Chacoan Great House Communities, Ritual Landscapes, and the H-Spear Site

This paper documents and contextualizes a previously unrecorded Chacoan great house, H-Spear, located in the Cibola region of west-central New Mexico. The Chaco-era H-Spear Site (LA201571) has a great house, great kiva, and earthen berm surrounding the great house/great kiva complex. Full-coverage survey data from the Ojo Bonito Archaeological Project (OBAP) indicates extensive pre-Chacoan, Chacoan, and post-Chacoan occupations of the broader area, but little, if any, contemporaneous occupation within 2 km of H-Spear. We argue that H-Spear’s placement on the landscape reflects a local “ritual landscape” with architectural and spatial continuity from Basketmaker III/Pueblo I to Pueblo IV times. Our research also indicates that a much larger scale view of the spatial organization of great house communities is needed to obtain a better understanding the Chaco world in which great houses functioned.