Gulf and Western North America (820 – 963 CE): Mound-Builders, Chaco Flourishing, and California’s Canoe Chiefs

Geographic and Environmental Context

Gulf and Western North America includes: Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, nearly all of California (except far northwest), Florida (except the Jacksonville corridor), southwestern Georgia, most of Alabama (except Huntsville corner), southwestern Tennessee, southern Illinois (Little Egypt), southwestern Missouri, most of Nebraska (except northeast around Omaha), southeastern South Dakota, southern Montana, southern Idaho, southeastern Oregon.

• Anchors: Lower Mississippi towns (Plaquemine precursors), Natchez bluffs, Gulf fisheries (Calusa, Pensacola), Southern Plains nodes (early Spiro), Chaco Canyon great houses, Hohokam canals in Salt–Gila basin, Mogollon Rim, Great Basin foragers, California coast (Chumash Channel Islands, Sacramento–San Joaquin wetlands).

Climate and Environmental Shifts

• Benefited from the Medieval Warm Period: ample rainfall on the Mississippi bottomlands, supporting maize expansion; drought cycles more subdued than in later centuries.

• Southwest: ideal for canal irrigation and Chaco aggregation.

• California: steady oak acorn harvests and rich marine productivity.

Societies and Political Developments

• Mississippian precursors: maize cultivation expanded; Plaquemine and Caddoan mound centers rose in the lower Mississippi.

• Southern Plains: early mound activity at Spiro foreshadowed its later role.

• Southwest: Chaco Canyon reached its zenith, with great houses, roads, and ritual centers (850–1130).

• Hohokam irrigated villages flourished, cultivating maize, cotton, beans.

• Mogollon and Sinagua villages dotted uplands.

• California: Chumash chiefdoms expanded; tomol plank canoes connected Channel Islands to mainland.

• Great Basin: highly mobile foragers harvested seeds, hunted rabbits, and traded obsidian.

Economy and Trade

• Maize surpluses redistributed at mound centers.

• Chaco trade: turquoise, macaws, copper bells from Mesoamerica.

• Hohokam cotton & shells exported widely.

• Chumash shell beads spread along Pacific.

• Great Basin obsidian and salt linked desert to Puebloan centers.

Belief and Symbolism

• Mound cosmologies tied earth/sky/underworld.

• Chaco ritual kivas, astronomical alignments structured calendars.

• Chumash cosmology tied celestial navigation to canoe exchange.

Long-Term Significance

By 963, the region contained Mississippian precursors, Chaco’s great houses, Hohokam canals, and Chumash maritime chiefdoms, forming a continental crossroads of exchange and ritual.

The Ancient Pueblo population—the "Anasazi", from a Ute term adopted by the Navajo denoting the "ancient ones" or "enemy ancestors"—had rapidly expanded by 850: groups resided in larger, denser pueblos.

Strong evidence attests to a canyon-wide turquoise processing and trading industry dating from the tenth century.

Around this time, the first section of Pueblo Bonito is built: a curved row of fifty rooms near its present north wall.

Native beadwork has continued to advance.

Beads are made from hand-ground and filled turquoise, coral, and shell.

Carved wood, animal bones, claws, and teeth are made into beads, which are then sewn onto clothing, or strung into necklaces.

Turquoise is one of the dominant materials of Southwestern Native American jewelry.

Thousands of pieces will be found in the Ancestral Pueblo sites at Chaco Canyon.

Some turquoise mines date back to Precolumbian times, and Ancestral Pueblo peoples trades the turquoise with Middle Americans.

Some turquoise found in southern Arizona dates back to 200 BCE.

The Mogollón peoples of the Three Circle period, as this developmental phase is known to scholars, live in the mostly mountainous region of what is now southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico.

The means of subsistence continues as before 900, as do the older type of pit houses with mud-plastered walls, but there have appeared rectangular pit houses constructed of stone masonry along with separate ceremonial pit houses.

Both developments suggest influences from the Anasazi (Pueblo) culture to the north.

Pottery types have become more various and sophisticated.

Artists of the Mimbres culture of southwestern New Mexico, a subset of the larger Mogollon culture produce, from 1000, figurative paintings on pottery, remarkable in that much contemporary painted pottery of the Southwest is nonfigurative, its striking appearance reliant on complex linear patterns.

Many of these images suggest familiarity and relationships with cultures in northern and central Mexico.

The elaborate decoration indicates that these people enjoyed an elaborate ceremonial life.

An early style of Mimbres pottery, called Boldface Black-on-white, is characterized by a figure of a single animal surrounded by complex symmetrical and geometric designs drawn on the rims of bowls.

Birds figure prominently on Mimbres pots, with images such as turkeys feeding on insects or a man trapping birds in a garden.

An egalitarian group, the Mimbres live in settlements of up to one hundred and fifty contiguous rooms of very similar size, built of river pebbles and adobe.

These pueblos, usually on one story, gradually grow into large clusters grouped around an open plaza.

Ceremonial structures are more similar to the larger Mogollon culture, with semi-subterranean kivas with entry ramps and ceremonial offerings buried under the floor.

However, smaller square or rectangular kivas with roof openings are also found.

The Pueblo, or Anasazi, develop an advanced culture in northwestern New Mexico.

Chaco Canyon, a major regional center of from fifteen hundred to five thousand people, is surrounded by standardized planned towns, or great houses, built from the wood of over two hundred thousand trees.

Thirty-foot-wide roads, flanked by berms, radiate from Chaco in various directions.

Small blocks of aboveground masonry rooms and a kiva make up a typical pueblo.

Great kivas grow to fifty to seventy feet in diameter.

Pottery consists of corrugated gray bisque and decorated black-on-white in addition to some decorated red and orange vessels.

Shells and turquoise are imported.

The Great kiva (Hopi for “old house,” a large ceremonial chamber) of Chaco Canyon, a major center of ancestral Puebloan culture and a hub of ceremony, trade, and administration for the prehistoric Four Corners are, is constructed around 1000.

A a large enclosed area for religious activity and ceremony, it is somewhat isolated from the rest of Chaco Canyon.

It is on the south side of Chaco Wash, adjacent to a Chacoan road moving up steep stairs to the top of the sandstone mesa.

The kiva stands alone, with no residential or support structures, and originally had a thirty nine foot passageway from the underground kiva to several aboveground levels.

The youngest in a string of volcanoes (the San Francisco volcanic field) erupts near the volcanic San Francisco Peaks in northern Arizona around 1085, forming the so-called Sunset Crater, a one thousand-foot-high (three hundred and five meter) cone with a rim of bright red orange ash and cinder.

The eruption produces a blanket of ash and lapilli covering an area of more than twenty-one hundred square kilometers (eight hundred and ten square miles) and forces the temporary abandonment of settlements of the local Sinagua people.

The Anazasi, centered in the region of present northwestern New Mexico, construct, around 1100, a large stone and timber pueblo village, located in the oasis-like valley of the Las Animas River, in the midst of a semiarid region of cactus, sage, and juniper.

The Aztec Ruins National Monument preserves ancestral Pueblo structures in northwestern New Mexico, United States, located close to the town of Aztec and northeast of Farmington, near the Animas River.

Salmon Ruins and Heritage Park, with more ancestral Pueblo structures, lies a short distance to the south, just west of Bloomfield near the San Juan River.

The buildings date back to the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, and the misnomer attributing them to the Aztec civilization can be traced back to early American settlers in the mid-nineteenth century.

The actual construction was by the ancestral Puebloans, the Anasazi.

The main dwelling of the pueblo village in the oasis-like valley of the Las Animas River is a three-story structure of 500 rooms; adjacent to this structure is the so-called Great Kiva, a circular ceremonial structure (that is the largest in contemporary North America).

The villagers of the Las Animas River valley grow corn, beans, and squash in the irrigated bottomlands.

The many settlement sites scattered throughout the Wuptaki National Monument are built by the Ancient Pueblo People, more specifically the Sinagua, Cohonina, and Kayenta Anasazi.

The Sinagua are a pre-Columbian cultural group occupying an area in central Arizona between the Little Colorado River and the Salt River (between Flagstaff and Phoenix) including the Verde Valley and significant portions of the Mogollon Rim country between approximately 500 and 1425.

Early Sinagua sites consisted of pit houses roofed with branches of pine and juniper.

A major population influx had begun soon after the eruption of Sunset Crater, which had blanketed the area with a thin layer volcanic ash around 1085; this improves agricultural productivity and the soil's ability to retain water.

The inhabitants will construct hundreds of masonry structures on cliffs overlooking the Little Colorado River and the Painted Desert, in northern Arizona, eighteen miles (thirty kilometers) northeast of modern Flagstaff.

The largest and most elaborate of the structures, given the name Wupatki, which means "Tall House" in the Hopi language, is a three-story red sandstone structure of more than one hundred rooms.

Constructed near one of the few springs in the area, it overlooks a circular masonry amphitheater as well as a ceremonial ball court (one of the largest ever found outside of Mexico).

The so-called Pueblo Bonito, a large, freestanding, multistoried, six hundred and fifty-room communal dwelling in the Chaco Canyon site of the Anasazi culture, begun around 828 and completed about 1115, is today the largest and best known Great House in Chaco Culture National Historical Park, northern New Mexico.

The Hovenweep village communities, like the people at Mesa Verde and Canyon de Chelly National Monument, had moves from mesa tops to the heads of canyons in about 1100.

The Anasazi, from 1160, erect six separate groups of extraordinary defense towers, cliff dwellings, and pueblos, built of stone masonry on the site of the present Utah-Colorado border.

The defense towers—rectangular, circular, or D-shaped, some two or three stories tall—are strategically placed to overlook the heads of the canyons or to rise from isolated boulders lying on the canyon floor.

The largest group contains eleven different buildings, one of which, the so-called Hovenweep Castle, possesses walls twenty feet (six meters) high.

(Hovenweep, a name meaning "deserted valley," is the name given to the area’s ruins.)