The Dendrochronology of Palluche Canyon, Dinétah

The ancestral Navajo homeland of Dinétah in northwestern New Mexico contains hundreds, if not thousands, of Navajo archaeological sites that date from the A.D. 1500S through the late 1700s. A subset of these sites, known as pueblitos, are masonry structures located in defensible positions on boulder tops, mesa rims, and other topographically isolated settings. This paper presents dendrochronological data from the newly discovered site of Twine House (Kin T'łooł), confirms the provenance of samples collected in the 1950s from the site of 42 Pueblito, and re-evaluates all tree-ring data from every sampled pueblito site in Palluche Canyon, a major tributary of Cañon Largo in the heart of Dinétah. The spatial and temporal aspects of the pueblito sites suggest that Palluche Canyon was colonized, depopulated, and re-occupied by a kin-based group of eighteenth-century Navajos, possibly similar to the ethnographically documented Navajo “outfit.”.