Time and Patience: the Most Powerful Warriors. Part Three

    The nexus of astronomy and architecture is called archaeoastronomy and in Chaco Canyon, NM it is manifested in three predominant ways.  One of these is in front-facing South/Southeast (S/SE) orientated structures - we will discuss the other ways in future instalments of this topic.

Pueblo Pintado a S/SE orientated structure (~160 degrees)
(Author's collection. Copyright 2019)

    Buildings with S/SE orientation are well documented back to Basketmaker III pit houses (400-700AD) - well before the earliest great houses - and continued to be built through the middle of the Pueblo I Period (700-850AD).  Archaeological surveys find that the orientation azimuths range from 151 to 161degrees and this S/SE orientation was consistently applied to Chacoan architecture for 700 years (450-1140AD).  The fact that this orientation doesn’t deviate with latitudinal change suggests that it wasn’t based on direct regional celestial observation.  Additionally, the area where this S/SE orientation dominates is too large for a common-to-all terrain feature which could insinuate this azimuth on the Chacoan psyche. 

    With this in mind, I should surmise this orientation was culturally important to  Chacoans for reasons that are not readily clear and the consistent application of this azimuth over centuries also indicates the employment of some physical means.  

    There exists an ethno-archaeological basis for this cultural importance amongst the telling of Hopi migration stories about the Snake Clan which migrated from the Navajo Mountain region to the Black Mesa region of today’s Arizona - a heading of approximately 165 degrees.  A version of this migration story seems to be recounted by Cosmos Mindeleff in 1891.  

    ”…A brilliant star arose in the southeast, which would shine for a while and then disappear.  The old men said, ‘Beneath that star there must be people’, so they determined to travel towards it.  They cut a staff and set it in the ground and watched until the star reached its top, then they started and traveled as long as the star shone; when it disappeared they halted…sometimes many years elapsed before it appeared again.  When this occurred, our people built houses during their halt; they built both round and square houses…They waited until the star came to the top of the staff again, then they moved on.”

Mesoamerican religious staff from Teotihuacan, Mexico (circa 70AD)
(Author's collection. Copyright 2019)

The veracity of this statement is borne through the statement concerning housing - “they built both round and square houses”.  Archaeological proof exists all over the southwest today of pit houses like this from the Basketmaker periods.  Today we have no reason to believe that this doesn’t extend to the means of navigation employed as well.  They speak of a simple cut staff - NOT a cross-member or cross-staff as posited by JM Malville in his excellent 2011 paper.  To date there have been found multitudes of staffs and religious sceptres in Chacoan tombs throughout the region (as well as across Mesoamerica) and these staffs could easily be symbolic of the Gnomon navigational device described in Part two. 

    The ease of reproducing this bearing with a gnomon used as a carpenter’s square fulfils our hypothesis for a construction device used to reproduce this S/SE orientation.  Simultaneously, the employment of this simple tool, in this configuration, would negate the archaeological “smoking gun” that scholars are looking for to corroborate this theory.  The answer is hiding in plain sight, we just don’t know what we are looking at.

    All native American tribes extant demonstrate great reverence for their ancestors and there is no conflicting evidence in the case of Ancestral Puebloans.  If we couple that with the verifiable evidence from their migration myths, it isn’t unrealistic to extrapolate our hypothesis here that the south/southeast manifestation in archaeoastronomy in and around the Chacoan world was based on ancestral veneration.  In a further extrapolation, I posit the use of a simple astronomical tool - in use around the world for centuries prior - as a means of building those structures and the proof is in museums throughout the American Southwest labeled “Chacoan religious staff”.

Pueblo Bonito from the inside.  Originally S/SE orientated (~160degrees), later altered to North/South.
(Author's collection. Copyright 2019)