Current Views on Salmon, Chaco, and the Middle San Juan Region
Paul F. Reed, Center Preservation Archaeologist and Chaco Scholar at Salmon Ruins Museum
My recent edited volume, Chaco’s Northern Prodigies (2008), expands on studies of the past decade and highlights new research by a diverse group of institutions and individuals over the last seven years. Authors explore the Salmon and nearby Aztec pueblos as 11th- and 12th-century Chacoan Outliers and as central places in the 13th-century landscape of the Middle San Juan region. Papers in the book also focus attention on the critical role played by communities in the Middle San Juan region in the context of the larger Puebloan-Chacoan world from A.D. 1000–1300.
Research by archaeologists associated with the National Park Service’s Chaco Project (1971–1982) and other scholars indicates that, between 1000 and 1130, Chaco functioned as the political, social, economic, and ritual center of the northern Pueblo world. Archaeologists’ views of Chacoan outliers, including Salmon and Aztec, have evolved in recent years, and some archaeologists now see little evidence for an overarching Chacoan “system.” The Middle San Juan region figures strongly in modified interpretations of Chacoan outliers. As interpreted by the original excavators of Salmon and Aztec, Irwin-Williams and Earl Morris, respectively, Chacoan migrants established colonies at Salmon and Aztec in the late 1000s and early 1100s as part of an expansion to the north. Subsequent research suggests that other communities in the Middle San Juan emulated the Chacoan architectural style. The decline of Chacoan political influence by about 1130 led to the rise of new centers across the Pueblo landscape, including sites in the Northern San Juan-Mesa Verde region and in the Zuni-Cibola region to the south. As part of this process, important regional centers emerged in the Middle San Juan region, including Aztec and Salmon.
Map of the Middle San Juan region
Salmon lies between Chaco (45 miles to the south) and Mesa Verde (45 miles to the north), in the heart of the Middle San Juan region. (In our work in the area, we have chosen to use the broader and more inclusive term “Middle San Juan” and not the more restricted geographic term “Totah” used by some other archaeologists.) This positioning between two of the archaeological centers of the ancient Pueblo world, both of which have undergone intensive work by Southwestern archaeologists, has meant that the Middle San Juan region has been overshadowed by its neighbors. Despite the region’s importance to interpretations of Chacoan and post-Chacoan developments, its archaeology has been largely overlooked in most regional syntheses. Indeed, settlement patterns and individual site histories—for example, for Salmon and Aztec—are usually interpreted in light of Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde.
Nevertheless, research over the last fifteen years has indicated that ancestral Puebloan developments in the Middle San Juan have a unique trajectory linked to, but independent of, Chaco and Mesa Verde. A growing number of researchers working for different institutions have begun to discern the distinctive characteristics of the Middle San Juan. For example, Steve Lekson has highlighted the importance of the Aztec community in the post-Chacoan world and discussed its role as a descendant Chacoan “capital” from the 1100s through the end of the 1200s. Gary Brown and his team have begun the task of reassessing Aztec’s architecture, chronology, and place in the region. Wolky Toll and colleagues have studied the La Plata Valley over the last decade, identifying a unique local pattern of ancient Pueblo culture. Finally, the newly completed Salmon report similarly focuses on reinterpreting the site’s place in the region. In all of this recent research, it is clear that the Middle San Juan region was much more than simply a receiver of people and culture from Chaco and Mesa Verde.
