Mellon Foundation Grant supports the Chaco Digital Initiative

Mellon Foundation Grant Supports Digital Archive of Chaco Canyon

From the University of Virginia website, "UVA Today"

— by Elizabeth Wilkerson

May 14, 2009 — A University of Virginia-based digital archive of material from Chaco Canyon – a World Heritage Site many scholars regard as the most important archaeological region in North America – has received a $538,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Located in northwestern New Mexico near the Four Corners, the Chaco Culture National Historic Park comprises thousands of masonry structures built between A.D. 400 and A.D. 1250 by the ancestors of contemporary Pueblo people. The buildings range from small houses that might have sheltered a dozen or so inhabitants to great houses with multiple stories, hundreds of rooms and numerous "kivas" – round subterranean rooms used for gatherings and rituals.

U.Va.'s Chaco Digital Initiative currently documents the most important of the Chaco great houses, Pueblo Bonito, and four related settlements that were excavated between 1896 and 1945.

Although Chaco has one of the longest histories of archaeological research in the Americas, much of the information is scattered, with artifacts, images and written documents deposited in more than two dozen institutions from New Mexico to New York. Much of the early research was never published.

With the click of a mouse, a scholar now can view and compare Chaco information without traveling to distant locations.

There are still many fundamental questions about the canyon and its people, said Stephen Plog, David Harrison III Professor of Historical Archaeology at U.Va. He is principal investigator of the project with Worthy Martin, co-director of U.Va.'s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and associate professor of computer science.

A central question is how the people used Chaco – as a site for seasonal gatherings for important rituals, the prevailing theory, or as a year-round community, a theory that Plog says closer investigation through the archive supports. And there are smaller questions: "How are the small houses different from the great houses? What was happening in the great houses? Were there hearths, were there storage pits, were there artifacts that suggest that a particular space was a room where people were living or a room where they were storing ceremonial materials?" Plog said.

Archaeological work in the canyon began in 1896 and continued throughout much of the 20th century. Today, with new attitudes and new techniques in archaeology, and in deference to the beliefs of the Pueblos that their ancestors and their lands should not be disturbed, preservation is encouraged over excavation. The digital archive at U.Va. is helping scholars decipher the clues to the puzzles of Chaco.

Read it all HERE