Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [91]
Compared to smaller buildings, the Great Houses were distinguished by finer construction with veneer masonry, large structures called Great Kivas used for religious rituals (similar to ones still used today in modern Pueblos), and a higher ratio of storage space to total space. Great Houses far exceeded homesteads in their contents of imported luxury goods, such as the turquoise, macaws, shell jewelry, and copper bells mentioned above, plus imported Mimbres and Hohokam pottery. The highest concentration of luxury items located to date comes from Pueblo Bonito’s room number 33, which held burials of 14 individuals accompanied by 56,000 pieces of turquoise and thousands of shell decorations, including one necklace of 2,000 turquoise beads and a basket covered with a turquoise mosaic and filled with turquoise and shell beads. As for evidence that the chiefs ate better than did the peasants, garbage excavated near Great Houses contained a higher proportion of deer and antelope bones than did garbage from homesteads, with the result that human burials indicate taller, better-nourished, less anemic people and lower infant mortality at Great Houses.
Why would outlying settlements have supported the Chaco center, dutifully delivering timber, pottery, stone, turquoise, and food without receiving anything material in return? The answer is probably the same as the reason why outlying areas of Italy and Britain today support our cities such as Rome and London, which also produce no timber or food but serve as political and religious centers. Like the modern Italians and British, Chacoans were now irreversibly committed to living in a complex, interdependent society. They could no longer revert to their original condition of self-supporting mobile little groups, because the trees in the canyon were gone, the arroyos were cut below field levels, and the growing population had filled up the region and left no unoccupied suitable areas to which to move. When the pinyon and juniper trees were cut down, the nutrients in the litter underneath the trees were flushed out. Today, more than 800 years later, there is still no pinyon/juniper woodland growing anywhere near the packrat middens containing twigs of the woodland that had grown there before A.D. 1000. Food remains in rubbish at archaeological sites attest to the growing problems of the canyon’s inhabitants in nourishing themselves: deer declined in their diets, to be replaced by smaller game, especially rabbits and mice. Remains of complete headless mice in human coprolites (preserved dry feces) suggest that people were catching mice in the fields, beheading them, and popping them in whole.
The last identified construction at Pueblo Bonito, dating from the decade after 1110, was from a wall of rooms enclosing the south side of the plaza, which had formerly been open to the outside. That suggests strife: people were evidently now visiting Pueblo Bonito not just to participate in its religious ceremonies and to receive orders, but also to make trouble. The last tree-ring-dated roof beam at Pueblo Bonito and at the nearby Great House of Chetro Ketl was cut in A.D. 1117, and the last beam anywhere in Chaco Canyon in A.D. 1170. Other Anasazi sites show more abundant evidence of strife, including signs of cannibalism, plus Kayenta Anasazi settlements at the tops of steep cliffs far from fields and water and understandable only as easily defended locations. At those southwestern sites that outlasted Chaco and survived until after A.D. 1250, warfare evidently became