Background Information

The context for this year's research.

The Rio Puerco rises on the western flanks of the Jemez Mountains, emptying its sediment-rich waters into the Rio Grande just south of Albuquerque. For eons the waters of the Rio Puerco, still sacred to Pueblo peoples of Isleta and Laguna, have carved the primary natural travel route linking two major physiographic regions of the American Southwest, the San Juan Basin and the Rio Grande Valley.

These two regions have played important roles as centers of Pueblo culture change over the past millennium, including the development of the Chaco regional system in the San Juan Basin (Crown and Judge 1991) and the later Pueblo migrations into the Rio Grande Valley (Cameron 1995). Throughout the post-contact period (A.D. 1540-present) the Rio Puerco drainage has served as the primary travel artery between the Eastern Pueblos and their Western counterparts at Hopi, Acoma, and Zuni Pueblos. Despite its centrality to historic and ancestral Pueblo (Anasazi) regional interaction, much of the Rio Puerco's prehistory remains underdocumented.

The Puerco drainage is most well known for research into preagricultural Archaic groups (Irwin-Williams 1973) and the archaeology of early Chaco-style outlier settlements (Powers et al. 1983). Yet comparatively little is known about the past several centuries of ancestral Pueblo occupation in the area despite evidence of continued, intensive occupation (Tainter and Tainter 1995).

Sifting and screening work on site allows
the research team to recover even small
samples of pottery, bone and other materials.

During the summer 2001 field season our research will delve into the ancestral Pueblo occupation along the Rio Puerco. Our specific focus of investigation will be Chaves Pueblo (LA 578, also known as Hummingbird Ruin), a very large, ancestral Pueblo village occupied during the 13th and 14th centuries on the Canada de los Apaches, a side tributary of the Rio Puerco. The first residents of Chaves Pueblo settled in during some of the most tumultuous decades ever experienced by ancestral Pueblo peoples. The 13th and 14th centuries were difficult times for puebloan communities across the Southwest.

During this time the ancestral Pueblo peoples endured prolonged droughts (Grissino-Mayer 1996), weathered increasing levels of conflict between communities (LeBlanc 1999; Haas and Creamer 1996), and saw regional population relocations on scales that had never been experienced (Spielmann 1998; Duff 1998). These and other factors created conditions leading to large-scale movement out of some areas, such as the Four Corners and Kayenta regions (Dean 1996; Varien, et al. 2000). Migrants relocated to the Rio Grande valley and many other areas, some of which were already occupied, creating the potential for population interaction as well as conflict. Settlement size increased dramatically during this period as puebloan groups moved into large, often defensively situated villages, often along or near dependable water supplies (Adler 1996). This dependence on an aggregated settlement strategy remained strong in the Pueblos across the subsequent seven centuries, and still stands as the defining characteristic of Pueblo community organization today (Adler, Van Pool, and Leonard 1996).

The Rio Puerco basin occupies roughly 16,000 square kilometers of northwestern New Mexico. Rio Puerco is one of the main tributaries of the Rio Grande, entering the river near Bernardo. Learn more about this watershed here.

Create your own map, showing the Rio Puerco in relation to major roads and rivers, and to state, federal and Native American lands. Click here for Enviromapper.

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