KINSHIP AND COMMUNITY IN THE NORTHERN SOUTHWEST: CHACO AND BEYOND

Archaeogenomic studies of a burial crypt in Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, have demonstrated the presence of an elite matrilineal descent group that spanned most of the 300+ years the great house was occupied, confirming, among other things, the deep antiquity of matrilineal ideologies among the Ancestral Pueblos of the northern Southwest. This article explores the sociopolitical implications of matrilineal descent, matrilocal residence, and Iroquois-Crow alliance structures among the Ancestral Pueblos of Chaco and elsewhere. It argues that matrilineal ideologies helped shape community forms and intercommunity relations throughout the Pueblo Southwest. It argues further that kinship provides insights into Chaco's eleventh-century expansion that dispersed “outlier” great houses over much of the southeastern Colorado Plateau. The article concludes with a call for archaeologists and cultural historians to pay more attention to kinship, the principal idiom of social, economic, and political relations in nonstate societies.

Areal Decrease, Density Increase, and Circumscription: A Mathematical Note

Population density increases whenever a population grows more rapidly, or shrinks more slowly, than the area it inhabits; areal contraction therefore accelerates density increase. This consideration not only reinforces Dickson's (1987) suggestion that circumscription by anthropogenic environmental destruction contributed to the rise of some early states; it also implies that rate of density increase should be distinguished, as a motor of sociocultural evolution, from density itself. In light of this distinction the rise of the state in southwestern Iran, and occasional instances of high density among nonstate societies, are not necessarily inconsistent with population-pressure theories.