The advent of the Chaco World transformed the Greater Southwest, but despite centuries of study, most models of Chaco sociopolitical organization rely upon categorical types rooted in neo-evolutionary schema. Many Indigenous scholars question the universal applicability of such models, arguing that knowledge and relationships serve as a more salient foundation of power in Indigenous societies. In the Pueblo World of the U.S. Southwest, this is expressed mostly clearly in performances in which cultural knowledge is shared through song, dance, and chromatic metaphor. Paint produced for performance embeds many layers of symbolism and knowledge and is produced following strict adherence to sodality-maintained protocol, making it an ideal material to explore diachronic relationships between knowledge and power. Paint is one of the oldest human technologies, yet it remains poorly understood and largely unproblematized in archaeological discourse.

In this project, archaeological collections of paint, paint production tools, and painted media are treated as a material archive of relationships. Although a wide range of colors was used and rendered in paint, the technology of blue-green paint was of primary concern for this project. Blue-green is one of the most significant colors in the Pueblo World, with important symbolic ties to all-important rain and vegetation, and is also one of the most challenging to render in paint.

In this project, similarities in archaeological paint compositions were interpreted as reflections of shared production environments and used to reconstruct the social groups responsible for their production. Archaeological paint recipes were reconstructed using a novel approach to the analysis of archaeological paint that relies upon the non-destructive analysis of micro-samples of material that is often routinely discarded during routine museum handling. Once collected, compositional analysis was carried out using a combination of non-destructive techniques including polarized light microscopy, X-ray fluorescence, and Raman spectroscopy.

The analysis of blue-green paint recipes from Pueblo Bonito, Chetro Ketl, Pueblo del Arroyo, Aztec West, and Kin Kletso has resulted in several key findings. First, despite archaeologists' long-held assumption that blue-green paint was made with copper carbonate minerals, such as azurite and malachite, copper sulfate minerals served as the primary colorants and is made with the closely related minerals of antlerite and brochantite. This single recipe for blue-green was circulated among great houses in Downtown Chaco, Aztec West in the Middle San Juan, and at the McElmo phase great house of Kin Kletso. Rooms with evidence for the preparation and storage of blue-green paint and painted media are strongly associated with rooms associated with Pueblo Bonito's founding families in the northern room block, or in rooms that articulate with plaza space in symbolic spaces that show that the display of blue-green painted media was a key component of plaza-based performances.

The widespread circulation of a single recipe for blue-green suggests that communities of practice involved in the production of performances cross-cut great house affiliations. Ultimately, this suggests that participation in performances offered a way for members of founding families to continually legitimize their power by managing the dissemination of knowledge, but also offered a way to integrate newcomers into Chaco society through cross-cutting institutions such as sodalities. Performance in the Chaco World created a dynamic arena for the circulation of knowledge, and for the continual creation and recreation of relationships. By focusing on the role of paint as a means of reconstructing relationships of knowledge, this project calls attention to the importance of knowledge sharing and the integration of diverse people as fundamental drivers of Chaco society.

In sum, this project resulted in the following key results and outcomes: (1) The development of a novel approach to the study of archaeological materials, encouraging the use of micro-samples for non-destructive analysis in future research; (2) The identification of a single, widespread recipe for blue-green paint made using a previously undocumented copper sulfate pigments that was circulated widely among Chaco great house sites through time and space; (3) A new understanding of blue-green paint as a tool for interpreting the socio-political landscape of Chaco, emphasizing the circulation of knowledge in maintaining power and social cohesion in Chaco society.

Last Modified: 11/25/2024
Modified by: Kelsey E Hanson