KINSHIP AND COMMUNITY IN THE NORTHERN SOUTHWEST: CHACO AND BEYOND

Abstract

Archaeogenomic studies of a burial crypt in Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, have demonstrated the presence of an elite matrilineal descent group that spanned most of the 300+ years the great house was occupied, confirming, among other things, the deep antiquity of matrilineal ideologies among the Ancestral Pueblos of the northern Southwest. This article explores the sociopolitical implications of matrilineal descent, matrilocal residence, and Iroquois-Crow alliance structures among the Ancestral Pueblos of Chaco and elsewhere. It argues that matrilineal ideologies helped shape community forms and intercommunity relations throughout the Pueblo Southwest. It argues further that kinship provides insights into Chaco's eleventh-century expansion that dispersed “outlier” great houses over much of the southeastern Colorado Plateau. The article concludes with a call for archaeologists and cultural historians to pay more attention to kinship, the principal idiom of social, economic, and political relations in nonstate societies.