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<< Text Pages >> Paquime - Ancient Village or Settlement in Mexico

Submitted by bat400 on Tuesday, 10 November 2009  Page Views: 5709

Multi-periodSite Name: Paquime Alternative Name: Casas Grandes
Country: Mexico
NOTE: This site is 62.42 km away from the location you searched for.
Type: Ancient Village or Settlement
Nearest Town: Nuevo Casas Grandes  Nearest Village: Casas Grandes
Latitude: 30.366700N  Longitude: 107.9474W
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
 2 Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
 no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
 4 Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
 4

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Ancient Village in Chihuahua, Mexico.
Pacquime first experienced substantial construction of post, wattle and daub construction in the 1100's. But in the 1300's, after the general abandonment of Chaco Canyon site to the north, a construction boom occurred in Pacquime, possibly in as little as ten years. Single story dwellings were replaced by multistory apartment blocks made from adobe bricks.

More than 2000 rooms were built and the population possible exceeded 2000, even in a desert climate that required a canal system to grow adequate crops.
The site contains ball courts, earthen mounds, and plazas. A museum shows artifacts found at the site.

Note: First Evidence of Corn Beer in northern Mexico Discovered on Teeth From Ancient Burials. See comment.
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Nearby Images from Flickr
2023_12_10 Casas Grandes CHIH (25)
2023_12_10 Casas Grandes CHIH (12)
2023_12_10 Casas Grandes CHIH (4)
2023_12_10 Casas Grandes CHIH (5)
2023_12_10 Casas Grandes CHIH (6)

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Nearby sites listing. In the following links * = Image available
 93.1km W 278° Arroyo el Concho* Cave or Rock Shelter
 93.2km SSW 193° Madera Caves Cave or Rock Shelter
 93.2km SSW 193° Valley of the Caves, Chihuahua* Cave or Rock Shelter
 193.8km NE 42° Caballo Blanco de Juárez Hill Figure or Geoglyph
 250.6km NE 46° Hueco Tanks State Park & Historic Site* Rock Art
 251.8km WNW 303° Murray Springs* Ancient Village or Settlement
 261.5km NNE 24° Summerford Mountain Archaeology District Rock Art
 304.4km WNW 295° Patagonia Lake State Park Petroglyphs* Rock Art
 311.3km NNE 29° Fossilized Footprints - White Sands National Park* Ancient Trackway
 319.8km N 355° Gila Cliff Dwellings* Ancient Village or Settlement
 344.0km W 271° Cerro De Trincheras* Ancient Village or Settlement
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 362.8km NW 310° Romero Ruins* Ancient Village or Settlement
 367.1km NW 307° Las Capas* Ancient Village or Settlement
 367.6km NW 310° Vista de la Montana UMC* Modern Stone Circle etc
 373.2km NNW 347° Cordova Cave* Cave or Rock Shelter
 374.3km NW 308° Marana Village Site* Ancient Village or Settlement
 376.4km NW 306° Signal Hill* Rock Art
 378.3km NNE 28° Three Rivers Petroglyphs* Rock Art
 394.6km N 352° Tularosa cave* Cave or Rock Shelter
 420.4km NW 320° Crow Canyon* Rock Art
 431.7km NNW 333° Kinishba Ruins* Ancient Village or Settlement
 440.2km NNW 344° Casa Malpais* Ancient Village or Settlement
 448.0km NW 312° Casa Grande - Village* Ancient Village or Settlement
 448.1km NW 312° Casa Grande - The Great House* Ancient Palace
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"Paquime" | Login/Create an Account | 2 News and Comments
  
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First Evidence of Corn Beer in Southwest Discovered on Teeth From Ancient Burials by bat400 on Tuesday, 22 March 2016
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The last meals of men and women buried centuries ago in the ancient city of Casas Grandes were dominated by corn, new research has found — what archaeologists say is the first conclusive evidence of corn beer in the Greater Southwest.

And these clues were found in a long-overlooked source: the fossilized plaque on the teeth of the dead. “The results of this study offer some of the first hard evidence for the production of corn beer, consumption of corn smut, and food processing methods,” said Daniel King (graduate student, anthropology, Brigham Young University) who led the research.

Casas Grandes, also known as Paquime, was a large settlement on the fringes of the Mogollon culture to the north and Mesoamerica to the south. At its peak in the 14th century, the city was home to as many as 3,000 people, likely serving as a trade center, trafficking goods and channelling cultural influences between what’s now central Mexico and the southwestern U.S.

Now, a new project undertaken by Dr. Anne Katzenberg (University of Calgary) is revisiting those remains, in an effort to learn more about the people who lived and worked in the prehistoric city.

And King and his colleagues sought to do their part, by analyzing the teeth of the dead. Specifically, they studied the tooth calculus of more than a hundred sets of human remains.

“Calculus is fossilized tooth tartar,” King said.
“If teeth aren’t cleaned regularly, then the tartar, which can trap pretty much anything in it, such as algae, plants, fungus, or fibers, will slowly mineralize with everything stuck in it and turn into calculus, while the microremains turn into microfossils.”
To get at this microscopic evidence, the team recovered tartar from the remains of 110 people found within the ancient city and from other sites in the Casas Grandes River valley, all buried between 700 and 1450 CE.

Of those 110 samples, 63 yielded some sort of microscopic remains.
The most common traces the researchers found were starch granules, mostly bits of corn, which accounted for 36 percent of the samples. Also common were phytoliths — tiny mineral fragments — that came from grasses and squash.

And more than 10 percent of the samples revealed the presence of corn smut — an edible, nutritious fungus that grows on corn and is still considered a delicacy, known today by its Aztec name, huitlacoche.
But while corn appears often in the dental record of Casas Grandes’ dead, that’s not necessarily a reflection of the population’s diet as a whole, King noted.
“Given the nature of calculus, any microremains recovered are going to be from the last days or weeks of the person’s life, maybe a month or two, but not longer,” he explained. “So reconstructing diet, in the long term sense, doesn’t work with calculus.
“However,” he added, “identifying specific foodstuffs — like corn beer, fish, chile, et cetera — is useful, as many of them can’t be seen in the results of other studies.”

In this regard, King said, the “most interesting results” of his team’s research was the discovery of corn alcohol.

Three of the samples revealed granules of maize that bore the unmistakable signs of fermentation, he said — including swelling and fragmentation caused by being heated at three distinct temperatures, and striations created by the fermenting process. These bloated, broken grains seem to be the result of making chicha — a corn beer whose use has been recorded in Central and South America for as much as 5,000 years, King said.

King noted, the burial contexts of the samples haven’t yet been analyzed, so archaeologists can’t yet draw conclusions about whether beer consumption was limited, for example, to a certain social class.

When it comes to beer in the southwestern archaeological record, he said, “almost nothing exists for northern Mexico or the American Southwest. The results we poste

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Macaws possibly raised for ceremonial and trade purposes long before Spanish by bat400 on Tuesday, 10 November 2009
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A century or more before the Spanish set foot in the Americas, birds of a multi-hued feather were bred together in what’s now a desolate part of northwestern Mexico. That, at least, is the implication of a new analysis of bones of prehistoric scarlet macaws.

Inhabitants of Paquimé, a large settlement that flourished from 1200 to 1450 in what is now northern Chihuahua, raised scarlet macaws more than 500 kilometers north of the animals’ tropical homes, say anthropology graduate student Andrew Somerville of the University of California and his colleagues. Ancient macaw breeders harvested the birds’ vibrant red, blue and yellow feathers for use in ceremonial garb and to trade with Native American societies in the southwestern United States, Somerville’s team proposes in an upcoming Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.

Evidence for scarlet macaw breeding at the arid Mexican site supports the idea that people bred exotic animals far from the animals’ native habitats, Somerville says. Ratios of carbon and oxygen isotopes in bones from 30 scarlet macaws excavated in the 1970s at Paquimé indicate that the birds mainly ate maize, Somerville says. In their tropical habitat of southeastern Mexico and Central America, modern scarlet macaws subsist on a wide variety of food that includes fruits, seeds and flowers — but not maize.

As early as 300 B.C., Mesoamerican societies such as the Olmec and the Maya used scarlet macaw feathers for ritual and military dress. Prehistoric societies in the southwestern United States also obtained scarlet macaws, apparently via trade, from around A.D. 100 to at least 1150.

Some researchers have suggested, without direct evidence, that Paquimé residents bred macaws for trade. “Our evidence indicates that Paquimé residents developed technology for macaw breeding and did not have to rely on long-distance trade or close connections to Mesoamerica to acquire these prestige goods,” Somerville says.

Somerville’s group analyzed scarlet macaw bones from a collection of 322 of these birds excavated more than 30 years ago at Paquimé. Excavations also yielded 56 adobe cages for macaws, many containing macaw bones and feces.

Carbon measurements indicated that the Paquimé birds ate plants adapted to dry regions, which at that time and place consisted largely of maize.

Somerville’s team provides groundbreaking evidence that the Paquimé macaws were not raised in the tropics, comments anthropologist Michael Whalen. But that doesn’t mean that extensive macaw breeding took place at the Mexican site, in his view. “Prehistoric people could have bred macaws, but it’s unlikely that they did so on a large-enough scale to produce the Paquimé population,” Whalen says.

A constant flow of juvenile scarlet macaws may have been transported north from Mesoamerica, Whalen hypothesizes. Along the way, birds would have been fed maize and given water from local sources, producing chemical signatures different from those of tropical macaws. Most imported birds didn’t live long at Paquimé and were replaced quickly, Whalen posits. Scarlet macaw remains at the site are dominated by juvenile birds that didn’t reach reproductive age.

Owners and breeders today find that macaws won’t reproduce unless fed a carefully balanced diet. Male and female macaws are notoriously difficult to tell apart, he says, making effective breeding dicey.

For more, see the Science News article by Bruce Bower.
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