This special section of American Antiquity contains 9 papers that address the organization of production in Chaco Canyon during the height of the "Chaco Phenomenon," a regional system that covered the northern part of the American Southwest between A.D. 900 and 1150. These papers are part of an effort to synthesize the National Park Service's Chaco Project, a large-scale research project undertaken during the 1970s and early 1980s. Our introductory paper provides a brief history of research in Chaco Canyon, an overview of the Chaco phenomenon, a summary of the Chaco synthesis project, and a synopsis of the other papers. The first four papers in this issue were written by experts on prehistoric economic systems who developed models of the operation of production and distribution in Chaco Canyon. The following four papers, by Chaco scholars, use data from the Chaco Project to evaluate the models presented in the initial papers. There is general agreement that Chaco was a place where people from the surrounding region gathered for participation in communal ceremonial events, including the building of the most striking element of the Chaco phenomenon--great houses. Production is seen as household-based, serving to finance these communal gatherings.

The role of production, exchange, and consumption in Chaco Canyon can be analyzed successfully only when the system as a whole is considered. A cognitive-processual approach is used here to develop a model of Chaco as an essentially egalitarian society, centered on the Canyon as a Location of High Devotional Expression. The production and consumption of goods is understood in the context of an ideational/devotional significance of the great houses and great kivas of Chaco and of periodic visits made to them for devotional purposes (i.e., pilgrimages). Consideration is given to the structure of regional pilgrimages and the function of the multiple great houses in Chaco Canyon. This model is compared with two others: Chaco as a secondary trading center and Chaco as an elite power base. Production and consumption in both sacred and profane contexts are examined in order to distinguish among the three models.

I propose that Chaco Canyon was a chiefdom that emphasized a corporate political strategy (Blanton et al. 1996). Corporate groups define the relationship of people to resources, especially as the owners of productive land. Groups are materialized by public ceremonies and monuments, but leaders are typically faceless. Chaco's famous road system, the elaborate architecture of the great houses, and the regional procurement of specific resources support the proposal that Chaco was a corporate chiefdom. To create and sustain the regional institutions of a chiefdom requires not only leaders, but a system of finance. Chaco is argued to have had a system of staple finance, where surplus food and everyday technologies were mobilized from a broad supporting population. Mobilization was based on control of food production, but the method of control has not yet been defined for Chaco. The exchange of prestige goods, such as turquoise, shell, and copper bells, was not part of the system of finance for Chaco, but was part of an interpersonal and noncentralized reciprocal exchange network such as those found broadly in egalitarian societies.

Kinship is central to an understanding of sociopolitical organization and the organization of production in Chaco Canyon. Between A.D. 700 and 900, lifeways in the Chacoan world underwent a transformation that reflects the evolution of matrilocal residence. Matrilocal groups became the foundation of a polity based on a corporate political strategy. Matrilocality provided the peoples of the Chaco region a social structure in which women were able to form stable agricultural communities while men were freed to take part in long-distance resource procurement and trade. Leaders mobilized goods from across the polity for corporate-affirming activities, such as construction of great houses. This corporate strategy is evident in an examination of turquoise production. The production of turquoise ornaments was diffuse and uncontrolled, but the consumption of turquoise, at least in Chaco Canyon, was highly centralized. This is what we would expect to see in a polity operating within a corporate strategy.

The household is the most basic and flexible component of human social organization. It is through the household that we can understand the Chaco phenomenon from the point of view of agriculture and craft production. Households strive for autonomy and self-sufficiency and they spread themselves thin to meet basic subsistence requirements. As a result, scheduling of agricultural and craft activities is critical to the success of the household. Craft technologies must be complementary with agricultural activities; for example, pottery may be made during the heat of the day when agricultural tasks are at a lull. The concept of intersecting technologies suggests that technical knowledge, resources, and labor may be shared among crafts and other activities. Chacoan households probably specialized in the production of different crafts including pottery, jewelry, basketry, and other woven goods. Within the context of the Chaco regional system the mobilization of labor would have been through obligatory work assignments that complemented domestic autonomy in agricultural production and, as a result, would have been organized seasonally.

Manufacture and movement of pottery has a complex and changing history in the ancestral pueblo region. By the time great houses were being built in the Chaco sphere, four wares were in use and some areas were supplying large quantities of pots to the sites in Chaco Canyon. Widespread stylistic trends indicate mechanisms of communication and shared ideals over a huge area. Ceramics are an index of how large quantities of everyday items were transported more than 60 km to Chaco. The similarity of source and form assemblages at small sites and great houses demonstrates the close link between the two kinds of sites. The scale and layout of great houses and layering in great mounds associated with them are suggestive of periodic events that are components of Renfrew"s model of central Chaco as the location of devotional events. Scrutiny of layer contents indicates that such events were variable, and that lithics and ceramics from a single geographic source seem to be independently transported. Different areas may have been represented differently at different events, but layers always retain some of their complex composition of sources.

The most unusual aspect of chipped stone in Chaco Canyon is that materials were imported from a considerable distance but used almost exclusively as informal flake tools. Narbona Pass chert from the Chuska Mountains, 75 km away, is the most common nonlocal material found during the Chacoan Era (A.D. 900-1150). There are relatively few number of formal tools found in the Canyon, primarily projectile points, and a significant number of these do not seem to have been made in Chaco. New models of the organization of production offered by Earle, Hagstrum, Peregrine, and Renfrew (this issue) are evaluated using chipped-stone data collected by the Chaco Project during the 1970s. Chipped-stone data support the suggestion made by these scholars that great houses in Chaco Canyon were the focus of periodic communal gatherings. Deposition of quantities of Narbona Pass chert debitage in great house trash middens was apparently a ceremonial aspect of these gatherings, perhaps related to Puebloan concepts of renewal. Some projectile points appear to have been deposited in great house rooms or kivas as ritual offerings.

For the prehistoric inhabitants of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico, turquoise was not an essential commodity for daily life. Yet, over 56,000 pieces of turquoise were recovered with two burials from Pueblo Bonito, the first site excavated in Chaco Canyon, and more turquoise is found in sites in Chaco Canyon when compared to other sites throughout the southwestern United States from ca. A.D. 900 through 1150. It may have been a long-distance trade item, exchanged for copper bells or macaws from further south, but its primary function was as a ritual item within the regional system. Because turquoise is found in sites established early in the Chaco sequence, this review will examine data from earlier periods to suggest which Bonito phase developments were innovations or continuations of previous practices. Some ritual uses of turquoise followed by contemporary Puebloan people probably have roots extending back into the Chaco era.

Wood used in the construction of Chacoan great houses represents a class of bulk artifact collected and prepared for use in buildings that can be reasonably argued to be public structures. The organization of production is generally held to be within the framework of a corporate chiefdom, as defined by cross-culturally inspired position papers for the "Organization of Production" symposium on the Chaco phenomenon. The organizational requirements for the acquisition, processing, and transport of construction elements are discussed through the examination of harvest schedule, the description and comparison of beam treatments, and labor investment for the processing, transport, and stockpile management of the beams. The timing of harvest and the labor effort invested in construction wood is found to be different and more intense than in a sample of comparable-scale non-Chacoan buildings but within the means of self-paced, corporately motivated task groups operating under the parameters of seasonal household schedules. Because of the consistency of handling, and quality of treatment, we envision the development of skilled task groups, perhaps at the level of a formal fraternal society, under the guidance and organizing skill of a limited number of leaders or specialists. More centralized corporate direction may have been an aspect of organization for only a brief period after A.D. 1070.

Foraging strategies of modern hunter-gatherers may not accurately model resource use of specialized big-game hunters. Historic accounts from the Northern Plains of North America indicate that utilization of spring-spawning fish when large mammals were fat-depleted was not universally beneficial. Three independent reports from Europeans and Americans show that a sudden switch from a prolonged diet of lean red meat to fish produces symptoms consistent with lipid (fat) malabsorption. It is hypothesized that plains-adapted hunter-gatherers formed their camps in grassland environments and hunted big game throughout the winter The effects of eating lean meat alone were avoided by utilizing fetal and newborn animals and through the use of stored carbohydrate-rich foods. Groups associated with wooded environments wintered along the margins of the winter grazing range. They followed a diverse strategy with opportunistic use of big game and were able to exploit spring-spawning fish. Archaeological remains from 18 sites from the plains, parkland, and forests of Western Canada were used to test these hypotheses. The faunal assemblages, tools, and identifications of lipid residues from pottery vessels were consistent with the proposed strategies.