Traditional archaeology in the American Southwest has produced many linear feet of scientific reports, hundreds of monographs, dozens of textbooks, but nothing to pull all this information together into a historical narrative. That’s what University of Colorado archaeologist Steve Lekson has done in this unprecedented volume. In the first seven chapters of this highly readable, often humorous book, Lekson constructs a political history of the people of the Southwest from “time immemorial” to the Spanish conquest.
One of the nation’s leading scholars of the Chaco culture, Lekson concentrates his story on the rise and fall of the Chaco Canyon civilization, its contemporaries (Hohokam and Mimbres) and its successors (the peoples of Aztec ruins and Paquimé) from about A.D. 950 to 1450. From the vast. but woefully incomplete, mountain of archaeological data, Lekson builds a narrative around rulers (kings and princes) and farmers, not unlike those more commonly accepted hierarchical societies of Mesoamerica (Aztec, Toltec, and Teotihuacán) and Cahokia in Illinois that influenced them. In Lekson’s view, nothing happened in isolation, as the people of the Southwest were very aware of what was going on in the rest of North America.
Lekson’s history is really two histories interwoven together. This first is the story of ancient people. The second in the story of archaeologists and other scientists in the modern era who try to unravel the former. He skillfully connects the dots produced by the scholars in writing the history of each era as no other archaeologist has. Picking and choosing from various important sites and events, Lekson makes the history hold together, even if, as he readily admits, some of the details may be open to question.
Most of the archaeological establishment will be highly critical of this work, but Lekson is the most provocative and innovative pre-colonial scholar of our time. In this History of the Ancient Southwest he has thrown down a challenge that other scholars must take up and advance. It is a book that everyone interested in the ancient Southwest must study and enjoy.
