The Joint Casas Grandes Project's (JCGP) important excavations at Paquimé had a profound impact on how generations of researchers have viewed the archaeology of the U.S. Southwest and northwestern Mexico (SW/NW). In 1974, the publication of their eight-volume report brought the results of this research to the general public and scholarly audiences. Two books published by the University of Arizona Press were released shortly after the fortieth anniversary of that seminal report: a scholarly volume (Ancient Paquimé and the Casas Grandes World, 2015) and a short companion volume for the general public (Discovering Paquimé, 2016). This two-volume release parallels the approach the JCGP took with archaeological reports: some report volumes were an accessible summary for all readers, and others provided more detailed documentation and data. This is an important and valuable way to make current research accessible and interesting to a wider audience than either book would reach alone, and I wish this approach were more common in archaeological reporting.
The JCGP was an international collaboration whose leadership included Charles C. Di Peso of the Amerind Foundation and Eduardo Contreras Sanchez of Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), and it focused primarily on the site of Paquimé, located in northern Chihuahua, Mexico. The editors of the two recent volumes, Paul E. Minnis and Michael E. Whalen, have worked in the Casas Grandes area since the late 1980s in collaboration with colleagues from INAH in order to study the larger Casas Grandes region. Their focus in these volumes is on summarizing advances since the JCGP as well as the current state of archaeological knowledge concerning Paquimé and its area of influence. Unlike the exhaustive JCGP report volumes aimed primarily at scholarly audiences, the 2015 scholarly volume by Whalen and Minnis does not include much detailed documentation or data. Instead, chapters focus on summarizing recent research and current issues of debate among archaeologists working in the region, with ample references to point readers to the original reports, data, and journal articles. The short volume (2016) has concise chapters on the same topics, each only two to four pages long, that summarize the key points of the analogous chapters in the longer volume in a form that is accessible to a popular audience and casual readers. The short volume also includes many more illustrations, which I found welcome.
Chapters in Ancient Paquimé discuss Paquimé and the surrounding Casas Grandes world. The book includes a chapter on the Viejo period (AD 400–1200) although, as is the case in the JCGP volumes, the Medio period (AD 1150/1200–1450/1475) receives the vast majority of attention. Chapter authors are leading researchers on each topic, and they are based at numerous institutions in Mexico, the United States, and Canada.
Most chapters focus on summarizing research since the JCGP and the ways that interpretations have evolved based on these newer investigations. Jane H. Kelley and Michael T. Searcy's chapter on the Viejo period follows this model. Although there is still comparatively little data available from this period, they summarize what is known from the work of a few important projects. As an archaeologist working north of the U.S.-Mexico border, I would have appreciated more discussion of how patterns in the Casas Grandes world relate to similar developments in the rest of the Mogollon region and to the Hohokam area, but with so little data available, I understand the authors’ brevity on that subject. Subsistence received only rudimentary study by the JCGP (as was usual at that time). Minnis and Whalen's chapter on advances in subsequent decades summarizes current interpretations of an agricultural system that included several different crop assemblages, combinations of floodplain and upland farming practices, and suites of wild plant and animal resources, all of which varied in the different environmental zones within the Casas Grandes region. Some elements, such as enormous earthen ovens and large mammals, were clearly related to ritual practice.
Chapters on settlement patterns and Paquimé's regional influence focus on pulling the general conclusions of the more detailed studies they reference together into sets of arguments concerning Paquimé's role as a center. Whalen and Todd Pitezel's discussion of settlement patterns summarizes the results of survey projects in the area around Paquimé to argue that the site was a primate center for other settlements within about 30 km, and that Paquimé influenced rather than controlled developments at greater distances. These dynamics were associated with an interaction sphere centered at Paquimé similar in size to the Hohokam and Chaco regional systems farther north in the SW/NW region. John E. Douglas and A. C. MacWilliams examine a larger region, assessing how developments in outlying areas relate to those at Paquimé and supporting the idea that Paquimé influenced this broader region rather than controlling or colonizing it. Their summary of several forms of Paquimé influence evident near the northern edges of its reach in southeast Arizona and southwest New Mexico is a particularly important contribution to the literature. Both of these chapters are important revisions of earlier ideas from the JCGP's work, which focused on the site of Paquimé itself and promoted it as a powerful trading center whose elites held sovereignty over the entire surrounding area. In their chapter on south and west Mexico, José Luis Punzo Díaz and M. Elisa Villalpando Canchola summarize decades of research supporting a revision of early JCGP ideas that specialized merchants from these regions founded Paquimé. Instead, they argue for a long history of interregional interactions predating the Medio period and a long-distance trade in prestige goods that existed as “a consequence rather than a cause” of social stratification (p. 190). Together, these chapters demonstrate how studying of the rest of the region has both improved researchers’ understanding of Paquimé and revised their views of its role in local and regional developments.
A few chapters include somewhat more detailed considerations of data, particularly Gordon F. M. Rakita and Rafael Cruz Antillón's interesting chapter on craft production. Their discussion presents the main competing explanations for the origins and production of the major items for which Paquimé is known (polychrome pottery, turquoise, shell, copper, turkeys, and macaws), and it evaluates current evidence for those competing claims with a concise summary of relevant data. The adaptation of this chapter for Discovering Paquimé is especially successful at showing general audiences how archaeologists evaluate competing explanations and which ones best characterize the production of some of the items people tend to find most compelling at Paquimé. Christine S. VanPool and Todd L. VanPool's chapter in Ancient Paquimé on religion has a similar organization (although with less emphasis on data). It summarizes the most current approaches to understanding this topic, draws out the commonalities and differences among major approaches, and highlights the implications of each for our understanding of the area and its ancient residents. In discussing the end of Paquimé, David A. Phillips Jr. and Eduardo Gamboa offer useful summaries of tree-ring and radiocarbon dates along with ceramic evidence indicating abandonment of the site by AD 1450.
In an odd omission, neither book contains regional maps in its early chapters. These would have been especially helpful for illustrating the several different types of “zones” discussed in the Viejo period chapter, as well as a different set of “zones” in the chapter on settlement patterns, due to the fact that the relative sizes and locations of all these differently defined zones are not well known to those of us who do not work in that region. A regional map finally appears in Chapter 7 of both volumes, and Discovering Paquimé contains an additional small map in Chapter 6.
As someone working in the greater SW/NW, I was happy to see several arguments of which I had not been aware—such as possible cacique field systems and high-status use of bison—summarized in Ancient Paquimé and guiding me to the original references to learn more. I also found the volume a useful summary of current (as of 2015) research issues in a region about which I have often felt I ought to know more. Although data-focused arguments were not intended to be a focus of the book, some summary tables to include data at a broad level would have been welcome in many chapters, as would maps. This book will be useful to researchers seeking a summary of current Casas Grandes research or of work on topics such as craft production in this part of the SW/NW. It is also a good resource for graduate-student courses or for advanced undergraduate seminars.
The accompanying 2016 book for the general public, Discovering Paquimé, does an admirable job condensing chapters in the longer volume and making them interesting for casual readers, and it is mostly successful in avoiding jargon and overly fastidious detail that can often detract from these sorts of summaries. The additional color illustrations add interest and highlight some of the most important topics mentioned in the chapters.
These two books complement each other well. They are a useful summary of the current state of archaeological knowledge about Paquimé and the Casas Grandes world, and despite having been published in 2015 and 2016, they are still important books that deserve to be widely read.
