Pink Chert, Projectile Points, and the Chacoan Regional System

Abstract

The most unusual aspect of chipped stone in Chaco Canyon is that materials were imported from a considerable distance but used almost exclusively as informal flake tools. Narbona Pass chert from the Chuska Mountains, 75 km away, is the most common nonlocal material found during the Chacoan Era (A.D. 900-1150). There are relatively few number of formal tools found in the Canyon, primarily projectile points, and a significant number of these do not seem to have been made in Chaco. New models of the organization of production offered by Earle, Hagstrum, Peregrine, and Renfrew (this issue) are evaluated using chipped-stone data collected by the Chaco Project during the 1970s. Chipped-stone data support the suggestion made by these scholars that great houses in Chaco Canyon were the focus of periodic communal gatherings. Deposition of quantities of Narbona Pass chert debitage in great house trash middens was apparently a ceremonial aspect of these gatherings, perhaps related to Puebloan concepts of renewal. Some projectile points appear to have been deposited in great house rooms or kivas as ritual offerings.