For more than thirty years, Stephen Lekson, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado, has been challenging conventional wisdom about Chaco Canyon, the magnificent prehistoric center in the desert of northwestern New Mexico. In this new offering, Lekson takes his previous challenges a step further and adds new insights and interpretations, refining a theory of Chaco Canyon that is dramatically different that those of a generation ago.
At the core of Lekson’s case is the contention that for more than a century archaeologists have gotten the history of the American Southwest wrong, blinded by their familiarity with modern Pueblo Indians. This institutional bias, Lekson argues, has prevented them from seeing the Chacoans as being rooted in another world, that of the Mesoamerican culture to the south.
While Chaco Canyon, the center of the Chacoan culture, is more than impressive by prehistoric Southwestern standards, it pales in comparison to the creations of the great civilizations to the south like the Maya, Toltec, and Aztec. But Lekson points out that it fits nicely with smaller Mesoamerican centers, and its unique features such as great houses, roads, and trade, make it an anomaly in the Southwest. While local native people lived in small unit primitive pueblos, the great houses of Chaco Canyon rise to five stories of beautifully trimmed stone. Long, wide, straight roads connect the center to as many as 150 Chaco outliers with their own Great Houses. The presence of cacao, macaws, and copper bells demonstrate extensive trade with the south. While the local native cultures are more or less equalitarian, Chaco is clearly a class society, with the richer, better fed elites living in the great houses and the commoners living in mud hovels. All of this, Lekson argues, points to a society of aristocratic rulers living in palaces and ruling a small empire on the fringe of the Mesoamerican empires.
Needless to say, many in the archaeological community are unconvinced and love to excoriate Lekson’s view of the Chacoan world. But nobody can deny that Lekson has forced a re-examination of the Chaco culture that continues to gain traction as he to presses his often controversial views. Written with wit and humor, A Study of Southwestern Archaeology is both a major challenge to a perplexing archaeological problem and a delight to read.
