Paquimé (Mexico)

In northwestern Chihuahua state, Mexico at the foot of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains is the site called Paquimé or Casas Grandes. At its height in 1300 AD, Paquimé was the center of a culture which included much of New Mexico and Chihuahua, as well as portions of Sonora, Texas and Arizona. Once believed to be an outlier of the Toltec society of the Mexico gulf coast, the Casas Grandes hegemony has been redated and is now believed to be wedged temporally between Toltec and Aztec, separated from both by distance and time.

Paquimé Lifeways

The site of Paquimé itself is enormous, covering nearly 90 acres, seven stories high, and containing perhaps 2,000 rooms. Archaeological evidence, in the form of artifacts and architectural similarities, indicate that at its height, Paquimé influenced much of the Rio Grande River region.

Archaeological sites with evidence for connection to Paquimé are found from Alamosa Creek north of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico to Ojinaga, Chihuahua, where the Rio Conchos empties into the Rio Grande, a distance of 350 river miles, thence northeastward to Roswell and southwest to Cuarenga. Hundreds of villages were involved in the polity, whose exact social structure can only be guessed at. There are obvious suggestions to Mesoamerica; iconography at Paquimé contains horned and plumed serpents reminiscent of Quetzalcoatl.

The homes of the people who lived at Paquimé were circular and semi-circular pit houses and coursed adobe room blocks built around plazas; small rectangular ball courts are also found in some places, as are cliff-dwellings. Ceramic pots of Paquimé were vessels with multiple colors called polychrome; foodstuffs included rabbit, bison, deer, antelope, and turkey--there is evidence that turkeys and macaws were kept in pens for their plumage. A form of ten-row corn was grown.

Sources

An international flowering of recent research at and around Casas Grandes has produced a book edited by Curtis Schaafsma and Carroll L. Riley called the Casas Grandes World.

Di Peso, Charles C. 1974 Casas Grandes. Flagstaff: Northland Press.

Douglas, John E. 1992 Distant sources, local contexts: Interpreting nonlocal ceramics at Paquimé (Casas Grandes), Chihuahua. Journal of Anthropological Research 48(1):1-24.

Minnis, Paul E., Michael E. Whalen, and R. E. Howell 2006 Fields of Power: Upland Farming in the Prehispanic Casas Grandes Polity, Chihuahua, Mexico. American Antiquity 71(4):707-722.

Swanson, Steve 2003 Documenting Prehistoric Communication Networks: A Case Study in the Paquimé Polity. American Antiquity 68(4):753-767

Van Pool, Christine S. 2003 The Shaman-Priests of the Casas Grandes Region, Chihuahua, Mexico. American Antiquity 68(4):696-717

VanPool, Christine S. and Todd L. VanPool 2006 Gender in middle range societies: a case study in Casas Grandes iconography. American Antiquity 71:53-76.

VanPool, Todd L. and Robert D. Leonard 2002 Specialized Ground Stone Production in the Casas Grandes Region of Northern Chihuahua, Mexico. American Antiquity 67(4):710-730.

VanPool, Todd L., et al. 2000 Flaked stone and social interaction in the Casas Grandes

Region, Chihuahua, Mexico. Latin American Antiquity 11(2):163-174.

Whalen, Michael E. and Paul E. Minnis 2001 Architecture and authority in the Casas

Grandes Area, New Mexico. American Antiquity 66(4):651-668.

Whalen, Michael E. and Paul E. Minnis 1996 Ball courts and political centralization in

the Casas Grandes region. American Antiquity 61(4):732-746.

Whalen, Michael E. and Paul E. Minnis 2003 The Local and the Distant in the Origin of Casas Grandes, Chichuahua, Mexico. American Antiquity 68(2):314-332.

Woodall, J. N. 1968 Growth Arrest Lines in Long Bones of the Casas Grandes Population. Plains Anthropologist 13(40):152-160.