THE CHACO DIGITAL INITIATIVE
THE CHACO DIGITAL INITIATIVE
Immediately prior to the era from A.D. 850-1150 in the Pueblo region of the American Southwest, most people lived in small villages of 1-15 masonry rooms, probably housing no more than 10-25 individuals. Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico is an anomaly to this pattern, with nine exceptionally large pueblos concentrated in a single 9-mile stretch of the canyon. These structures are referred to as “great houses” because of their size (50 to 650 masonry rooms) and their unusual constellation of architectural features such as intricate core-and-veneer architecture, large subterranean ritual structures known as great kivas, and excessive use of wooden beams harvest in the mountains 50-70 km away. Scholars recognized the unique social scale of Chaco as early as the late 19th century. A hundred years later, the canyon continues to command the attention of archaeologists both here and abroad.
Despite the scope of fieldwork and publications on Chaco, many of the central research questions have proven difficult to resolve. Was Chaco a political, ritual, or economic center, or some combination of these factors? Was there significant social differentiation among the canyon residents and, if not, how were the large number of workers mobilized to build great houses? How can we explain the dichotomy between the large great houses and the numerous contemporary small house sites? Even more basic questions such as how many people lived in Chaco remain unresolved, with stark discrepancies between published estimates.
Inadequate and incomplete reporting of pre-1970s fieldwork in the canyon has hindered resolution of these questions. The published monographs often follow the reporting patterns typical of earlier generations, focusing on categories of material types (e.g., ceramics) rather than describing contexts, which are central to contemporary research. While archaeologists continue to emphasize data from these crucial early excavations, our ability to test historical and theoretical models is limited by the published sources.
In 2002, a group of scholars agreed to work together to build a digital research archive to provide detailed room-by-room catalogs of materials and features and access to photographs and field drawings from five important Chacoan settlements. Over the last 5½ years, we have collected thousands of unpublished field notes, journals, letters, maps, manuscripts, and images from more than 20 institutions around the country. In cooperation with the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia, we have designed and built a complex relational database that catalogs the archival information collected and integrates architectural, artifactual, chronological, and stratigraphic excavation data extracted from published and unpublished sources. Much of the archival material can be accessed through our project website, www.chacoarchive.org; hundreds of texts may be downloaded in PDF format and roughly 7,500 images will shortly be searchable by collection, site, and keyword.
Room-by-room data entry that will allow the critical, context specific queries that have been needed began about 1½ years ago and is ongoing, with a likely completion date of late 2009, but we will release available information for three important sites at the end of 2008. We are now designing and building interfaces that will allow interested scholars to query and download this information in multiple ways.
