THE PAQUIMÉ ENIGMA

By Elizabeth Lunday

Paquimé has puzzled archaeologists for decades. New research could provide some answers.

By Elizabeth Lunday

PAQUIMÉ HAS BEEN A MYSTERY since Spanish explorers first saw the abandoned city. In an account of a 1565 expedition, chronicler Baltasar Obregón described the site as encompassing “many houses of great size, strength, and height...with towers and walls like fortresses.... The houses contain large and magnificent patios paved with enormous and beautiful stones resembling jasper. There are knife-shaped stones which support the wonderful and big pillars of heavy timbers brought from far away. The walls of the houses were whitewashed and painted in many colors and shades.”

And yet this city was empty of inhabitants. The Spanish asked indigenous people living in the surrounding area about the community, and they said that the city had been defeated in battle a few generations before and its residents had fled.

Today, archaeologists know much more about

A view of the southeastern portion of Paquimé. The labyrinth of massive adobe walls made up a portion of the living quarters at the city’s center.

Paquimé, which is located in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua in a wide, fertile river valley in the foothills of the Sierra Madres. The surrounding region, and the culture that thrived there, is known as Casas Grandes. Paquimé was a wealthy city whose residents imported rare and valuable objects from hundreds of miles away—from the western coast of Mexico, from Mesoamerica to the south, and from the Ancestral Pueblo region to the north. The city’s architecture also incorporates elements from distant cultures.

The Casas Grandes region received little attention from archaeologists until 1958, when Charles Di Peso of the Amerind Foundation began a three-year excavation of the city. Di Peso developed a basic chronology for the site; although it was revised by later archaeologists, researchers continue to divide the timeline of the Casas Grandes culture into two periods, the Viejo (Old) period between A.D. 700 and 1200, and the Medio (Middle) period between 1200 and 1450.

Di Peso’s research indicated that Paquimé rose in size and complexity relatively quickly; what began as a small collection of simple buildings appears to have grown into a substantial city sometime around A. D. 1300. This begged the question—a question that has been debated by archaeologists for decades—of who built this grand city? Was it the work of local residents, or migrants from the south or the north? In 2013, archaeologists Mike Searcy of Brigham Young University and Todd Pitezel of the University of Arizona began their Roots of Casas Grandes project in hopes of settling this debate.

DI PESO’S TEAM DISCOVERED Paquimé had some 2,000 rooms in buildings that reached at least three stories. Archaeologists believe many architectural features of Paquimé were used in large, public rituals. Fifteen geometric or animalshaped platform mounds, likely used for ritual ceremonies, are scattered around the city. Five enormous earth ovens were probably used to prepare feasts held in conjunction with rituals. One was so large it could have been used to cook up to 6,600 pounds of agave.

Mesoamerican-style ballcourts also likely played an important role in religious activities. The courts are shaped

A crew under the direction of Michael Searcy and Todd Pitezel exposes the plastered floor of a large communal structure at the San Diego site, a Viejo-period settlement located nine miles south of Paquimé.

like a capital letter “I” with a long, narrow alley that widens at both ends. Brilliantly colored macaws also seem to have had ritual significance. The birds are native to central Mexico, where they appear frequently in pottery and sculpture and were used in religious rituals. The people of Paquimé both imported and bred the birds, and several plazas include pens where macaws were held.

After finishing his Paquimé excavation, Di Peso investigated one nearby Viejo-period site, and it yielded none of the Mesoamerican elements that he found at Paquimé. Consequently he theorized that southern merchants arrived in the region at the start of the Medio period, took control of the surrounding indigenous population, and supervised the building of the city, motivated by the opportunity to dominate trade to the region.

Other archaeologists have proposed alternative explanations. Noting Paquimé’s architectural similarities to Ancestral Puebloan sites such as Chaco Canyon and Aztec Ruins, which is located north of Chaco in northwest New Mexico, Steve Lekson of the University of Colorado proposed that a small group of elites from Aztec Ruins, who were joined by thousands of people along the way, moved to the Casas Grandes region and took control over what he believed was a relatively small local population.

Lekson thinks these migrants, who had left Aztec Ruins, were intent on creating a new community at the southern end of what he refers to as the Chaco Meridian, a north-south line that runs from Aztec through Chaco to Paquimé. Lekson hypothesized this line established a sacred connection between the cities. The migrants also wanted to be nearer Mesoamerica in order to acquire ritualistic goods such as macaws. In addition to incorporating Ancestral Puebloan characteristics into Paquimé’s architecture, the migrants, emulating Mesoamerican cultures, also incorporated characteristics from that region.

“In our thinking, Casas Grandes is primarily a local phenomenon,” said University of Tulsa archaeologist Mike Whalen. “It has local antecedents and a local origin.” Whalen and his research partner, Paul Minnis of the University of Oklahoma, have worked in the region over the last twenty years. Whalen and Minnis argue Viejo-period architecture and artifacts demonstrate cultural antecedents for later Medio period features. “There’s a lot of continuity in the ceramics from the Viejo period to the Medio period. We also see continuity in the architecture,” said Minnis, regardless of the Mesoamerican and Ancestral Puebloan influences.

Whalen compares pottery discovered at Viejo and early Medio sites with a style of mid- to late-Medio-period pottery known as Ramos Polychrome. This is highly decorative pottery that features red and black geometric designs and stylized figures on a tan background. It was produced starting around 1300. When excavating at an early Medio site dating to about 1200, Whalen said, “We didn’t find any Ramos Polychrome, but we did find painted wares that are similar, but much simpler. They have some of the same designs, but not all of them, and they are in simpler form.” Whalen believes this pottery is a precursor of Ramos Polychrome.

Searcy and Pitezel theorize that Paquimé was partly

the result of a local evolution, and, believing more data is necessary to answer the migrants or locals question, they embarked on their project. “One of our primary goals is the development of the Viejo-period chronology so that archaeologists not only can better understand the internal Viejoperiod trajectory, but also better understand the transformation into the Medio period,” said Pitezel. “We hope that work will help us discover what we refer to as the ‘roots of Casas Grandes.’ That is to say, what similarities and differences between the periods can inform on how the Casas Grandes Medio period came to be.”

Little work has been done on Viejo-period sites. Whalen and Minnis excavated four Viejo pithouses at three sites, the late Jane H. Kelley of the University of Calgary conducted limited excavations at six sites, and Searcy and Pitezel have excavated two others. The data from these excavations suggests that from about A.D. 700 to 950 Casas Grandes people lived in clusters of shallow, semi-circular pithouses that were common in the Southwest in this period. They usually consisted of partially below-ground structures with walls constructed of poles, brush, and adobe. Subsequently pithouses were replaced by above-ground adobe rooms; the exact reason for this transition is unclear, but archaeologists suggest it coincided with an increase in communal stability.

Searcy and Pitezel excavated a circular structure thirty feet in diameter that they think served as a communal building. It’s possible that rituals of the sort performed at Paquimé in the Medio period took place here. In her excavations, Kelley found copper artifacts and marine shells that had been acquired from as far away as the west coast of Mexico and black-on-white pottery imported from the Mimbres region in southwest New Mexico and adjacent areas of Arizona and northern Mexico. These discoveries indicated trade with distant cultures during the Viejo period. “So we’re starting to

A researcher pipets a small amount of liquid in preparation for quantifying the amount of DNA in a sample taken from human remains found in the Casas Grandes region.

Todd Pitezel analyzes a reconstructed Viejo-period vessel. The vessel is an Anchando Red-on-brown jar, a type thought to be one of the precursors to the Medio-period polychrome vessels.

find more lines of continuity,” said Searcy, “cultural practices that didn’t change from the Viejo to the Medio periods.”

As for Paquimé’s foreign characteristics, he surmises they came via trade or migration. “Are people going out of Casas Grandes to Central Mexico and seeing ballcourts and macaws and bringing them back to the community?” Searcy asked. “Or are people migrating from these foreign places and bringing their culture with them?”

Meradeth Snow and her team at the University of Montana had some of the same questions, so they began a research project, which Searcy joined, sequencing samples of mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, taken from the remains of 400 individuals found at Viejo and Medio-period sites in the Casas Grandes region, including Paquimé. Individuals inherit their mtDNA from their mother, allowing researchers to trace maternal lineages back in time. Geneticists divide DNA lineages into haplogroups, which are large groups of people all descended from the same maternal line. While thirty-six mtDNA haplogroups are found around the world, only five have been discovered among Native American populations.

Determining only the haplogroups of Casas Grandes individuals would likely not provide Snow with enough information to draw conclusions about population movements, so she is sequencing the whole mitochondrial genome to reveal subtypes of the haplogroups. Snow and Searcy reason that if migrants arrived in the Medio period, they would have had a different genetic profile of their maternal lineages than the people of the Viejo period. If most of the individuals from the Viejo and Medio periods belong to the same subtype, that could indicate few migrants arrived in the community. In contrast, the appearance of different mtDNA lineages could reflect migration.

The researchers took samples from individuals in a range of social classes, as determined by the value of the grave goods that adorned their burials. “We’ll be looking to see if we find certain subtypes within certain types of burials,” Snow said. The point of this is that, if they do find evidence of migrants, the types of grave goods they were buried with would suggest their status. Such information could confirm or contradict Di Peso’s hypothesis that affluent southern merchants came to Paquimé and engineered its development. They expect to have the results of this study by the end of 2020. Archaeologists on all sides of the Paquimé debate believe these results will provide answers

Paquimé has Mesoamerican and Ancestral Puebloan elements. This t-shaped door is an example of the latter.

to some of the most pressing questions about Casas Grandes.

Despite disagreeing on where Paquimé’s residents hailed from, Di Peso and Lekson agreed that, once the city reached its grand scale, it exerted control over the surrounding region. Di Peso, in fact, wrote that “hundreds of mountain and valley satellite villages bowed to the needs of the capital city.” But Whalen and Minnis’ investigation of Medio sites in the surrounding countryside have led them to conclude that Paquimé’s control was limited. Communities within eighteen miles of the city center had architectural features that imitated Paquimé’s, including macaw pens, ballcourts, large community ovens, and platform mounds. But the communities farther away bore fewer similarities to Paquimé, and features such as macaw pens and platform mounds are absent.

The sort of power Di Peso and Lekson believe Paquimé wielded, Whalen said, would have required physical force, and there is no evidence of that. “The influence of Paquimé was not by force,” he said. “It was a simpler influence that had to do with ritual.” The leaders of Paquimé, Whalen argued, used large public rituals to bind together the people of the city and its nearest surrounding neighbors into a shared culture. But as distance from the city increased, Paquimé’s influence faded.

Paquimé thrived until about 1400. Then the population began to decline, and by 1450 the city was abandoned.

Many questions remain about Casas Grandes. Pitezel and Searcy want to better understand the dynamics of the Viejo-period population; it’s unclear how many people lived in the region before the rise of Paquimé or how they were organized socially and politically. They are also working on the chronology and typology—the characteristic features associated with particular dates—of Casas Grandes ceramics.

“Chronology and ceramic typology may seem ‘old school’ to most archaeologists, but so little work has focused on the Viejo period that we are obligated and compelled to start with the basics,” said Pitezel. In fact, these fundamentals will be essential to solving the big mysteries at Paquimé. “Chronology and ceramic typology are basic units for archaeologists, so without a clearer understanding of these as related to the Viejo period, we can only continue to speculate on larger anthropological questions related to social, economic, political, and religious systems of the Casas Grandes people.”

Working in such uncharted territory is one of the most exciting parts of working at Paquimé, according to Searcy. “There’s so much there we don’t know,” he said. “Everything we do advances our knowledge.”

ELIZABETH LUNDAY is the host and producer of the history podcast “The Year That Was” as well as author of multiple books about art and culture.