The archaeological record suggests that, at its zenith, Paquime’s population – which resembled historic Puebloan populations in physical appearance and dress – developed and honed perhaps the most diverse mix of cultural traits, occupations, skills and beliefs of all the pre-Colombian peoples of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. Politicians unified and orchestrated the life of the immediate community (they do not seem to have controlled the regions as a whole). Spiritual leaders gave meaning to religion, ritual and spirituality. Chanting medicine men used hollow bones to "suck illnesses" from the bodies of their patients. City planners and architects invested harmony, form and direction in community structures. Engineers designed and built water transport and irrigation systems. Craftsmen raised massive adobe walls, shaped and set construction timbers, built colonnades, constructed roofs and laid stone mound and ball court facades. Artisans turned shell, clay, copper, stone, wood, plant fibers and animal and human bone into art forms or ceremonial objects. Merchants enriched Paquime (and themselves) in the booths of the marketplace. Itinerant traders served as the agents of import and export on the trails to distant communities. Athletes won glory for their communities on the I-shaped ball courts. Farmers raised corn, beans, squash and other crops in their irrigated fields. Hunters killed game to supplement family larders. Aviculturists bred and raised turkeys and the precious and exotic scarlet and soldier macaws for ceremony, display and trade. Warriors protected Paquime and, presumably, raided its enemies. The spiritual leaders, the artisans, and the merchants and itinerant traders played pivotal roles in the life of the community.

The Spiritual Leaders

"In the world of the Paquime…," said Di Peso, "all things were real and could be either good or bad—therefore, it took considerable magic to insure one’s health, to guarantee food, and to minimize the potential misfortunes of one’s surroundings."

Holy men connected the people of Paquime to a pantheon of deities. Di Peso believed that they especially venerated Quetzalcoatl, the ancient Mesoamerican deity who represented, in convoluted and mysterious ways, the powers of goodness and light against the forces of evil and darkness. They probably identified Quetzalcoatl variously with the planet Venus, wind, war and possibly human sacrifice. They memorialized him in monuments, jewelry, ceramics and rock art, and they often used the symbol of a serpent which bore a feather plume or an arched horn or sometimes both the plume and horn above its head to mark Quetzalcoatl’s overarching presence in their religion. The holy men of Paquime also wove Tlaloc, an ancient Mesoamerican deity connected to storms and water, into their religion. As in Mesoamerica, Paquime priests may have sacrificed children to Tlaloc, probably beside springs and ponds. Classically symbolized by goggle-eyes and a snarling mouth, the Tlaloc deity "was evidenced at Paquime," said Di Peso, "by the multiple groups of articulated burials of common-age young people…"

Shamans bridged the natural and supernatural worlds of Paquime, visiting the spirits to convey prayers and solicit gifts. A shaman, said archaeologist Christine S. VanPool in her article "Flight of the Shaman," Archaeology Magazine, January/February, 2002, "prepares to leave this world by entering a trance, often through the use of psychoactive plants, self-mutilation, sleep deprivation, ritual dancing, or fasting." He enlists animal spirits to protect him during his dangerous missions. Sometimes, he transforms himself into a totemic animal to facilitate his passage. The Paquime shamans, VanPool said, helped induce their trances by smoking high concentrations of tobacco in tube-shaped pipes. Their spiritual journeys found visual expression in the form of pots shaped like smokers and painted with transformation symbols. "Why did the Casas Grandes shamans take their journey? I believe their primary role was to ensure that rain would come to their arid land," said VanPool.

The Artisans

The artisans produced the commodities – especially the shell ornaments and ceramic vessels – which, through trade, would help define the cultural reach of Paquime for modern archaeologists. The artisans drew from huge stores of shells imported from the Gulf of California to craft items such as necklaces, pendants, bracelets, rings and even musical instruments which spiritual leaders used in religious ritual and which merchants exported to distant trading partners. Di Peso believed that slaves "confined to the low dungeon-like rooms of the warehouses…spent their waking hours perforating millions of tiny spiraled whelks," although they "did not own or revere the shell they were forced to handle." Skilled craftsmen used quartz crystal pestles, chipped stone gravers and stone abraders to produce "such exquisite items as the truncated Olividae and Conidae [shell] beads, dyed tinklers, cut and incised pendants, a mosaic-covered Strombus alter piece, and pseudo-cloisonne armlets." Meanwhile, Casas Grandes ceramists "produced effigies and painted vessels – all highly decorated with geometric design – depicting men, women, macaws, owls, snakes, badgers, fish, lizards, and mountain sheep," as VanPool said in her article in Archaeology Magazine. "The naturalistic images often are detailed enough to allow the identification of animal species. Many vessels even record ritual behavior that occurred in the past…" Archaeologists have found Paquime and Paquime-style ceramics at 13th and 14th century village sites scattered across western Texas, southern New Mexico, southeastern Arizona, northeastern Sonora and northern Chihuahua.

The Merchants and Itinerant Traders

Merchants and itinerant traders linked Paquime to what archaeologist J. Charles Kelley has called the "Aztatlan Mercantile System," a vast network of trade routes and markets which extended from the Valley of Mexico up through northern and western Mexico into the southwestern United States. As Kelley said in his paper "The Aztatlan Mercantile System: Mobile Traders and the Northwestward Expansions of Mesoamerican Civilization," Chapter 9, in Greater Mesoamerica: The Archaeology of West and Northwest Mexico, "…Paquime was indeed the center of a major interaction sphere…" and the mercantile system was the "only probable mesoamerican [sic] source for the conversion of Paquime into the center…" In Kelley’s view, Paquime evidently served as the "gateway" for trade with communities within its range of interaction.

The merchants energized the mercantile life of Paquime, presumably capitalizing on the city marketplace to acquire raw materials (Di Peso found nearly 4,000,000 individual marine shells warehoused in the community apartment complex), coordinate artisans’ manufacturing work, and negotiate commodity exchanges. The itinerant traders – possibly roving "wheeler/dealers" from throughout the system – served as conduits, not only for merchandise, but also for ideas and ideology. Still following their vocation well into historic times, Indian itinerant traders of Mexico "…traveled over the whole land, bartering, trading, buying in some places and selling in another…" said Father Bernardino de Sahagun, one of the earliest Spanish Franciscan missionaries in Mexico. "They also travel through towns, along the seashore, and in the interior. There isn’t a place they do not pry into a visit, here buying, there selling." (I have taken the quote from Kelley’s paper on the Aztatlan mercantile system.) The archaeological record suggests, according to Kelley, that their stock in trade included fabrics, smoking pipes, tobacco, metal objects (copper, bronze and gold), turquoise, cacoa and ceramics.

The itinerant traders, "who, as late as 1895, were still carrying on extensive short- and long-distance trade on foot…" said Kelley. "In 1895, Lumholtz [Carl Lumholtz, a Norwegian natural scientist and adventurer] questioned at length two of these traders and actually weighed one trader and his load (pottery). This trader weighed 70 kilos [154 pounds]; his load weighed 63 kilos [139 pounds]; and he had been a [trade bearer] for 35 years. He was able to compete with pack mules by walking twice as far each day, 30 or 40 miles, as a loaded mule."

In a remarkable feat, itinerant traders transported scarlet and military macaws from the rain forests of Central America across the deserts of northern Mexico to the city of Paquime. Somehow, they managed to keep the birds alive in spite of drastic environmental change, unaccustomed diet and extreme confinement. (In native habitats, macaws live in riverine forests, nest in high trees and range widely in search of fruits. They will chew up ordinary wooden cages.) Clearly, Paquime held the birds in high regard. Potters often incorporated their images into Casas Grandes ceramics. Paquime breeders raised macaws in rectangular adobe boxes equipped with nesting material and perches. They left, not only the boxes, but the skeletons and even the eggshells of the macaws as part of their archaeological record. Presumably, Paquime traded the birds or their feathers, both clearly highly valued, to other Puebloan peoples.

Interactive Sphere

Ten times larger than any neighboring community, Paquime’s cultural influence washed over the surrounding lands like ripples spreading across a pond, stronger near the center than at the edge. Paquime’s "interactive sphere" – a region where settlements share cultural traits, religious beliefs, architecture, icons and commerce in varying degrees – primarily encompassed northwestern Chihuahua, northeastern Sonora, southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico and far west Texas.

Following investigative surveys during the 1990’s, archaeologists Michael E. Whalen and Paul E. Minnis have suggested that Paquime’s interactive sphere could be divided into three irregularly shaped zones. First, as they said in their paper "Investigating the Paquime Regional System," published in The Casas Grandes World, "There was a zone of maximum interaction" within about 18 to 20 miles – roughly a day’s walk – of Paquime. In pueblo ruins within this zone, they found architecture, construction, ball courts, macaw cages and ceramics similar to those of Paquime. Next, there was a zone of intermediate interaction within two to possibly four days walk. They said that "Architecture and ceramics are similar to the inner zone, but ball courts and macaw cages were not common… There are several small, simple ball courts in southwestern New Mexico," about 75 miles north of Paquime. Finally, there was "A third interaction zone…defined by those areas whose ceramic assemblages show contact with Paquime but where no ball courts or macaw cage doors have ever been recorded," and it extends perhaps 200 miles from Paquime.

Whalen and Minnis conclude, tentatively, that "Communities within a day’s walk of the center appear to have participated relatively heavily in a system of ball court ritual and prestige goods exchange." Communities within the next zone "seem to have participated in the ritual and exchange system at a considerably lower level." While the outer zone clearly felt the influential ripples emanating from Paquime, the communities showed "no indication of this participation."

Why the Ascension?

Archaeologists have tried for decades to explain the Paquime phenomenon. How can you account for the rapid resurgence and transformation of Paquime at the beginning of the 13th century, just when the surrounding regions fractured? Paquime, said Di Peso, "…must have been a very exciting place with all of its daily market activity, the hustle of its many workshops, the staged ceremonial pomp, and the ball games, to say nothing of the vital timbre of the Paquime building and remodeling program."

Di Peso believed that "While the Toltec warrior-king, Matlaccoatzin, reigned from Tula," itinerant traders called puchtecas, who wanted "to accumulate wealth," moved into "the northern area and inspired the construction of such contemporary trading posts as those in the Casas Grandes Valley of Chihuahua…" Unfortunately, Di Peso, otherwise a brilliant and disciplined field archaeologist, miscalculated the dates for Paquime’s resurgence as well as its decline. Based on faulty assumptions about tree-ring data – a major source of dating in the American southwest – he thought the city was thriving at the time of the Toltecs and the Chaco Canyon Anasazis, and he developed his interpretation within that framework. In fact, as later research has shown, Paquime arose at least a century and a half later than Di Peso thought, after the collapse of the Toltecs to the south and after the abandonment by the Anasazis of their Chaco Canyon Great Houses.

There has to be another explanation for the ascension. Since the 1990’s, archaeologists have variously attributed the Paquime phenomenon primarily to stimulation by the Aztatlan Mercantile System, immigration from Mexico’s west coast, inspiration by Anasazi refugees, newly established empire by Chaco Canyon Anasazi elites, a combination of mercantile system stimulation and Anasazi inspiration, emergence of indigenous leadership, local manipulation and control of prestige goods and social and ideological concepts, and combinations of possibilities.

"There are difficulties with formulating testable models…" said Ronna Jane Bradley, with considerable understatement, in her paper "Recent Advances in Chihuahuan Archaeology," Chapter Thirteen in Greater Mesoamerica: The Archaeology of West and Northwest Mexico. "Clearly, Paquime was involved in extensive complex relationships with distant polities, and more work needs to be done before we can adequately understand those relationships."

Why the Decline?

By the 15th century, Paquime had spent its energies, although the population appeared to increase. "…two and one-half generations sat idly by and watched the magnificent city of Paquime fall into disrepair," said Di Peso. "The artisan-citizens continued to produce an abundance of marketable goods, but civil construction and public maintenance all but ceased. The populace took over various public and ceremonial areas and with crude alterations made living quarters of them. The dead were slovenly buried in the city water and the vital plaza drain systems, choking both." Based on his miscalculation for the emergence and the demise of Paquime, Di Peso believed that the collapse of the Casas Grandes regional system occurred in the midst of the upheavals in the Mogollon, Hohokam and Anasazi areas. In fact, it occurred essentially at the end of the great Puebloan Diaspora.

There had to be another explanation for the decline. Some archaeologists have suggested that perhaps Paquime spiraled downward after the warlike Tarascan people of Mesoamerica destroyed the Aztatlan Mercantile System in the 15th century. That could have interrupted Paquime’s access to trade goods such as shells, macaws and copper. It might have undermined the Casas Grandes economy. Of course, archaeologists may reject that notion, too. As J. Charles Kelley said, "That is the common fate of archaeological hypotheses based, as archaeological models always are, on insufficient data."