The Pajarito Plateau of northern New Mexico is home to Bandelier National Monument and its ancient cliff dwellings as well as Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the atom bomb. Located on the slopes of a huge dormant volcano, the plateau is known for its cool, forested highlands and its steep, well-watered canyons. One hundred miles to the west in a harsh, dry, treeless basin is Chaco Canyon the puebloan people’s greatest cultural center.
In this lively overview, University of New Mexico archaeologist David Stuart argues that as the Chacoan culture was collapsing at the beginning of the A.D.1100s, many of its people, family by family, immigrated to the thinly populated Pajarito Plateau, driven by drought and social strife. As the collapse worsened, more and more people came to the highlands in search of water and security, and this migration continued through the collapse of the Mesa Verde culture in the last decades of the 1200s.
The immigrant farmers had to adapt to the cooler nights and shorter growing seasons of the mountains, where growing corn posed new challenges. They abandoned the great pueblos of Chaco for more traditional small settlements. Santa Fe Black-on-white pottery replaced the Chacoan varieties. Stuart traces the adaptations of the immigrants to the new environment— “diversification of their food economy, and highly mixed farming techniques adapted to a wide variety of existing soil, temperature, and elevational microniches.” Small-scale innovations like true irrigation ditches and rock-mulch garden beds improved efficiency. Practicality and sustainability replaced the grandeur and stratification of Chaco culture.
From 1300 to 1550, this new upland culture flourished on the Pajarito Plateau, building the pueblos and cliff dwellings most Bandelier visitors cherish. The people gradually moved to the well-watered environment of the Rio Grande Valley, forming many of the pueblos that we know today. Mesa top fields were abandoned for the more reliable riverine environment.
Stuart concludes that the innovations of the Pajarito Plateau produced the densest populations of any Southwestern district in prehistoric times. It was the crucible for recasting Puebloan society into a model of long-term sustainability, as Chacoan complexity was transformed into the practical, egalitarian societies of the modern Rio Grande pueblos. – Mark Michel
