Memory, Meaning, and Masonry: The Late Bonito Chacoan Landscape

The monumental architecture of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico was constructed to convey, reinforce, and challenge ideas about social, ritual, and cosmological order. The concept of social memory can help clarify how architecture was employed in the transformation of Chacoan society at the beginning of the Late Bonito phase (A.D. 1100–1140). During the preceding century, Classic Bonito phase architecture expressed basic tenets of a Chacoan worldview—directionality, balanced dualism, and the canyon as a center place. At the beginning of the Late Bonito phase, confidence in the Chacoan ritual order was shaken by environmental and social developments. Leaders sought to re-formalize Chaco as a center place by instituting a new building scheme. Six new great houses were positioned on the landscape in a patterned, nested series of oppositional relationships. This re-formalization of the Chacoan landscape was legitimated through direct alignments and indirect architectural references to the Classic Bonito past. The new buildings were meant to bolster confidence in leaders and to attract followers by offering a combination of the familiar and the novel.