites was for a long time thought to be Southwestern. Eventually isotopic analysis determined that to be pretty unlikely. It probably comes from unknown sources somewhere in the Mexican highlands that may not exist anymore. Same story with cacao, which may have come from West Mexico instead. Likewise, the macaws referenced were bred in Paquime [1] in the Southwest itself (and perhaps elsewhere). We have the breeding rooms and baby skeletons to support it.

The unforgivably outdated info is the part about mesoamerican nobles living in Chaco. That's a super old and kind of racist narrative you typically see from people writing in like the 30s-50s. You'd have to ignore half a century of exploration into the emergence of political complexity in the SW to believe it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casas_Grandes

> The unforgivably outdated info is the part about mesoamerican nobles living in Chaco. That's a super old and kind of racist narrative you typically see from people writing in like the 30s-50s. You'd have to ignore half a century of exploration into the emergence of political complexity in the SW to believe it.

Wait what? You lost me here. The article clearly attributes the settlement of Chaco Canyon to the Ancestral Puebloans, which seems to be the current mainstream belief at least as Wikipedia presents it. It notes one skeleton with notched teeth, but doesn't seem to say anything about it being indicative nobility. With respect to that practice in Mayan culture, Wikipedia says "Overall, little evidence for the relationship between socioeconomic status and types of dental modification exists."

When the Chacoan ruins were originally discovered by Anglo-Americans in the 19th century, the initial hypothesis was that they were Aztecan. By the mid 20th, early archaeologists had shifted somewhat and recognized that they had primarily Puebloan populations, but many still insisted on a lingering belief that the sites were ultimately founded and/or governed by exiled Toltec nobility or that of various other mesoamerican groups. This was significantly motivated by early 20th century beliefs about the "essential natures" of certain ethnic groups. For Puebloans, it was believed that building a society like what was evident at Chaco was fundamentally against Puebloan nature (too much hierarchy, political complex, use of violence, etc...). Needless to say, this is both racist and also incorrect. Mesoamericans have not been found at Chaco.

Granted, it's been a few years since I've worked on a Chaco project specifically, but I'm pretty confident in my understanding here.

I would consider myself Puebloan although from southern Colorado. I think it's mildly interesting that I have a completely different understanding than an archeologist does

It happens surprisingly often. I'm curious how your understanding differs though. I'm not trying to describe how we think about Chaco today, but rather how academics 60-70 years ago interpreted it through a diffusionist lens.

My understanding is that the Spanish knew what the ruins were because they asked around and got the answer. I think there's a difference between knowing something and formally studying something scientifically and methodically. The latter surely must involve discounting second hand testimony while valuing physical evidence. Like, I can tell you about how my father-in-law found conquistador armor in an ice cave by the great sand dunes but academically that doesn't interest anyone.

I do find it difficult to understand how any academic could believe Pueblo people weren't (culturally predisposed?) to building Chaco Canyon when we have cities like Taos practically next door.

Chaco is pretty different than the modern Pueblos in a number of important ways. It's a lot more monumental (The back wall of Pueblo Bonito was ~5 stories tall), many potsherds have "mesoamerican" designs, the burials are incredibly rich, and the road network looks a lot like Aztec roads and the time period matched Toltecs, who were their "predecessors". Moreover, diffusionism was totally in vogue and it wasn't considered radical at all to suggest that Chaco was the distant outpost of some Toltecs making the local Puebloan populations labor for them. After all, Pacquime down in Chihuahua was an even larger, more impressive Toltec output (it wasn't). Additionally, though we now understand "anasazi" to refer to ancestral Puebloans, prior to the discovery/analysis of the Magician's Tomb in the 1920s, the link between ancestral and modern Puebloans was only suspected at best, and definitely not as a continuation.

Besides as any anthropologist would tell you, taking people purely at face value can hide some very complicated relationships. Some Navajo/Diné will tell you a lot of the ruins are their ancestors', for example. Some Hopi reportedly disclaimed Chaco to early archaeologists, calling it a bad place because they didn't want to claim descent from the political system. Something similar occurs with O'odham peoples and Hohokam structures.

What is your understanding?

What's the up-to-date explanation for those tooth mods the article talks about as indicative of Mesoamerican heritage?

The short answer is that we don't know the exact meaning. There are similar finds of dental modifications scattered across the Southwest. However, it's important to note that the Southwest was in active "cultural communication" with its neighboring areas, including Mesoamerica. Plenty of ideas went both ways, especially iconography. People like Lekson are still arguing that Chaco was at least partially an experiment/imitation of more Southern political systems.

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