3 CHACO GATHERS Experience and assemblage in the ancient Southwest Ruth M. Van Dyke Prologue Chaco Canyon is a place that gathers. There assembled we find clouds and stars, rabbits and ravens, stones and shadows. There enfolded we find corn and pollen, water and earth, turquoise and cacao. Woven into Chaco’s fabric we find ancestors and descendants, scholars and tourists, park rangers and stakeholders. Cities are gatherings, places where buildings, people, materials, activities, experiences, and memories overlap and intertwine with a density that defies dis- entanglement. Religious experiences are gatherings, with meaning emergent in the midst of shared liturgies, rare practices, and extraordinary affects. Religious experiences and cities (or at least dense gatherings of people) are both part of the gathering that is Chaco. “The events of one’s life take place, take place” (Momaday 1976:142, emphasis mine). In The Chaco Experience, I argued for the importance of affect and place – sandstone cliffs and canyon walls – in understanding Chaco (Van Dyke 2007). Chacoan elite leaders, I contended, manipulated monumental architecture, ancestral relationships, and the natural landscape to create a bodily experience for pilgrims and visitors; this experience legitimated Chaco Canyon (and its elite leaders) as central to the ancient Pueblo world. I was essentially arguing for the primacy of religious knowledge and practices at Chaco, as opposed to the economic or polit- ical dimensions favored by some other schools of thought. But what I did not yet understand was that these categorical separations are Western constructs. As beau- tifully demonstrated by Severin Fowles’s (2013) An Archaeology of Doings, for indi- genous peoples in the Southwest United States, religious “doings” are inseparable from all other dimensions of life. Fowles took inspiration from Latour’s (1993) critique of modernist attempts at “purification,” often cited as a seminal work in a “new materialist” turn across 9781138542464_pi-259.indd 40 9781138542464_pi-259.indd 40 07-Jun-19 10:44:26 PM 07-Jun-19 10:44:26 PM