Paquimé: Mysterious Mexico World Heritage Site That Still Puzzles Archeologists
UNESCO site is full of questions but few answers
Hola Amigos! Paquimé resembles sites in the US western states, but with no written language, archaeologists can only guess at how it came into being. What they do know is that it has been around for a very long time, had a complex culture bordering on the spiritual, and trade routes far and wide. I wrote about their pottery style, Mata Ortiz, in a previous post. Read on.
Paquimé, also known as Casas Grandes, an archeological zone in northern Mexico’s dusty terrain, stood at an intersection—where the Puebloan people from the north and the Mesoamerican peoples from the south and southwest met. It’s the largest archeological zone representing the peoples and cultures of the Chihuahua Desert. To date, only half the site has been excavated. As new technologies have been introduced, multiple theories about it have evolved, and it’s become somewhat of a mystery that has yet to be solved.
Declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1997, leading archeologists theorize that the northern Chihuahua site was occupied for thousands of years after finding crude stone hammers and scrapers commonly used by hunter-gatherers before agriculture began. Fortified hilltop terraces or cerros de trincheras were used as home and farming sites from as early as 1000 BCE to 500 CE.
But when southwestern archeolgists gather at conferences to discuss Paquimé, the more they try to unravel its mysteries, the less clear their findings become.
Pit houses
Early on, partially underground pit houses were constructed, eventually leading to one-story adobe homes and finally multi-story pueblos as in the Four Corners area in the US southwest. Though slow to start, its real development evolved around 700 CE, and in 1300, it emerged from shadowy origins and became the most culturally complex settlement in northern Mexico, the southwest, and the great Mesoamerican cultures of southern Mexico and Central America. It reached its height in the 14th and 15th centuries, when it served as a cultural beacon for pre-historic peoples within a 30,000 square mile area.
Then, around a century before the arrival of the Spanish who first spoke of it in 1560, things seemed to fall apart.
Location, location, location
Established on the west bank of the Casas Grandes River, the people who lived there raised several clusters of multi-story terraced buildings and a number of religious monuments. This was shortly after a 1340 fire that destroyed Paquimé. Did it rise from the ashes? Apparently so. Excavated buildings had mud-adobe walls and were smoothed in the suavé technique, including curved corners. Collectively, the buildings housed around 1600 rooms and the largest building covered nearly an acre.
With this in mind, Paquimé marked an epoch in the development of human settlement in a vast region of Mexico and illustrated an outstanding example of the organization of space in architecture.
The site bears testimony to an important element in the cultural evolution of North America and in particular to pre-Hispanic commercial and cultural institutions. People began to congregate in small nearby settlements to take advantage of the wide fertile Paquimé valley with its rivers, raw materials, and the practicality of it being a major trade route between north and south. Because of its location, merchant traders became an important component of the city.
The people of Paquimé raised corn, beans, squash. They hunted buffalo, antelope, and deer, harvested agave, nuts, prickly pear cactus, and wild plants. They raised and domesticated scarlet macaws, an oddity being so far from any type of jungle. But macaws were a necessary item for rituals and there is evidence Paquimé was the source for the macaw trade and likely controlled macaw production and distribution. Along with their agricultural leanings, they created high quality ceramics (Mata Ortiz pottery is very popular), wove textiles, created exquisite jewelry, and apparently well maintained their inspired trade network.
Though the natives knew no written language, by relying on artifacts, archeologists have pieced together this much of the Paquimé story. At its height, several thousand people lived there and from archeological findings, they were deeply spiritual. That influence spread across the hundreds of pueblos that lay within their cultural sphere.
Evidence also showed the complexity of an infrastructure complete with underground drain systems, reservoirs, water channels to reach homes, and a sewage system. After the 1340 fire, Paquimé rebuilt, leading archeologists to believe the disaster spurred on the golden age to come, bringing with it grand ball courts, stone-faced platforms, effigy mounds, and a market area.
Cultural crossroads
But who exactly energized Paquimé in the 13th century, building it into a cultural crossroads? Some archeologists believe the Mesoamerican missionary traders had a hand in it, while others suggest elite groups migrated to the area in the wake of failing pueblo cultures from more distant areas. Others credit Puebloan people of southwestern New Mexico.
What no one can agree on was its essence—was it primarily a manufacturing and trade center, which could have certainly been the case with its skilled artisans and wealth of raw materials. Or was it merely a consumer of imported exotic goods due to a location that attracted traders with extravagant lifestyles? And then there’s the question of the religious aspect. It may have been a draw for those searching for meaning, a staple supplied by the spiritual element of Paquimé, as evidenced by the number of religious artifacts found in various excavations.
Archeologists believe the area of Paquimé itself was relatively small, but its network reached far, far away as evidenced by the extensive commercial networks that had been forged with Mesoamerica. Findings included bead making, copper bells, copper armlets, copper ceremonial axes, Pacific Coast seashells, spindle whorls, ceramic drums, and ceramic shards.
In my previous post on Mata Ortiz pottery, those shard fragments instigated the widely popular and distinctive ceramic pottery known and lauded today as Mata Ortiz, with a white reddish surface featuring elongated sharp-edged designs, and named after a present day town that lies within the Paquimé area. Paquimé products were no doubt distributed in the extensive trade network that stretched throughout northern Mexico and as far north as present-day Arizona and New Mexico.
Religion
Emphasis must be placed on the messianic draw of religion. Even at the far reaches of Paquimé territory, the prehistoric people felt the mystic winds of Mesoamerican religious beliefs and rituals. Numerous icons found in excavations validated Paquimé’s religious status. Across the region touched by its base, Puebloan peoples created a gallery of religious art and connections to the spirit world, including plumed or horned serpent-like Quetzalcoatl figures, strange Tlaloc figures, step-sided rain pyramids, zigzag lightning symbols, and sacred macaws. Also in excavations, the presence of large numbers of monumental ritual architecture, which show patterns of social integration, suggest Paquimé served as a religious center.
Collapse
Scholars suggest the fall of Paquimé began in the 15th century, possibly due to a warlike Mesoamerican empire, Tarascans—second in size only to the Aztecs—that cut through their trade routes. While commerce dwindled, a drought tip-toed in. Also possible could have been that cultural alliances in the US southwest and northern Mexico could have realigned or deteriorated, thus depleting the influence that Paquimé once wielded. Also there was the possibility of nomadic warriors from the north, who could have sacked the city, bringing an end to a two hundred year cultural phenomenon in northern Mexico desert land.
Yet in spite of the vast evidence of this highly advanced civilization in northern Mexico, why has it not received more acclaim? From Expedition Magazine of the Penn Museum, an article by Paul Minnis and Michael Whalen states, “The image of the prehistoric southwest as a place where small kin groups lived in pastoral settings, unfettered by the trappings of ‘civilization,’ all generations part of an endless, unchanging, and millennia-long cultural tradition is common.
“However Casas Grandes, or Paquimé, was one of the largest and most influential communities of its day in the North American Southwest, covering 36 hectares, with over 2000 rooms, numerous ritual structures, a sophisticated water system, and an accumulation of extravagant wealth, and evidence of mass production of goods.”
Their thoughts were never recorded because they had no written language. But their deeds speak for themselves in the visible remains of massive multi-story adobe constructions along with artistic fragments of the innovative workings of an advanced society that held reign over an immense portion of the northern Chihuahua desert in the 14th and 15th centuries.
Paquimé Cultural Center
Located on the site is Paquimé Cultural Center showing the evolution of the site and the excavations that helped recognize it as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Museo de las Culturas del Norte is on the site and open Tuesdays to Sundays.
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Resources
Paul Minnis and Michael Whalen. “Ancient Paquimé and the Casa Grandes World.” Exhibition Magazine of the Penn Museum. University of Arizona Press. 2015.
Todd VanPool. “Visiting the horned serpent’s home: A relational analysis of Paquimé as a pilgrimage site in the North American Southwest.” Sage Journals. October 2018.
Alex La Pierre. “Five Reasons to Visit Paquimé, Chihuahua.” Borderlandia. January, 2019.
MY BACKSTORY—Puerto Morelos sits 100 miles from four major pyramid sites: Chichen Itza, Coba, Tulum and Ek Balam. Living in close proximity to this Maya wonderland made it easy to pyramid hop on our days off from Alma Libre Libros, the bookstore we founded in 1997. Owning a bookstore made it easy to order every possible book I could find on the Maya and their culture, the pyramids and the archeologists who dug at these sites and the scholars who wrote about them. I became a self-taught Mayaphile and eventually website publishers, Mexican newspapers and magazines, even guidebooks asked me to write for them about the Maya and Mexico. I’m still enthralled by the culture and history and glad there’s always new news emerging for me to report on right here on Mexico Soul.
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