Our next lecture Tuesday, November 14, 2025 at 6:30 pm Cibola in Chacoan and Post-Chacoan Times Keith Kintngh Since 1896, the ruins in Chaco Canyon have been a focus of Southwest archaeologists' attention. The recognition of Chaco as a regional system with outliers and roads only began in the last 50 years. Drawing on the limited excavations and extensive surveys over the last 45 years, Professor Kintigh will discuss both the nature of the Chaco world and the regional consequences of Chaco's collapse in the Cibola area. He will discuss the H-Spear site, a Chaco outlier located south of the Zuni Indian Reservation. While one might expect a nearby residential community, no contemporaneous occupation was discovered within .5 km of the great house; within 2 km only 4 possibly-contemporaneous room blocks (fewer than 20 rooms, total) . By contrast, the post-Chacoan Hinkson Site, 2.6 km northwest of H-Spear, has 32 residential room blocks with 525 rooms immediately surrounding a great-house complex that includes an unroofed, oversize large kiva, a nazha and roads. Using excavations at and around these two sites as well as the post-Chacoan great-house site of Los Gigantes in the El Morro Valley, Kintiigh will look at applying John Stein's important idea of ritual lansdscapes and the problematic concept of "community " over the period from AD 100-1275.

Keith Kintigh is Professor Emeritus of archaeology at Arizona State University. His field research focused on the organization of ancestral Pueblo societies in the Cíbola area. Throughout his career, Kintigh published on quantitative methods and developed computer programs to address unusual analytical needs of archaeologists. To enhance preservation and access to the digital records of archaeological investigations, Kintigh led a team of archaeologists and computer scientists in creating tDAR (the Digital Archaeological Record), a sustainable repository for the digital records of archaeological investigations. Over the last 10 years, Kintigh led a different team of archaeologists and computer scientists to develop SKOPE a web application that provides free, high resolution paleoclimatic data. Kintigh earned a BA in Sociology and an MS in Computer Science at Stanford University in 1974 and a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Michigan in 1982. He received ASU's award for Outstanding Doctoral Mentor for 2004. He was a Fulbright Fellow in Ireland in 2011.

The lecture is held in the Sandia Ranger Station Large Conference room. ********************** The self-guided trail (on-site) is always open. The garden is planted just in time for a recent good storm. Won't you come and join us to water when Mother Nature decides to take a break? We always have a need for museum guardians, too. Do come and check us out!