Casa Grandes and Its Hinterland

One hundred thirty miles south of the United States border, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, lie the ruins of the impressive prehistoric town of Casas Grandes (Great Houses) or Paquimé. From about A.D. 1300 to 1450, it was probably the largest and grandest town in the entire Southwest. Extensive excavations at the core site from 1958 to 1961 by Charles Di Peso revealed a well-engineered water system and massive Pueblo-style room blocks, as well as Mesoamerican-style ballcourts and platform mounds. Exotic trade goods like copper bells and macaws were abundant. Di Peso interpreted all this to mean that Casas Grandes was a Mesoamerican outpost on the edge of Mexican civilization, complete with ruling elites and a stratified social system. In this book, Whalen and Minnis, archaeologists at the universities of Tulsa and Oklahoma respectively, offer an insightful challenge to Di Peso’s interpretation. Armed with new data, they see a much less centralized and stratified polity. Instead of a foreign outpost, Casas Grandes rests squarely in the cultural tradition of the greater Southwest in general and northern Chihuahua in particular, albeit with Mesoamerican touches. Whalen and Minnis see it as a society of intermediate complexity that lacked well-defined power structures. The outlying settlements were influenced by central Casas Grandes, but not ruled by it. When compared to the work done at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde, research in the Casas Grandes region is still in its infancy. But in Casas Grandes and Its Hinterland, Whalen and Minnis have made an outstanding contribution to our understanding of this intriguing culture.