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  3. The Chaco Phenomenon P1: Between about 900 to 1150 AD, a mysterious Stone Age culture arose, flourished, and then vanished in th

The Chaco Phenomenon P1: Between about 900 to 1150 AD, a mysterious Stone Age culture arose, flourished, and then vanished in th

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问题 The Chaco Phenomenon
P1: Between about 900 to 1150 AD, a mysterious Stone Age culture arose, flourished, and then vanished in the semi-desert region of the Southwestern United States. Named the Chaco culture after the canyon in which the principal ruins are found, nearly everything about this ancient society is shrouded in mystery. A truly remarkable transformation in settlement patterns occurred in the San Juan basin in northwestern New Mexico, with small household farmsteads giving way to aggregated communities centered on communal masonry buildings that are now called "great houses." These multi-level buildings of up to 800 rooms are scattered over thousands of square miles of the Four Corners area of the Southwest. The entire episode of great house construction in Chaco, the Bonito phase (A.D. 900-1140), was signifying an pronounced period of immense cooperative effort. Pueblo Chetro Ketl’s outer wall alone is calculated to be composed of 30 million stones which were brought to the canyon from distances between 80 and 150 kilometers away. Many of the stones had to be shaped before being positioned and built into a huge project. But by 1140 AD, the massive construction ceased abruptly, followed by a rapid decline in use of the great houses and apparent abandonment of the canyon in the thirteenth century.
P2: For more than a century archaeologists have struggled to understand the circumstances surrounding the rise and collapse of Chacoan society—dubbed the Chaco Phenomenon. Specifically, research has focused on determining why such an apparently inhospitable place as Chaco, which today is extremely arid and has very short growing seasons, should have been favored for the concentration of labor that must have been required for such massive construction projects over brief periods of time. Until the 1970s, scholars and the public alike had a long-shared notion that Chaco had been a forested oasis that attracted farmers who initially flourished but eventually fell victim to their own success and exuberance, as they employed unsustainable land-use practices to build their impressive communities. Yet there is no substantial evidence, archaeological or otherwise, to support such contention.
P3: However, recent geological field studies in Chaco have produced some table-turning evidence that may require a significant reassessment of the assumption that the canyon was not a favorable agricultural setting. It appears that during the extraordinary construction boom in the first half of the eleventh century, a devastating flood occurred, resulting in extreme difficulty irrigating the area. A large natural lake, near the biggest concentration of great houses, may have existed at the western end of Chaco and might have suspended sediment, which would then have flowed into the canyon. The presence of an abundance of water and, equally important, a source of sediment that replenished agricultural fields, presumably made the canyon an extremely attractive place for newly arriving people from the northern San Juan River basin. In fact, during the 1980s, this reconstruction was largely dismissed in response to evidence that there were only scattered trees along cliffs and escarpments above the canyon rather than woodlands in the first place, and that canyon soil was highly sensitive to increases in aridity and temperature and thus unsuitable for farming, regardless of the amount of trees. As long-standing scientific consensus was undergoing this transformation, the position of the canyon within a regional network of dispersed agricultural communities called up more academic attention. P4: The adoption of a regional perspective in explaining the Chaco Phenomenon was based in part on the discovery of formal trails. A combination of remote sensing techniques and ground verification defined a prehistoric road system which extended outward from Chaco Canyon into the surrounding San Juan Basin, later referred to as Chaco "outliers." These trails are densest around the concentration of great houses in the center, and the canyon itself is roughly at the center of the basin. Consequently, Chaco Canyon was intimately related to other settlements in a single cultural web flung across 30,000 square miles and which reached into Colorado and Utah, all tied together by a network of ancient roads. The current consensus view is that religion provided the fundamental explanation for this centrifugal pattern.
P5: After close study of great kivas (multipurpose rooms used for religious, political, and social functions), archeologists tend to depict Chaco as a location of high devotional expression and the pilgrimage center of a sacred landscape. The kiva structure itself, of whatever size, occupies a special and sacred place in Pueblo architecture. Excavation of some of these vaults suggests that they were once associated with ceremonies. Archaeological record presented some ritual artifacts, including caches of turquoise beads and pendants, unusual ceramic vessels and wooden objects, several rooms with multiple human burials, and especially the large number of kivas found in great houses. Most of these indicators occur only at Pueblo Bonito, but archaeologists generally assume that all the great houses had a similar ritual function. Some scholars have even argued that the great houses were temples instead of residences.
P4: ■ The adoption of a regional perspective in explaining the Chaco Phenomenon was based in part on the discovery of formal trails.
■ A combination of remote sensing techniques and ground verification defined a prehistoric road system which extended outward from Chaco Canyon into the surrounding San Juan Basin, later referred to as Chaco "outliers."
■ These trails are densest around the concentration of great houses in the center, and the canyon itself is roughly at the center of the basin. Consequently, Chaco Canyon was intimately related to other settlements in a single cultural web flung across 30,000 square miles and which reached into Colorado and Utah, all tied together by a network of ancient roads. ■ The current consensus view is that religion provided the fundamental explanation for this centrifugal pattern.
According to paragraph 3, what is the possible significance of new geological field studies in Chaco?
选项 A、They indicate that during the construction boom the Chaco area probably did have enough water and sediment to attract farmers to that area.
B、They could undermine the theory of Chaco as a religious center.
C、They show the presence of excessive amounts of water, which may have led to the departure of most of the people living there during the Bonito phase.
D、They suggest that the kind of sediment present in Chaco in the eleventh century was not favorable for agriculture.
答案A
解析 【修辞目的题】首句提到“produced some table-turning evidence that…”，说明此处为题目所问的重要发现，后文说明了发现的具体内容，因此答案为A。
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