Pueblo Secret Societies

Pueblo secret societies come in two basic forms: (1) tribal initiation societies, whose members include most if not all of the adults of the community or tribe, and membership is usually compulsory; and (2) restricted secret societies, whose members are always a reduced set of community or tribal members, and membership is usually voluntary and normally involves a lifelong commitment.

Pueblo tribal initiation societies include the Katsina religion of the Western Pueblos and the ritual moieties of the Rio Grande.Footnote ¹ Both Katsina and moiety societies initiate members in rites of passage ceremonies during adolescence “in order to connect the present generations to the past” (Jorgensen Reference Jorgensen1980:234). Because most initiates are adolescents, participation is compulsory, and in most Pueblos, tribal initiation represents the minimal level of ritual engagement expected of all adult community members.

As their name implies, restricted secret societies have more exclusive memberships. Eastern Pueblo restricted societies are usually associated with specific functions, such as curing, clowning, hunting, and war; their memberships tend to be small (a dozen or fewer);Footnote ² and members are most often recruited through pledge or vow, and occasionally by trespass or entrapment.Footnote ³ In contrast, Hopi restricted societies have comparatively larger memberships; they are more generalized in function and less political than their eastern counterparts; and most recruitment takes place through the institution of the ceremonial parentFootnote ⁴ but also by pledge and vow (Dozier Reference Dozier1970:141; Parsons Reference Parsons1939:128; Titiev Reference Titiev1944:13). Geographically intermediate Western Pueblos (Zuni, Acoma, Laguna) have a mix of western and eastern institutions and recruitment practices. Despite inevitable regional and linguistic variations, all Pueblo secret societies are legitimized by their connections to the supernatural world, and all have a sacred history that tells how various spirits bring rain and good health to the community through the intercession of secret-society rituals.

To better understand the origins and evolving roles and functions of secret societies in Pueblo social organization, it may help to begin, as Fred Eggan (Reference Eggan1950) did, in the west—which is comparable, he suggested, to looking back in time. At Hopi, all the important communal ceremonies are owned by matrilineal clans. The ceremonial liturgy (songs and prayers) and paraphernalia required for enacting the ceremony (fetishes, altar pieces, etc.) are normally owned and maintained by the prime lineage of the controlling clan. A clan’s ceremony is conducted by a secret society whose members are drawn from across the community, without respect to clan affiliation (Titiev Reference Titiev1944:13). However, the head priest of the society is normally a member of the clan that owns the ceremony—a brother, son, or nephew of the clan matriarch—and society leadership is typically passed down through the clan’s “avunculate” (from maternal uncle to sororal nephew, not father to son). This pattern of clan ownership of ceremonies is distinctly Hopi, but it is present in somewhat attenuated form in all other Western Pueblos (Eggan Reference Eggan1950:303), and remnants of the pattern persist at Jemez Pueblo and the Jemez River Keresan villages of Zia and Santa Ana, where certain ceremonies and ritual offices are associated with—but not controlled by—particular clans (Dozier Reference Dozier and Spicer1961:106; White Reference White1942).

Clan control of ceremonies in the west is historically linked to ownership of developed farmland. In the words of Joseph Jorgensen (Reference Jorgensen1980:190), “For the matrilineal Pueblos it was an all or none proposition: if they owned land, they controlled rituals, and if they did not own land, they did not control rituals. If village organizations usurped either ritual control or land, they usurped both.” This widespread pattern first emerged, I suspect, when corporate descent groups began using ritual performance to help validate their ownership of the community’s prime farmland. Normally, the most productive fields are owned and developed by a community’s founding descent group(s), on the ancient principle of first in time, first in right. Later in time, when additional clans joined the growing community, the status of the founding clan(s) would be validated every year by their sponsorship of communal rituals and accompanying feasts that distributed food to land poor, lower-rank community members.

In the three Hopi community clusters of First, Second, and Third Mesa, the Bear Clan was the founding descent group, and it controlled the largest and most productive floodwater corn fields.Footnote ⁵ Traditionally, a senior male member of the Bear Clan assumes the role of Kikmongwi, or “chief of the houses,” and head priest of the apical Soyal Society (Soyal, or winter-solstice ceremony, presages the entire ceremonial calendar and is enacted in order to bring the sun back and restore bounty to the landscape). Each of the (usually) six Soyal priests, who are normally drawn from other high-ranking descent groups in the community, receives a prime piece of Bear Clan farmland in exchange for his services in Soyal and “on the condition of proper behavior and faithful observance of ceremonies” (Titiev Reference Titiev1944:61).

Eggan (Reference Eggan1950:106) pointed out that there is no centralized religious ruling hierarchy at Hopi, where secret societies and their priests have little secular authority, but the association of the Bear Clan, village chief, and Soyal ceremony represent “a step perhaps in the direction of a central religious ruling group.” But it was only a step. The Rio Grande Pueblos went further.

Unlike the Western Pueblos, Eastern Pueblo restricted secret societies function independently of the kinship system, and society heads appoint all the important political officers of the Pueblo, from war captains/chiefs to governor and on down, all of whom typically serve coalition-inhibiting one-year terms. Eastern Pueblos often have multiple secret societies that perform similar and sometimes overlapping functions. For example, most Rio Grande Keresan Pueblos have three or four generalized medicine societies that focus on exorcising evil and restoring the general health of the community, as well as several lesser medicine societies that specialize in specific diseases, misfortunes, or taboos. All are ranked, and the head priest of the Pueblo (cacique) normally presides over the highest-ranking medicine society. It seems likely that the multiplication of societies is partly the result of historical schisms. As Robin Fox (Reference Fox2011:83–113) once noted, sectarianism is endemic in all ideological organizations.

Most of the material needs of the Eastern society head priests are provided by the community, their fields are worked by others, and secret societies control the community’s most important resources, interpueblo alliances, and formal trade agreements (Brandt Reference Brandt, Wills and Leonard1994). Brandt characterized the Eastern Pueblos as nonegalitarian and centralized, with status differences maintained by “a well developed system of information managed through secrecy, surveillance, and privacy” (Reference Brandt, Wills and Leonard1994:13–14). In the view of one comparative scholar, “The Eastern Keres and Tanoan Pueblos did not invest power in kinship groups, and their villages were more integrated and more centrally controlled in economic, social, ceremonial, and warfare matters than all other political communities in western North America” (Jorgensen Reference Jorgensen1980:222).

Individual Rio Grande Pueblos are often likened to autonomous city-states that traded with their neighbors and formed expedient military alliances but embraced no other formal connections, even within the same linguistic community (e.g., Dozier Reference Dozier1970; Spicer Reference Spicer1962). However, Pueblo boundaries are actually closed and static at some levels but open and dynamic at others. For example, all historical Pueblos are at least normatively endogamous—a consequence, no doubt, of ancient matrilocal residence practices (Murdock Reference Murdock1949:214)—so intercommunity marriage alliances were unlikely, and there were no other obvious political alliance mechanisms linking individual communities in any formal way (as far as we know, nothing comparable to the various matrilineal confederacies of eastern North America [Levy Reference Levy1992]). However, the secret-society priests from different Pueblos were and still are highly interconnected. In fact, most Eastern Pueblo secret societies are pan-Pueblo in scope, and ritual knowledge is actively shared throughout the region via reciprocal interpueblo ritual exchanges that occur even across language boundaries.

For example, most Puebloan medicine societies, from the Tewa Basin in the northern Rio Grande Valley to the Zuni River in western New Mexico, are probably Keresan in origin (Eggan Reference Eggan1950:209). According to Tewa anthropologist Edward Dozier (Reference Dozier1970:176),

On Dozier’s last point, Tewa anthropologist Alfonso Ortiz (Reference Ortiz, DeMallie and Ortiz1994:298) concurred: “The initiations for most of these borrowed religious practitioners were and are still conducted only in the Pueblos where they originated.”

Keresan Pueblos are also the most likely source of the dual clown societies (Koshare/Kurena), which are closely related to the medicine societies and have spread throughout much of the Pueblo world. In turn, the Keresans probably borrowed historical forms of hunting and war societies, in addition to key elements of moiety societies, from Tanoan neighbors on the Rio Grande (Jorgensen Reference Jorgensen1980:240; Ware Reference Ware2014; Ware and Blinman Reference Ware, Blinman and Hegmon2000). Dozier (Reference Dozier1954:266) notes that a greater emphasis on hunting and war among the Rio Grande Tanoans may have resulted from annual hunting sojourns on the Plains, where they interacted with and perhaps emulated Plains Indian tribes, who emphasized such character traits as individual agency and personal aggression. Tanoan leadership in the major colonial era revolts—1680, 1694, 1696, and 1847—is consistent with this emphasis.

When a Pueblo “borrows” a secret society from another Pueblo, the new society is typically integrated at a level subordinate to the established societies of the receiving Pueblo (Ware and Blinman Reference Ware, Blinman and Hegmon2000). As a result, the basic elements of the secret-society complex are similar across most of the Rio Grande Pueblos, but the elements are invariably arranged differently. As Robin Fox (Reference Fox1967a:6) observed, “In a sense each village is unique. This uniqueness stems, however, from the fact that each village puts together certain basic elements in different ways.” These patterns are rather clearly the product of interpueblo ritual exchange and resorting.Footnote ⁶ The question is, why so much exchange? Hayden (Reference Hayden2018) argues that secret-society expansion through the mechanism of ritual exchange is everywhere the norm, and he attributes the behavior to the propensity of secret-society leaders to expand their influence beyond their home communities in order to forge alliances with neighboring leaders and acquire more power and wealth in the process. In other words, it is politics by another name.

Once established, Pueblo ritual connections likely had important historical consequences. For example, the successful Pueblo Revolt of 1680 is most often portrayed as an ephemeral alliance that was born of necessity and made obsolete by its spectacular success. We know, however, that a ritualist named Popé from the Tewa Pueblo of Ohkay Owingeh (formerly San Juan Pueblo)—who was imprisoned and publically flogged by the Spanish in 1675 on suspicion of witchcraft—directed the planning of the 1680 revolt from the kivas of Taos, a Northern Tiwa–speaking village 64 km (40 miles) north of Ohkay. These kinds of interpueblo ritual connections, to which historians have likely seen only the tip of the iceberg, no doubt helped coordinate the most successful Native revolt in the history of the Spanish frontier. Ritual connections also enhanced Pueblo resilience in the face of European disease impacts. If, for example, smallpox removed society priests in one Pueblo, replacements could be trained and initiated at nearby Pueblos where the depleted societies remained intact. As one example, Richard Ford (Reference Ford and Wilmsen1972:40–41) tells of the death, with no trained replacement, of Nambé Pueblo’s Winter Moiety Chief in 1914. The Winter Chief from nearby Tesuque Pueblo stepped in and filled the void until he could train a local Nambé replacement.

Reflecting on the inherent resilience of pan-Pueblo ritual-political systems, Ortiz said, “In this long-demonstrated ability to, as one Tewa metaphor states it, reinvigorate decaying vines from nearby vital ones, lies the strength of the Pueblo people and their prime hope for the future” (Reference Ortiz, DeMallie and Ortiz1994:304–305).

Pueblo Secret Societies in Comparative Context

North America was home to many Indigenous secret societies—some still functioning, others only in memory—when anthropologists arrived on the scene in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Hayden Reference Hayden2018). Assembling and analyzing the comparative evidence, Hayden (Reference Hayden2018) concludes that secret societies tend to emerge in “transegalitarian societies”Footnote ⁷ through the efforts of aggrandizers who seek to monopolize power and accumulate wealth. Typically, wealthy individuals, especially those who already had considerable power as heads of corporate kin groups or other factions, assumed leadership roles in emergent secret societies. Their goal, Hayden (Reference Hayden2018) argues, was to extend their power and benefits beyond their immediate kin group and community in order to acquire even more wealth and influence, especially from the high initiation and advancement fees typically charged new members. Along the West Coast of North America, for example, most secret societies were apparently open only to high-rank individuals such as chiefs or clan heads. High initiation fees prevented lower-rank individuals from even attempting to join.

If wealth accumulation was foundational to the formation of Indigenous secret societies in North America, the Southwest Pueblos are an apparent exception. Economic surpluses were few and far between in the Rio Grande Basin during the early colonial period, and historical narratives include frequent accounts of starvation and local village abandonments due to crop failures, floods, and raids from nomadic tribes. These challenges were exacerbated, of course, by tribute and labor demands from Spanish overlords (e.g., Simmons Reference Simmons and Ortiz1979b). Furthermore, there is little evidence of significant variability in household incomes among the historical Pueblos (Dozier Reference Dozier1970), and no evidence—that I can find—that material wealth accrued to secret-society priests. Consequently, despite their strongly hierarchical and theocratic authority structures, the Rio Grande Pueblos stand out in Hayden’s (Reference Hayden2018) North American sample for their economic egalitarianism.

Another contrasting feature of Eastern Pueblo secret societies is that society heads are not leaders of elite kinship groups. As noted, Eastern Pueblo clans have either lapsed entirely or they control marriage but little else. Throughout the Rio Grande Basin, secret societies appear to have been ascendant at the same time that corporate descent groups were in decline, suggesting that the two processes may have been causally related. These facts raise important historical questions, to which I now turn.

Origin Stories

Because the activities of secret societies are, by definition, cloaked in secrecy, it is rare for material culture associated with Pueblo secret societies to show up in interpretable contexts in the archaeological record. Given that data are frequently lacking, speculations about the origins of Pueblo secret societies often punt to functionalism. A common assumption is that secret societies emerged in the late precolonial period (Pueblo IV, ca. AD 1300–1600) when postmigration populations coalesced to form communities with hundreds—and sometimes a thousand or more—residents. As large population aggregates formed, the presence of multiple unrelated descent groups would have created an environment ripe for factionalism. To prevent disruptive schisms, secret societies were created that drew their members from multiple clans, thereby providing a measure of community integration. The Katsina religion is an oft-cited example, and Katsinas did, in fact, appear for the first time and spread throughout most of the Pueblo world in the late precolonial period, consistent with the timing of the functional arguments. This coincidence may have sealed the functional case for many (e.g., Adams Reference Adams1991:186).

Eggan (Reference Eggan1950) advanced two related functional arguments about secret-society origins. He proposed that disruptive mass migrations off the Colorado Plateau in the late AD 1200s contributed to the decline of ancient lineage and clan organizations and led to their eventual replacement by simple nonexogamous dual divisions (ritual moieties), which he described as “devices to organize and regulate rivalry and opposition in order to serve the purposes of the group as a whole” (Eggan Reference Eggan1950:302). Citing Wittfogel and Goldfrank (Reference Wittfogel and Goldfrank1943), Eggan (Reference Eggan1950) went on to argue that Eastern Pueblo restricted secret societies also emerged in the postmigration period in order to manage the complicated affairs of irrigation agriculture on the Rio Grande. Tewa anthropologist Dozier (Reference Dozier1970) later expanded on Wittfogel and Eggan’s theory to propose a formative link between the emergence of secret societies and the need for political centralization to manage the region’s complex and interdependent irrigation systems:

Contrary to Dozier’s (Reference Dozier1970) claim, materials and paraphernalia often associated with secret societies—such as canes, altar pieces, effigies, et cetera—have been recovered from Ancestral Pueblo contexts that long predate the late precolonial period (e.g., Crown Reference Crown2018; McGregor Reference McGregor1943; Vivian et al. Reference Vivian, Dodgen and Hartmann1978), so the roots of these institutions go deeper. But how deep? If we had to rely on the rare ceremonial assemblage to reconstruct the history of Pueblo secret societies, progress in understanding their origins and evolution would proceed slowly, at best. However, in addition to portable objects, Pueblo secret societies are associated with a couple of distinctive architectural forms, so perhaps we can say something about the evolution of the institutions by examining the origin and evolution of their architectural containers.

The earliest communal architecture on the southern Colorado Plateau are large (10–20+ m in diameter) semisubterranean structures called “great kivas.” They are large enough, in many cases, to accommodate whole communities—or significant portions of them—and some early examples of the structure appear to have been shallow and unroofed, making detection problematic and undercounting more likely (Gilpin and Benallie Reference Gilpin, Benallie and Reed2000; Morris Reference Morris1980). Community kivas (a term I prefer) first appear in Basketmaker III times (ca. AD 500–700) and continue, waxing and waning in numbers and with inevitable structural modifications, into the historical period, where they remain the dominant form of community ritual structure among all Eastern Pueblos today. Pueblo consultants readily acknowledge continuity between the eleventh- and twelfth-century great kivas of Chaco and Aztec Ruins and the large moiety kivas of the Rio Grande Pueblos. Moreover, wherever ritual moieties are found today, they are invariably associated with community kivas; and wherever ritual moieties are absent, community kivas are absent as well. This is not to suggest that community kivas functioned exactly the same way a thousand or more years ago as they do today. However, the size and prominence of the structures and the fact that similar structures called “dance houses” were used in California for tribal initiation ceremonies (Jorgensen Reference Jorgensen1980) suggest historical connections and possible continuity of function.

Not long after the first community kivas appeared, the Basketmaker domestic pithouse began morphing into what some archaeologists call a “lineage” or “clan” kiva. Initially, such pit homes had “wing walls”—floor partitions that may have served to separate domestic and ritual activities during active ceremonies. By late Pueblo I or early Pueblo II times (AD 850–1000s), wing walls phase out as pit structures get deeperFootnote ⁸ and more elaborate, often incorporating low perimeter benches and walls of carefully shaped and fitted sandstone masonry. Common floor features included sipapus (symbolic portals to the underworld), wall and floor vaults, foot drums,Footnote ⁹ and unusual artifact caches—all suggestive of ritual activity.

As pit structures became deeper and more formal, many common domestic activities such as food preparation and long-term storage migrated from the pit structure to rooms in an adjacent jacal (wattle and daub) and/or masonry room block (Brew Reference Brew1946; Smith Reference Smith1952). These shifts are probably related to an increase in residential stability during the early Pueblo period (AD 700–800s). People were becoming more sedentary, and their facility architecture evolved to accommodate new wants and needs (more domestic floor space, accessible storage rooms, etc.). We should also note that clan kivas, certainly now and probably then, were not exclusive ritual spaces. Historical clan kivas serve as stages for esoteric ceremonies, but they are also workshops, dormitories for young men, retreats for old men, and spaces where many common daily activities take place.

I have proposed (Ware Reference Ware2014:93–97) that one of the functions of clan kivas was to integrate the dispersed avunculate, an atom of kinship (Fox Reference Fox1993; Lévi-Strauss Reference Lévi-Strauss and Needham1969) composed of all males born to a matrilineage, where maternal uncles have specified rights and duties regarding their sisters’ sons (Fox Reference Fox1967b:105). In the dispersed “segmented” villages of the Ancestral Pueblos (Chang Reference Chang1958), matrilocal residence would have removed men from their lineage home following marriage and dispersed them to other households in the community. With the physical dispersal of senior lineage males, clan kivas evolved to provide a formal architectural space for returning uncles to conduct lineage rituals and instruct their sisters’ children, out of sight of the matriline’s resident husbands and fathers (who had similar responsibilities to their sisters’ children). Recall that the avunculate still governs leadership succession in Hopi secret societies and remains the governing core of many other Western Pueblo secret societies. Consequently, it is arguably the germ of the ubiquitous Pueblo restricted secret society (Ware Reference Ware2014:96). If this interpretation is correct, the roots of restricted secret societies may extend back to at least the eighth- to ninth-century pithouse-to-pueblo transition, when the first so-called proto-kivas emerged (Wilshusen Reference Wilshusen, Lipe and Hegmon1989b).

If tribal and restricted secret societies have roots going back a millennium or more on the Colorado Plateau, they almost certainly played instrumental roles in social and political processes long before the late precolonial period. In fact, in a corner of the Colorado Plateau in a canyon called Chaco, secret societies appear to have taken center stage.

The Flowering of Secret Societies

In the tenth and eleventh centuries (AD 900–1100), Ancestral Pueblo populations throughout much of the southern Colorado Plateau grew and dispersed, probably in response to improved groundwater and atmospheric-moisture conditions. Sometimes referred to as the “Pueblo II expansion,” the improved conditions coincided with and no doubt helped usher in and sustain the Chacoan era, when parts of the plateau practically exploded with fascinating complexity. Like the proverbial blind men and the elephant, scholars have touched Chaco and found everything from a Mesoamerican trading outpost (Hayes et al. Reference Hayes, Brugge and Judge1981) to a complex chiefdom (Grebinger Reference Grebinger1973) to a secondary state (Lekson Reference Lekson2008). Hayden (Reference Hayden2018) weighs in with a very different hypothesis. He calls Chaco a “Super Secret Society Regional Polity,” a category in which he includes such archaeological enigmas as Chavín de Huántar, the Olmec ritual centers, Stonehenge, Minoan peak sanctuaries, and the ritual centers of Neolithic China, as well as “many other large ritual centers that occur immediately before the emergence of state organizations” (Hayden Reference Hayden2018:361). Hayden devotes considerable space in his book to exploring the salient characteristics of these regional ritual-political organizations, allowing us to compare relevant Chacoan material expressions. Needless to say, citing a range of data that supports a particular hypothesis does not constitute a test of that hypothesis! My hope is that these comparisons help generate further analysis, discussion, and debate.

According to Hayden (Reference Hayden2018:43), “Successful secret societies exhibited the ability to spread over large regions very rapidly, creating a relatively uniform regional network of ritual and political organizations that would otherwise be unexpected and surprising.” This expansive character of secret societies is observed wherever secret societies form. Hayden concludes, “The spread and continuing interactions and exchange of secret-society rituals, paraphernalia, ideology, and iconography plausibly provide the dynamic behind archaeological ‘interaction spheres’” (Reference Hayden2018:90). In California, for example, the World Renewal, Toloache, and Kuksu cults “integrated large numbers of people into social, economic, political, and ritual networks of considerable dimensions, including many thousands of people and sometimes hundreds of communities” (Hayden Reference Hayden2018:113).

Chaco was clearly a regional-scale network of some kind. One way to estimate its size is to look at the geographic distribution of Chacoan great houses,Footnote ¹⁰ which occur roughly from Zuni in the south to Mesa Verde in the north and from the broad Chinle Valley in the west to the Rio Puerco in the east—an area encompassing some 129,500 km² (50,000 square miles), or about the size of the state of Ohio. Considering the linguistic diversity of historical Pueblos—the Pueblo people currently speak six mutually unintelligible languages from four language families—the sheer geographic extent of Chacoan expressions is consistent with a multicultural interaction sphere. Even more telling, the spread of Chacoan architectural and other material expressions occurred over a vast region in just a handful of generations, at the speed of religion.Footnote ¹¹

Another common feature of secret societies is their control of astronomical and calendrical knowledge (Hayden Reference Hayden2018:83). In southern California, for example, “secret society members claimed that celestial bodies governed everything on the earth and that members could travel to the stars and influence the celestial spheres.” Members of the Chumash ‘Antap society of California “developed highly sophisticated astronomical knowledge and an accurate calendar which they claimed gave them an understanding of (and influence over) celestial systems and cosmic equilibria” (Hayden Reference Hayden2018:93). The architectural alignments, rock art, shrines, and other celestial features of Chaco Canyon are of course well known, extensively documented, and the subject of numerous publications and even celebrity-narrated films (e.g., Sofaer Reference Sofaer, Morrow and Price1997; Zeilik Reference Zeilik1985). The subject may, in fact, be one of the biggest visitor draws to New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon World Heritage site, which is decidedly off the beaten path.

Exotic material culture and elaborate art styles are also common features of pan-tribal secret societies. According to Hayden (Reference Hayden2018:24), “Ritual objects from unknown or far away sources, or requiring special skill to make and use, could be employed to demonstrate unusual power over nature.” Chacoans imported objects from as far away as Mesoamerica. Macaws, copper bells, conch-shell trumpets, and cacao likely played roles in sacred performances designed to awe the uninitiated. Hayden (Reference Hayden2018:322) goes on to note that secret society–based polities are often associated with some form of distinguishing monumental architecture. Chacoan great houses, “roads,” and other earth works are obvious candidates.

Sophisticated artistic traditions are another important hallmark of secret societies (Hayden Reference Hayden2018:291). The Northwest Coast art style and its various regional substyles—with their elaborately carved wooden masks, rattles, staffs, feasting dishes, and other ritual paraphernalia—are all linked to pan-tribal secret-society practices (Hayden Reference Hayden2018:39). The Katsina religion, with its distinctive iconography depicted in kiva murals, rock art, and painted ceramics, spread throughout the Pueblo world in the late precolonial period (e.g., Hays-Gilpin and LeBlanc Reference Hays-Gilpin, LeBlanc and Schaafsma2007), and Mesoamerican themes such as stylized parrots and serpents have long been depicted in multiple Pueblo art forms, including vibrant ceramic, weaving, painting, and sculptural art traditions.

In a similar vein, Pueblo rituals often include out-of-body performances such as sword swallowing, fire walking, rattlesnake handling, and various sleights of hand. Such devices and demonstrations are used by secret societies throughout the Pueblo world (Parsons Reference Parsons1939), and similar—and sometimes identical—practices were performed by secret societies in California and the Northwest Coast (Hayden Reference Hayden2018; Jorgensen Reference Jorgensen1980).

As noted above, Hayden (Reference Hayden2018) documents an association between secret societies, economic surpluses, and wealth accumulation. In Hayden’s (Reference Hayden2018:286) words, “Indeed, one of the major purposes for establishing secret societies seems to have been the control of such surpluses.” As also noted, the ethnographic Pueblos are obvious exceptions to the surplus and wealth rule. The question is whether there were times in the Pueblo past when reliable surpluses and the accumulation of material wealth were possible. In fact, the AD 900s and 1000s, when Chaco took off and reached its maximum areal extent, were perhaps the two best centuries for farming on the southern Colorado Plateau in the last two millennia. In the tenth century, many regional floodplains began to aggrade after several centuries of net floodplain erosion, resulting in higher alluvial water tables. The eleventh century then saw a return to a more stable atmospheric moisture regime, which would have augmented the more favorable hydrological conditions (Dean et al. Reference Dean, Euler, Gumerman, Fred Plog and Karlstrom.1985:543). And it was the eleventh century, especially its second half, when Chaco took off and reached its maximum geographic extent. Great houses got very big very quickly, and over 150 outlier great houses were constructed throughout the San Juan Basin and beyond to eventually encompass a large portion of the southern Colorado Plateau.

Studies of Chacoan water works (Scarborough et al. Reference Scarborough, Fladd, Dunning, Plog, Owen, Carr and Tankersley2018; Vivian Reference Vivian and Doyel2001) have documented a canal system that ran the length of “downtown Chaco,” concentrating runoff from multiple side channels. The system included head gates and ditches that supplied water to terrace and floodplain agricultural fields. We can only estimate how many hectares (or acres) were under cultivation or what the average yield per hectare (or acre) was, and we do not know how many mouths needed to be fed. Estimates of Chacoan population vary widely, mostly because of continuing debates about the size of great-house resident populations (e.g., Bernardini Reference Bernardini1999; Windes Reference Windes, Judge and Schelberg1984). We also do not know if people were coming in from outside the canyon—perhaps dispersed clan members—to contribute ritual labor to various construction efforts, although it seems highly likely. We can all agree on one thing, however. The construction of great houses and associated earth works, “roads,” and water-control structures would have required significant amounts of time and labor. Agricultural surpluses were almost certainly needed to finance such efforts, and those same surpluses favorably accrued to great-house residents, who were generally taller, were healthier, and lived longer than their contemporaries in small-house sites in the canyon (Akins Reference Akins and Neitzel2003). Where were surpluses stored? Hayden (Reference Hayden2018:286) reminds us to look for excess storage whenever secret societies co-opt economic surpluses. Perhaps the many large and mostly featureless rooms in Pueblo Bonito and other great houses helped serve that function.

Unlike their Eastern Pueblo descendants, Chaco conforms to another of Hayden’s (Reference Hayden2018) expectations: the association of secret societies and the leadership of high-ranking descent groups. In a Pueblo Bonito burial crypt, the two earliest (early AD 800s) and most completely articulated adult male inhumations shared identical mitochondrial genomes (Kennett et al. Reference Kennett, Plog, George, Culleton, Watson, Skoglund and Rohland2017). In other words, they were both members of an elite matriline’s avunculate, interred, predictably, with objects signifying ritual knowledge and power. The Bonito burial crypt contained vast quantities of turquoise, and an adjacent room was packed with perishable objects, including wooden staffs, traditional symbols of Pueblo authority (Judd Reference Judd1954).Footnote ¹²

Some of the broader implications of these data are as follows. Around the time of Pueblo Bonito’s founding, roughly 1,200 years ago, clan, ceremony, and secret society were apparently deeply enmeshed—as they are in all Western Pueblos today. Between then and now, Eastern secret societies detached from descent group control and began operating as independent agents of change. Detachment might have occurred any time between the AD 800s and the ethnographic present, but I think a strong circumstantial case can be made that independent secret societies were functioning by the mid-to-late 1000s when so many Chaco-style great houses sprouted across the Southwest Four Corners. When avunculate-based secret societies detached from clan control, they began to behave more like the institutions that Hayden (Reference Hayden2018) describes in his book: organizations led by prominent aggrandizers and characterized by rapid geographic expansion, the sharing of ritual symbols across language boundaries, investments in public ritual and imposing architecture, elaborate cosmologies, exotic objects, spectacular art, et cetera. Much more archaeological work needs to be done before the final Chacoan puzzle pieces are snapped into place and a sharper image emerges. For me, however, the most exciting part of this story is that the Chaco Phenomenon looks like an exuberant early version of a system of pan-tribal secret societies that remains one of the defining features of the Rio Grande Pueblos—Chaco’s most likely descendants.

Twelfth-century droughts (ca. AD 1130–1180) that contributed to the depopulation of up to 90% of the southern Colorado Plateau—especially the plateau’s western reaches—helped close the curtain on Chaco Canyon in the early AD 1100s. Even though great houses persisted in the Middle San Juan River Valley through much of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Chaco Canyon was mostly depopulated, and many outlier great houses were abandoned or converted to vernacular residences. The persistence of unit pueblos and their clan kivas suggests that corporate descent groups survived into the subsequent Pueblo III period (AD 1100–1300). Secret societies apparently persisted as well and may have actually proliferated based on the appearance of new forms of communal architecture, such as D-shaped and circular multiwalled structures, masonry towers, and features such as walls, roads, and natural drainages that divided communities roughly in half (Lipe et al. Reference Lipe, Varien and Wilshusen1999). Perhaps this bifurcation of Pueblo III communities signals the splitting of an early tribal initiation society to create the ritual moieties that are ubiquitous throughout the Rio Grande Basin today.

The late thirteenth-century end of Pueblo III also saw progressive social isolation, balkanization, reduction in long-distance trade, and in some places organized violence (LeBlanc Reference LeBlanc1999). All of this was no doubt linked to continued climate disruptions (Ahlstrom et al. Reference Ahlstrom, Van West and Dean1995; Dean and Funkhouser Reference Dean and Funkhouser1995) and the movement of displaced people—harbingers of our current climate crisis.

East and West

In the east, large-scale migrations off the Colorado Plateau at the close of the thirteenth century coincided with a number of social and political shifts, some of which helped differentiate east from west. For example, a number of cultural practices were not exported from the plateau to the Rio Grande Basin during the migrations (Lipe Reference Lipe1995). In particular, unit pueblos and their associated clan kivas either did not make the trip to the Rio Grande or were abandoned shortly after arrival. Did the corresponding descent groups lose their ritual identity, leading secret societies to step into the breach? Or did the increasing dominance of the secret societies, long detached from direct descent-group control in the east, encourage the clan’s ritual functions to wither? Or perhaps secret-society priests played decisive roles in leading or managing the exodus from the plateau. Whatever the case, the archaeological evidence is clear that new centralized leadership roles emerged in the highly planned late-precolonial plaza pueblos of the Rio Grande, with their inward-looking courtyards and centrally directed, ladder-style room blocks (Cameron Reference Cameron1999:232; Hill Reference Hill and Lange1982).Footnote ¹³ These construction methods required a labor force that was coordinated and directed at the community—not descent group—level, which was reminiscent, Cameron (Reference Cameron1999) suggested, of Chacoan great-house planning. Does this mean that secret societies had effectively displaced descent groups at the core of the community authority structure? The contemporary lapse of unit pueblos and clan kivas is certainly suggestive.

As pan-Pueblo secret societies took off on the Eastern Plateau, the Western Pueblo regions of northeastern Arizona were comparatively quiescent. The shallow soils and scant rainfall of the western plateau had always supported fewer people and smaller settlements. At the height of the eleventh century, Chaco Phenomenon people of the Tusayan and Kayenta regions mostly lacked evidence of ranked communities, great houses, or community kivas. The absence of Pueblo II great houses is consistent with fewer home-grown secret societies in the west. In fact, First Mesa Hopi tradition claims that much of their ceremonial organization is Keresan, likely borrowed from the nearby village of Awatovi, including the “Snakes, Antelope, Flutes, Singers, Wüwüchimtü, Mamsrautü, and Oaqöltü” (Parsons Reference Parsons1939:977). Most of these societies were historically active in most other Hopi villages as well. The Katsina religion may also have Keresan roots, based on the absence of a “k” phoneme in the Hopic language (see discussion in Hill Reference Hill, Gregory and Wilcox2007:34).

The lack of community kivas and their corollary tribal initiation societies may explain why Katsinas were embraced so thoroughly in the west, where they did not have to compete with an existing tribal institution. In the Rio Grande Basin, where ritual moieties conduct tribal initiations, Katsinas had a very different reception. Rio Grande Keresan oral traditions preserve stories of conflict with the secret-society priests when Katsinas first appeared (Freese Reference Freese1991:241; Parsons Reference Parsons1939:1091). Parsons (Reference Parsons1939:112) was told that the medicine men drove the Katsinas from the village but were forced to relent when the villagers rose up and demanded that the cloud spirits be allowed to stay. (Katsinas are sometimes referred to as the “poor people’s religion,” meaning people without ceremonial property or office [Parsons Reference Parsons1939:112]). This historical challenge to secret-society authority structures perhaps explains why, to this day, Rio Grande Keresan Katsinas are closely managed by the apical medicine-clown societies (Dozier Reference Dozier1970:157).

The ancestors of the Western Pueblos endured long-distance migrations as well. Some Kayenta migrants traveled to what is now southern Arizona, where they interacted intensively with the Desert Hohokam for over a century, no doubt acquiring and imparting significant knowledge in the process (e.g., Clark and Lyons Reference Clark and Lyons2012). When Western Pueblo villages coalesced in the late precolonial period, most apparently retained dispersed kin-based social and political structures, but some moved toward a more centralized authority system. At Zuni Pueblo, for instance, lineages from named matriclans preserve the fetishes and provide the leadership for most of the secret societies, similar to Hopi. Unlike the Hopis, however, Zuni has a centralized hierarchy of priests with village-wide authority and an executive enforcement arm, and Zuni clans have, correspondingly, many fewer functions (Eggan Reference Eggan1950:304). Triloki Pandey argued that the growth of a centralized secret society–based hierarchy at Zuni resulted from village consolidation at modern Zuni Pueblo (Halona:wa) in the late 1600s:

The dispersed villages of the Hopis have traditionally rejected centralized control. Even communities that are ritually dependent on a “mother village” remain politically independent. The closest thing to a centralized government—the Hopi Tribal Council—deals almost exclusively with the outside world.

The concentration of political and ritual power at Zuni provides us, I think, with the template for a process that may have taken place throughout the Rio Grande Basin in the years following large-scale migrations from the plateau. Eggan’s (Reference Eggan1950) theory of a “Keresan Bridge” captures the trajectory, if not all the internal dynamics, of this process. It was not just ritual moieties replacing clans; more fundamentally, secret societies were usurping authority from corporate descent groups. Moving from west to east along the Keresan Bridge, from Acoma in the west to Cochiti in the east, there is a marked decline in corporate descent groups and a corresponding increase in the power and prominence of secret societies. At Acoma (ca. 1930s), the leader of the apical Antelope Clan managed the ceremonial calendar, directed the apportionment of community farmland, and made all major political appointments. However, the Antelope Chief’s appointments were subject to veto by the Flint medicine men. Parsons (Reference Parsons1939:1087) described Acoma as a “battlefield for (the) clash between clan and society.” Farther east on the lower Jemez River, at Keresan-speaking Zia and Santa Ana Pueblos, secret societies have taken over most of the clan’s ritual functions, but the link between clan, ceremony, and society has been preserved in oral tradition—if not in practice.

Farther east on the Rio Grande, the divorce between clan and secret society is final. Secret societies control the ceremonial calendar, appoint all political officers, direct communal labor, and impose sanctions on noncooperating individuals and families. Clans, though present, no longer own land or control ceremonies, and they exert little or no power at the community level. When Chuck Lange conducted ethnographic research at Cochiti Pueblo in the years immediately following World War II, he found that people always knew the moiety affiliation—but almost never the clan memberships—of their neighbors (Lange Reference Lange1959:391).

Among the bilateral Rio Grande Tewa and Tiwa, lineages and clans have lapsed entirely, but clues to their former existence are preserved in Tanoan kinship terminologies that still distinguish between cross and parallel relatives. The presence of “crossness” in Tanoan terminologies indicates a former classificatory kinship system—most likely Iroquois or Crow—comparable to all other Pueblos (Cruz and Ortman Reference Cruz, Ortman., Hays-Gilpin, Herr and Lyons2021; Hill Reference Hill and Whiteley2018; Parsons Reference Parsons1924; Whiteley Reference Whiteley and Whiteley2018). The lapse of descent groups among Rio Grande Tanoans may have occurred fairly late due to the combined effects of Roman Catholic marriage restrictions and extensive Tanoan and Hispano intermarriage. Writing more than 50 years ago, Alfonso Ortiz (Reference Ortiz1969:46) maintained that Spanish and Tewa marriage practices had been thoroughly syncretized.

In conclusion, unlike secret societies that formed along the Pacific coast of North America, with its predictable marine and anadromous fish resources, economic surpluses were rare in the northern Southwest. This was especially true on the high, dry Colorado Plateau, where a short growing season combines with frequent moisture deficits to create an extremely challenging environment for subsistence farmers employing a neolithic technology. However, there were times in the past when climate conditions favorable for corn horticulture permitted higher population densities that led, perhaps inevitably, to social ranking and an unequal distribution of land, wealth, and power. In Chaco Canyon and perhaps other persistent occupations on the plateau, such as the Chuska slope, surpluses obtained during good years were used by emergent priesthoods—now at least partly detached from kinship control—to finance projects that enhanced their power and extended their influence over a region of the northern Southwest the size of New England. Importantly, many of these practices continue today among Chacoan descendants in the Rio Grande Basin, where ceremonial performances and ritual exchanges help preserve Pueblo cultures and communities enveloped—but never crushed or absorbed—by four centuries of Euro-American colonization. Ortiz (Reference Ortiz, DeMallie and Ortiz1994:304–305) concluded that these networks “may well constitute the single most important mechanism of cultural survival and revitalization that the Pueblos have, now as well as in the distant past.”

Needless to say, these and other stories of the rise of secret societies among the Southwest Pueblos will always be incomplete without the Pueblos’ own stories that have accumulated over the centuries as their ancestors faced difficulties and engineered solutions to one of the most challenging environments for farmers in North America. Unfortunately, due to the long history of Euro-American colonialism, which included intrusive studies by anthropologists and other historical scholars, true collaboration based on mutual respect remains elusive. In the final analysis, however, the lived experiences of the Puebloan people, preserved in oral tradition and ceremony and documented in the historical ethnographies, are essential if we are to repopulate the skeletal histories that archaeologists have built from crumbling masonry walls, potsherds, and postholes.