The Dynamics of Chacoan Social and Spatial Networks, AD 800-1200

Project Overview

How do large regional communities emerge, maintain connections across great distances, and respond to environmental and social change? This project investigates these questions through the study of the Chaco World, a network of communities centered on Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico between A.D. 800 and 1200. By examining patterns in architecture, ceramics, stone tools, and settlement locations, the project explores how communities were connected across a vast region and how those connections changed through time.

The research combines archaeological data, social network analysis, and geographic information systems to examine the relationships among great houses, great kivas, and surrounding communities throughout the Chaco World. By tracing shifts in regional interaction, migration, and settlement organization, the project investigates how social networks contributed to the rise of Chaco Canyon as a major center and how changing environmental conditions influenced the reorganization of communities across the Southwest. The resulting database and analytical tools provide new insights into the development of social inequality, regional integration, and long-term social change in non-state societies.

• Barbara J. Mills, University of Arizona
• Jeffery J. Clark, Archaeology Southwest
• Matthew Peeples, Arizona State University

2014 National Science Foundation, Archaeology Program – Exploring Adaptive Social Networks in the Face of Geographic Adversity

2022 Giomi, Evan, Barbara J. Mills, Leslie D. Aragon, Benjamin A. Bellorado, Matthew A. Peeples. Reading Between the Lines: The Social Values of Dogoszhi-style in the Chaco World. American Antiquity 87(1):100-123.

2019 Jeffrey J. Clark, Jennifer Birch, Michelle Hegmon, Barbara J. Mills, Donna Glowacki, Scott Ortman, Jeffery S. Dean, Rory Gauthier, Patrick D. Lyons, Matthew A. Peeples, Lewis Borck, and John Ware. Resolving the Migrant Paradox: Two Pathways to Coalescence in the Late Precontact U.S. Southwest. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 53:262-287.

2019 Giomi, Evan and Matthew A. Peeples. Network Analysis of Intrasite Material Networks and Ritual Practice at Pueblo Bonito. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 53(1):22-31.

2019 Mills, Barbara J. and Matthew A. Peeples. Reframing Diffusion through Social Network Theory. In Interaction and Connectivity in the Greater Southwest, edited by Karen G. Harry and Barbara Roth. University Press of Colorado, Boulder.

2018 Peeples, Matthew A. and Barbara J. Mills. Frontiers of Marginality and Mediation in the U.S. Southwest: A Social Networks Perspective. In Life Beyond the Boundaries: Constructing Identity in Edge Regions of the North American Southwest, edited by Karen Harry and Sarah Herr, pp. 25-56. University Press of Colorado, Boulder, CO.

2018 Mills, Barbara J., Matthew A. Peeples, Leslie Aragon, Benjamin Bellorado, Jeffery J. Clark, Evan Giomi, and Thomas C. Windes. Evaluating Chaco Migration Scenarios Using Dynamic Social Network Analysis. Antiquity 92(364):922-939.

2018 Katherine A. Dungan and Matthew A. Peeples. Public Architecture as Performance Space in the Prehispanic Central Southwest. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 50:12-26.