
The Elites of Pueblo Bonito (2018) - mooreds
https://thefifthwave.wordpress.com/2018/05/02/the-elites-of-pueblo-bonito/
======
ncmncm
When the end came, it came fast.

Were people generally better off, after? We call the time after the fall of
Rome a Dark Age, but farmers certainly kept more of their harvest, for
centuries.

~~~
RogerL
Define 'better'.

I'm not being (entirely) flip. After leaving Chaco they built a few more great
houses, but ended up in a more hospitable environment with presumably lower
environmental stress. Many different community styles seemed to form -
variations on the Chaco culture. It's up to interpretation, but it seems
likely that there were egalitarian and generally peaceful living coupled with
social experimentation, but still stressed by environmental factors. Then the
Spanish came, and relations were extraordinarily inhumane - slavery,
massacres, famine, and so on.

It's a lot of conjecture - no written records, and after the treatment by
first the Spanish and then US Government the descendants are almost entirely
silent on the matter despite having significant oral traditions on these
matters.

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golergka
> One long wall followed an 18-year cycle of the moon – a remarkable feat of
> cultural memory for a people who lacked writing and whose life expectancy
> for men was 35 years (for women it was 24).

Is this the usual fallacy of using the life expectancy of birth as if that was
the age when average adult expected to die? Because even without googling, I'm
pretty sure that once someone from this civilization survived childhood, his
expected age raised considerably, to 50-60 years.

~~~
RogerL
Yes, just another fanciful element of this article. In general, if you made it
past 18, expectancy ranged from 40-50 years. These populations were generally
in very high stress - anemia was nearly universal, once farming started stools
show universal evidence of pin worms and other parasites, and so on.

For example, the book "Centuries of Decline during the Hohokam Classic Period
of Pueblo Grande" shows a mean lifespan of 20.1 years at Pueblo Grande, but
40.9 years if you make it to 18.
[https://books.google.com/books?id=DopkDQAAQBAJ](https://books.google.com/books?id=DopkDQAAQBAJ)

That's not Chaco, but gives the general idea.

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zenkat
This article is "just so" storytelling if the worst kind. Little or no
evidence is produced for any of its conclusions -- just assertions that the
historical Pueblan people "obviously" must have had a technological elite that
desired separation from the riff-raff. It's completely ahistorical -- nothing
but fact-free cultural projection.

~~~
jackbravo
Talk about cultural projection...

> The massive ruins of Chaco Canyon reminded the modern Americans who first
> encountered them of the Aztecs. Given their love of clean straight lines,
> symmetry, and order, and their penchant for monumentality, a more apt
> parallel to the Anasazi, I think, would be the old Romans. Like the Roman
> colony, Pueblo Bonito was built to a plan.

Either he doesn't know the aztecs, or any other culture from the region. He
had to go to Rome, discounting other great cities like Tenochtitlan (Aztec,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenochtitlan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenochtitlan)),
Teotihuacan (Toltec?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teotihuacan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teotihuacan)),
Palenque, Chichen-Itza, Tikal from the Mayans, or Monte Alban from the Zapotec
people
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Alb%C3%A1n](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Alb%C3%A1n))....

~~~
RogerL
Besides the extensive trade and travel done with what we now call Mexico,
there was also a lot of trade, or at least travel, to CA at the time; beads
formed from seashells gathered from the CA coast were a common feature of
clothing and daily use items.

The writer of the article is ignorant, and the comparison to Rome is
offensive.

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patrickg_zill
I do wonder if the Anasazi didn't have some form of written communication. It
hardly makes sense that they could run a large enterprise without writing; and
how did they manage to communicate and coordinate everything without it?

Just dealing with trade over a long distance alone, would itself seem to
indicate that they developed some form of accounting.

~~~
Sarki
They most likely used quipu for this I think.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu)

~~~
NelsonMinar
Quipu are from the Andes in South America. It's several thousand miles away.

There's no evidence of writing in pre-contact Pueblo cultures. There are some
rock pictographs that might have symbolic meanings, that's about as close as
it gets. It's a bit of a mystery why Central American writing systems didn't
make their way this far north.

