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Dear American Archaeology,

I was bemused to see my current Chaco work treated like a joke or a crackpot theory, which it is not.  You’ll have to take my word for it; readers won’t learn much from your article about how the altepetl might help us better understand Chaco.   Mr. Toner chose instead to compile startled reactions from my archaeological friends.   Joseph Needham, the historian of science in China, endured similar guff from his historian colleagues, who knew for a certainty that science started with Thales and Pythagoras.   Needham consoled himself with an Arab proverb:  “The dogs bark, but the caravan moves forward.”   Toner’s article, alas, was more about the barking than the caravan.

Yours Truly, etc.

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By my count, about 15% of the words in Mr. Toner’s article directly addressed Chaco-as-altepetl– a complicated argument requiring exposition: juggling apples and oranges while tight-roping across deep intellectual chasms.  Mr. Toner offered a minimal model, just enough straws for a decently dressed straw-man.  Another 10% of the article was necessary stage-setting (What’s Chaco? Who’s Lekson?).  Mr. Toner said some pleasant things about me, for which I thank him.  For the rest – about three-quarters of the piece – Mr. Toner first established me as an “inveterate provocateur” and “rabble-rouser,” and then reported the outraged cries of a well-roused rabble: a string of criticisms by a half-dozen prominent archaeologists (all of whom I count as friends).  I recommended them to Mr. Toner, because at one time or another each disagreed with something I had written.  I’m entirely confident that I’m completely correct about everything I think, do, or say; but, in fairness, I thought Mr. Toner should consult people who might not share my assessment – people who could provide critique and alternatives.

But I was not expecting what Mr. Toner chose to publish.   One dismissed my past work as “a crock.”  Another charged that I cherry-picked data.  And another lectured me, at length, on my poor understanding of analogy.  Yet another suggested (nicely!) that I was ignorant of ethnology.   None of these things is true – but how would the innocent reader know?  As Mr. Toner crafted his piece, I had no opportunity to respond, to face my accusers.  The Sixth Amendment, it seems, does not extend to journalism.

I pointed this out to American Archaeology.  Editor Michael Bawaya kindly added a positive quote from Bill Lipe.  More importantly, Mr. Bawaya allowed me to insert some actual content through a long, dense, possibly incomprehensible caption to an abstract altepetl diagram.  Those who know Chaco may get the point; those who don’t know Chaco will probably scratch their heads.  I doubt that readers of American Archaeology will come away with any real notion of the issues.

This sort of thing is all in a day’s work, working with the media. I probably should take one for the team and shrug it off.  But parts of “Chaco through a Different Lens” were really annoying, so at end of this post I address a few particulars – letting off steam.   Mr. Toner probably did the job he was hired to do.   He had an editor to please and word-limits.  I have neither, so I can protest too much!  And perhaps more: two themes of Mr. Toner’s article typify current Chaco conundrums – more important than my bruised amour-propre.  We’ll riff off Toner’s title for those larger issues: Chaco through Rose-Colored Glasses, and Chaco through a Glass, Darkly; followed by a third section, Chaco through a Cracked Lens – some thoughts on archaeology and the media.  And then I let off steam.

Chaco through Rose-Colored Glasses

We want to think well of Chaco.  We want Chaco to be a happy place.  Alas, maybe not: my eyes opened when colleagues from Rio Grande Pueblos – we worked together at MIAC – told me: yes, they knew all about Chaco but they didn’t talk about it, because terrible things happened there.  That view, I found, was shared by other Natives of my acquaintance – members of Pueblo, Navajo, and Plains tribes.

Failing happy, we want Chaco to be congruent with our notion of Pueblos, which we assume to be happy(ish), peaceful, contemplative, ritual, and so forth – an idealization I take up elsewhere (Lekson 2009; see also Has Ritual Become a Religion?).  But, on the evidence, Chaco was not always pleasant nor – in the ethnological sense – Puebloan.  To be sure Chaco was part of Pueblo history and patrimony; I mean simply that Chaco did not operate as text-books tell us Pueblos operate.  The archaeological evidence is very strong, but the dead heavy hand of American Anthropology pushes Chaco away from its sometimes harsh reality and toward a rose-colored view.  That rose-colored a view is encouraged by laudable concerns with modern Pueblo heritage.  Well-meaning archaeologists won’t let Chaco stray into territories which (we think) might offend Native peoples.  I sympathize: archaeology can do harm — remember cannibalism?  Yet to be honest brokers of the past, we must let Chaco be Chaco.  And there’s not very much about Chaco that conforms to “Puebloan,” unless viewed through rose-colored glasses.

There’s a strong thread of Chaco-as-Pueblo in “Chaco through a Different Lens.”  Gwinn Vivian and Jim Judge – I honor both as friends and mentors – want Chacoan leadership to be a priestly elite (Vivian, p. 30) with a sociopolitical structure which was “fundamental[ly] ritual” (Judge, p. 30).  John Ware states that “Chaco has a strong ritual flavor and there is strong ritual continuities with today’s Pueblos” (p. 32).  (I admire Dr. Ware for his leadership of Amerind, and for the fact he actually read and really thought about Chaco-as-altepetl; more on this, below.)  Dr. Ware concludes that social institutions of the today’s eastern Pueblos could have built Chaco (p. 32) – Rio Grande Pueblos, rather than the Hopi-esque, relentlessly egalitarian models many of us carry in our heads.  He does well to point this out: eastern Pueblos are far more authoritarian and centralized than many of American Archaeology’s readers would know.   But here’s the rub: no post-1300 Puebloan society, east or west, ever created or re-created anything remotely like Chaco – a city central to a hundred towns.  (A Puebloan society to the south, Casas Grandes, did; but that’s not of consequence here.)  Dr. Ware may be correct: perhaps eastern Pueblos could have done it.  But they manifestly did not do it, so I have grave doubts.  I think what Dr. Ware sees in the eastern Pueblos are the final, tattered remnants of social structures which ruled in Chaco’s time, today discredited, curtailed, truncated.

Chaco-as-Pueblo goes beyond “Chaco through a Different Lens,” in the work of scholars wanting to “normalize” (my term, not theirs) Chaco – which apparently seems out-of-control.  I’m thinking of recent interesting articles by Chip Wills (Wills 2012) and Steve Plog (Plog and Watson 2012).  A simpler, more Puebloan Chaco, it seems, is somehow logically preferable to a more complicated Chaco.   I disagree (Lekson 2009; 2010; see also Ancient Southwest);  I am, of course, subject to correction.

Chaco through a Glass, Darkly

Another strong theme in Mr. Toner’s article reflects a second conundrum: the evident incredulity – approaching hostility – of many archaeologists and non-archaeologists to actually “solving” Chaco.  For some reason, we believe that we’ll never understand the place.  Mr. Toner writes, in his conclusions, “…many scholars concede the Chacoan mystery may never be never be fully resolved” (p. 32) — and then goes on to say guardedly positive things about my attempts to do just that.

C’mon gang: this is embarrassing!  We’ve been picking Chaco apart for more than a century.  The archaeology is easy: a short time-span, astonishing preservation, a wealth of tree-ring riches.  And Chaco, in the context of its time, was not that big a deal – as I argue in “Chaco as Altepetl.”  For the Southwest it was fairly unusual, but for North America it was barely visible.  Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus dismiss Chaco thus:

“To some archaeologists, familiar mainly with sites in the Southwest, Pueblo Bonito appears as spectacular as the ancient sites of Mexico and Peru.  To most archaeologists familiar with Mexico and Peru, Pueblo Bonito just looks like a big village.” (Flannery and Marcus 2012:157)

I’m not aware of any southwestern archaeologist who claims Pueblo Bonito (or, for that matter, Chaco Canyon) rivaled the cities of Mexico and Peru – that garbage comes from popular writers and chamber-of-commerce boosters – but their point remains: Chaco isn’t the Eighth Wonder or a fabulous mystery spot, it’s just another archaeological problem to solve.  So, solve it: that’s what we get paid to do.

Why on earth should we be surprised – even dismayed – if maybe we finally figured out Chaco?  Or even, figured some of it out.  Turn that on its head: why are we not upset and humiliated that we’ve spent so much of our time, so much of our energy, so much of our brain-power, and so much of other peoples’ money at Chaco…and still claim ignorance, almost proudly?  Through a glass, darkly: David Phillips tells Mr. Toner: “Trying to understand what kind of a system built Chaco is a little like trying to take a picture of a shadow after the person casting it isn’t there anymore” (p. 29).  If I felt that way, I’d find another line of work.  And I’d admit that the Indians are right: Southwestern Archaeology is just archaeologists arguing with each other over stuff they can never really know.  (Too many intelligent non-archaeologists already believe that – a grim topic to which I will return, below.)

One reason Dr. Phillips feels that way, apparently, is that we don’t have a vision of Chaco “…that everyone can agree on” (p. 29).  (Flannery and Marcus 2102:157: “To say opinions on Pueblo Bonito differ would be putting it mildly.”)  Well…not everyone agrees on Pueblo I, or Gila Butte phase, or Salado; but we do not throw up our hands and declare them un-solvable mysteries.  We seem content that Chaco remains a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.  The Mystery of Chaco Canyon has replaced the Mystery of the Anasazi in popular culture, and it’s seeped back into our profession.   Many archaeologists seem annoyed by the mere notion that someone – anyone – could ever “solve” Chaco!   Well, I’m annoyed by those archaeologists.  They are not helping.   The Mystery of Chaco Canyon is a failure of Southwestern Archaeology.

In his editorial in the same issue of American Archaeology, Mark Mitchell (President of the Archaeological Conservancy) asks: “Are we ever to reach a scientific consensus as to the nature of Chacoan culture? … A new well-funded, long-term research project using the latest theories and technologies can solve this mystery for once and for all” (p. 2).  He calls on the National Park Service to mount such a project.  While I welcome more research at Chaco, absent some unlikely “smoking gun” I’m not sanguine that piling on more and more data will resolve our muddle.  We already have plenty of data – more data than we know what to do with (to see the tip of the iceberg, see the Chaco Research Archive).

Those data decisively show that Chaco was not Puebloan.  Put aside the rose-colored glasses.  So what was Chaco?  I think that Chaco-as-altepetl is by far the most likely, historically relevant interpretation (see Chaco-as-altepetl).  I reached that conclusion by a long and winding road.  One of my first serious publications on Chaco denied any significant engagement of Chaco and Mesoamerica (Lekson 1983).  Understanding the data and – importantly – building realistic contexts for those data changed my mind.  Not overnight! – the process took 30 years.  Today, I’m convinced that it is impossible to understand Chaco and the Greater Southwest without sustained reference to Mesoamerica.  I’d like to believe that the change in my thinking reflects learning: creating new knowledge and moving Southwestern Archaeology forward.  Doing my job.

Chaco through a Cracked Lens

I do a fair amount of work with the media: print, video, radio, exhibits, and – slowly but not so surely – web.  Some of this work comes by choice and some by contract – I’m a curator, and curators deal with the public.  I write for the public and sometimes I am written about for the public.

“Chaco through a Different Lens” was American Archaeology’s idea.  Mr. Bawaya approached me, and I was receptive – Chaco-as-altepetl is pretty cool, but it won’t see official print for some time.  Mr. Bawaya hired Michael Toner, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist from Atlanta who had written for the magazine before.  Mr. Toner read my books and my blog.  He interviewed me (by phone) at length.  I was impressed.   I offered him names of several archaeologists who could be counted on to be intelligently critical.  I assumed he would seek others.

The article-in-process was timely: I was teaching a class “Archaeology and Contemporary Society” in Fall 2012, which included quite a bit about the media.  I reported on the progress (and regress) of the article, and drew useful lessons.  Such as: don’t expect too much.  Try to control the beginnings with ground rules; you’ll have no control over the process or the product.  And, unrelated to Mr. Toner: don’t use as many colons and semi-colons as I do; make titles transparently descriptive – search engines don’t appreciate jokes, metaphors, elliptical references; be very careful with copyright.  Things like that.

At the very beginning I warned and advised Mr. Toner and American Archaeology that there was no point to interviewing people who had not read and understood Chaco-as-atepetl, from the presentation in this blog (the version currently posted is substantially the same as that posted at the inception of the article, with better English).  I was trying to control the beginnings, to set the ground rules.  It’s true: you have no control over the process.

Weeks later, a text was sent out to me and to others quoted in the article, for “fact check.”  “Fact check” is exactly that: actual errors such as mis-spelled names or incorrect dates, and not license to change or modify statements or ideas.  The “fact check” text went out on a gang e-mail, and several respondents hit “reply to all” with interesting results.  A teapot-tempest: several of the party expanded on their critiques, and I reposted as time, energy and humor allowed.  I mention this because the emails exchanges made it clear that Mr. Toner had not taken quotes out of context; and because the email exchanges made it clear that at least two commenters had only a sketchy understanding of what I – and, consequently, they – were talking about.  Apparently they had not read or did not understand the argument.  I’m not entirely certain that Mr. Toner understood it, either – based on the published article.  Much may have been left on the cutting room floor.  It is, I admit, a complicated argument, but I think my explanations (in this blog, for example) can be understood by most readers.  Heck, kids in a middle school science club “got it,” perfectly.  I’m not sure what went wrong with “Chaco through a Different Lens.”

I reported faithfully to my university class, and awaited the outcome with some nervousness.   The final appearance of the article in the class was the article itself, hot off the presses.  (Do they still print on presses?)  I emailed the published version to the students, and — on the second-to-last day of class — attempted a post-mortem “teaching moment,” and for me perhaps a learning moment.  I was not thrilled by the article – I was very annoyed by some of it – but I urged the students and reminded myself to continue to work with the media.  It’s an obligation, even a necessity, despite occasional disappointments.

We are condemned to work with journalists.  And blessed: Mr. Toner is a gifted writer.  Magazines don’t trust archaeologists to write for themselves.  I can write, but American Archaeology (as far as I know) did not consider allowing me to author an article on my research.  Curious.  I once was an active contributor to Archaeology (AIA’s popular magazine).  I’m still carried on their masthead as “Contributing Editor,” but my recent offers to fulfill that role have been rebuffed – there seems to be little interest in an archaeologist-author.   It’s possible that magazine editors think: by and large archaeologist’s talents do not run to popular writing and, in an age of diminishing print, professional writers are readily available.  (Has a Pulitzer prize-winner written about your work?  As print dies its slow death, that might happen more and more often.)

P.T. Barnum said there’s no such thing as bad publicity.  I’m here to tell you Barnum was wrong.  But recall Principle #4 of the SAA’s “Principles of Archaeological Ethics”:

“Archaeologists should reach out to, and participate in cooperative efforts with others interested in the archaeological record with the aim of improving the preservation, protection, and interpretation of the record. In particular, archaeologists should undertake to: 1) enlist public support for the stewardship of the archaeological record; 2) explain and promote the use of archaeological methods and techniques in understanding human behavior and culture; and 3) communicate archaeological interpretations of the past. Many publics exist for archaeology including students and teachers; Native Americans and other ethnic, religious, and cultural groups who find in the archaeological record important aspects of their cultural heritage; lawmakers and government officials; reporters, journalists, and others involved in the media; and the general public. Archaeologists who are unable to undertake public education and outreach directly should encourage and support the efforts of others in these activities.”

Emphasis added: communicate archaeological interpretations of the past [to or through] reporters, journalists, and others involved in the media; and the general public.

Much (most?) of archaeologically-generated media focuses on stewardship of the archaeological record – a worthy goal, but too often minatory and prohibitive: we can do this but you can’t.  That’s true; but elitist exclusivity (terms I’ve heard many times from engaged civilians) makes it all the more important to show WHAT we do that they can’t do, and to make it very interesting – that is, worth support from the excluded public.  First, earliest, biggest – superlatives work with the media but superlatives by nature are rare, unusual, unique.   We must make the interesting portion of the other 90% of our work available – through the media.  At least, that’s what I told my class.

Southwestern Archaeology has an uneven history with the media.  Partly our fault, partly theirs.  An example:  Craig Childs – a best-selling regional author – wrote a pro-archaeology book, House of Rain.  Our response was a round-robin email, signed by Leaders of the Field, listing in detail Mr. Childs’ sins.  (Childs drank wine on a site!  Oh, the horror!  Oh, the humanity!)  That’s a great way to cultivate the media.  American Archaeology hires Mr. Toner to write about my work, and he inventories my peccadilloes.  (Lekson’s a provocateur!  To the gibbet!)  I suppose there’s a karmic balance in this, a cosmic tit-for-tat.  In the matter of Childs’ book, the email reflects our penchant for outrage.  People enjoy being indignant – in my experience, especially academics.   In the matter of “Chaco through a Different Lens,” it’s the attraction of controversy.  Controversy sells, controversy is news, and news is what journalists do.

In the matter of Chaco, outrage and controversy are not helpful, because we’ve abandoned Chaco to mystery.  We say: “Trying to understand what kind of a system built Chaco is a little like trying to take a picture of a shadow after the person casting it isn’t there anymore.”  Toner concludes: “…many scholars concede the Chacoan mystery may never be never be fully resolved.”  What’s the taxpayer to do?   Throw more money down a black hole, “a new well-funded, long-term research project” at Chaco so the archaeologists can argue about it?  Maybe not.   Public display of our disarray hurts the field, so I apologize for “Chaco through a Different Lens” – I tried to set the ground rules, but I couldn’t control the process or the product.

My students had an answer: the web.  Suss out the search engines and take our product directly to the public.  A different kind of chaos – I’m too old for that kind of risk.

LETTING OFF STEAM

“Inveterate provocateur” (p. 28):  I am not now, nor have I ever been a “provocateur” or a “rabble-rouser.”  I just do my job.  Doing my job, I sometimes discover wonderful or terrible things.  Either way, if they are interesting I share those discoveries with my colleagues.  (I can do boring, too; I do it in the gray lit.)  Some of my colleagues become agitated and upset because my discoveries are incompatible with their views of the ancient world or of archaeology.  Often that’s why the ideas are interesting: new knowledge! Labeling me as a provocateur makes my ideas ignorable; and for a certain kind of scholar, content with the old ways, that brings comfort.  I am reliably informed, for example, that several senior Southwest archaeologists refuse to read A History of the Ancient Southwest.  I am reminded of another biblical tag, not about glasses light or dark, but about margaritas before pork.

Shoot the messenger.  I’ve been shot at and hit for decades: Mimbres beyond the Mimbres Valley; Chaco beyond the San Juan Basin; Chaco went north to Aztec; Unit Pueblo “kivas” weren’t kivas; migrations, obvious in Arizona, might be obvious in New Mexico; Di Peso was more right than wrong about Paquime; no process without history; Chaco and Cahokia are an item – over the years these ideas earned me Agincourt swarms of slings and arrows.  I was not the only one saying these things, but I said them early and often; and consequently I’m the messenger who was shot, so many times the psyche resembles St. Sebastian, patron of pincushions.  It does not feel good, and do I seek it.  Many of these once-outrageous(!) notions are now widely accepted, even common knowledge.   I’ll bet that in five or ten years, our grad students will spend as much time reading codices as they spend reading Tewa World.   That’s how it usually works.

Chaco Meridian is “a crock” (p. 28):  Mr. Toner writes: “A fellow archaeologist called the idea ‘a crock.’”  In 1999 when Chaco Meridian was published, objections were loud and unpleasant.  “Crock” was not the harshest word I heard.  Had Mr. Toner done more research, however, he would have learned that while one archaeologist called it a crock, two ex-SAA presidents peer-reviewed the book and thought well enough of it to provide back cover blurbs.  Dozens of reviews were uniformly positive save one, by Gwinn Vivian.  Dr. Vivian’s review was not so much negative as politely and properly skeptical.  Chaco Meridian was, indeed, a novel idea: if correct, it constituted new knowledge.  As it  happens, it was correct – mostly and perhaps entirely.  Chaco Meridian was a four-point problem: North, Chaco, Aztec and Paquime.  Three of those four points are now widely accepted, almost common knowledge.  Only a few deep-dyed recidivists reject the idea that Chaco moved north to Aztec – a pox upon them.  Indeed, new information strongly suggests that the Meridian extended long before Chaco and Aztec, as early as A.D. 500 (see Texts and Contexts).  The empirical pattern is very strong and probably real – that is, not a coincidence.  The issue is, what did it mean?  A very good question!  Now that it’s asked, we can perhaps answer it.  As to Paquime – the fourth element of the original model – Di Peso long ago recognized Chaco’s role in the history of the Southwest’s last great city, and any balanced reading of the record supports his conclusion; but the current regime at Casas Grandes is not interested in such things.

The parable of the Bentley (p. 29):  David Phillips, who has done many excellent things for Southwestern archaeology, found me deficient in the logic of analogy, thus:

“If Chaco was an altepetl because it was like an altepetl, then a rusted-out 1974 Honda Civic is a brand-new Bentley, because it’s like a brand-new Bentley,” says David Phillips, curator of archaeology at the University of New Mexico’s Maxwell Museum of Anthropology. “Both have four wheels, a motor, a windshield, and headlights. If Steve persists in this logic, I have a Bentley I want to sell him.”

His parable, I fear, is wide of the mark.  I did not argue that Dave’s Civic was a Bentley.  Rather, I recognized that the Civic and the Bentley were, in fact, both automobiles.  And this was a major discovery!  Nobody believed that an archaeologist could afford a car; therefore Dave’s Civic was not classified as a car.  The rusting old Honda was a chicken coop, or a pilgrimage shrine (Madonna on the dashboard?), or an artistic pile of sheet-metal – anything but an automobile.  I don’t want Dave’s Civic; I want us all to realize that his Civic is, indeed, a car.  Rather like a Bentley in its inherent car-ness, but otherwise its own ride.

Cherry-picking data (p. 32):  Lynne Sebastian, who I cheerfully acknowledge is smarter than me, was quoted as saying “the only problem with Steve’s model is that he tends to pick data that fits his ideas and discards what doesn’t.”  Ouch.  We all marshal evidence, but I’ve always thought I was conscientious in understanding the data and others’ interpretations of those data.  I offer as an example the book A History of the Ancient Southwest.  A little over half of the book was text; the other half was footnotes, most which (by word count) were detailed considerations of data – pro and con – and others’ interpretations of those data.  Much of my recent writing anticipates counter-claims; I’ve been chided by editors about this.  I’ve grown a bit defensive in my old age: see “Inveterate provocateur,” above.   I try very hard to engage relevant data and others interpretations.   I’ve tried through my career to incorporate old data and old (and new) ideas, refreshed and re-interpreted.   That’s what data and ideas are for, no?

I hope that Dr. Sebastian does not expect and require a review of all Chaco data or all Chaco literature before any pronouncement.  Of course not: there’s just too much.  The quantities of data are staggering (discussed above), and the range of interpretations is immensely broad, with lunacy at both ends.  Some selectivity is required.  Chaco-as-altepetl reviews the range of non-crazy Chaco narratives; there were so many that I had to classify and categorize.  Then, like Stalin’s show-trials or the Terror’s tribunals, we can try ‘em in batches!

Michael Smith and not-an-altepetl (p. 30):  Dr. Michael Smith, a leading scholar of Aztec cities, says definitively that “Chaco was not an altepetl” (p. 30).  It’s lately come to my attention, from Dr. Smith himself, that he is inimical to the Lockhart-Hirth-Gutierrez model of altepetl.   Since I follow the Lockhart-Hirth-Gutierrez model, I’m not surprised that Dr. Smith is unhappy with its application to Chaco – and my use of his data to supplement a model he dislikes.

Eastern Pueblo ethnology (p. 32):  Mr. Toner suggests that my “altepetl-like society … [might be] a mistake due in part to a misreading of contemporary Pueblo culture” (p. 32), summarized by John Ware and discussed above.  I may be over-sensitive, but Mr. Toner seems to suggest that I am ignorant of eastern Pueblo ethnology.  I’m not; I may not know as much as Dr. Ware, but I appreciate the profound differences between Hopi and Ohkay Owingeh.  This clarification does not affect the validity of Dr. Ware’s argument, but it does perhaps assuage my battered vanity.

Archaeological “context” means at least two different things.  One is depositional: what was found where, with what?  That is, “context” is association.   The other meaning comes from CRM: a “historic context,” according to the Secretary of the Interior, is a succinct summary of historical information informing evaluations of significance.  That is, putting a site “in context.”  Neither associational context or historic context are easy or straight-forward.  Both are critically important.  I’ll address “associational context” first, and then return to “historic contexts” later in this essay.

I have been taken to task, more than a few times, for ignoring “context” – particularly in  A History of the Ancient Southwest(2009).  “Context” in these critiques typically refers to associations and details that can support interpretations differing from mine, about a particular area or problem.  People accuse me of overlooking their favorite details – details which, to be sure, might actually be important.  You could see this coming.  In A History of the Ancient Southwest, I tell a two-thousand year story in half of 250 pages (the other half is an intellectual history of Southwestern archaeology).   The effort was necessarily stream-lined.  I had to steer a storyline through eddies and shoals of scholarship, and I passed by many branches and bayous.  Contexts (with a few exceptions in extended footnotes) were referenced by citations of reports and syntheses.  I don’t present, directly, all the details – but, thus, I invite dissection in detail.  Everybody has their own take on their site, or their area, or their period, which they know best.  It’s the classic Kidder quandary: everyone said Kidder had a great job of synthesis his A Study of Southwestern Archaeology, except for their particular areas, which he got wrong.  I’ve heard much the same about A History of the Ancient Southwest.

Recently, my friend Chip Wills, writing about his work at the key Basketmaker III site of Shabik’eschee at Chaco, critiques my use/misuse of context (W.H. Wills, F. Scott Worman, Wetherbee Dorshow and Heather Richards-Rissetto, “Shabik’eschee Village in Chaco  Canyon: Beyond the Archetype,” American Antiquity vol. 77, no. 2, 20112).  My principal sin, it seems, is an “…alternative interpretation that is not based in direct analysis of Shabik’eschee and relies on an archetypical mode of inference that ignores intra-site temporal and spatial variation (see especially Lekson 2009)”  (Wills et alia p. 343).   And, again: “… based on synchronic perspectives that ignore basic contextual evidence for occupational fluidity (e.g., Lekson 2009:67)”  (Wills et alia p. 346)

In my discussion of Shabik’eschee, I was relying on Wills’s contextual evidence (presented in Wills and Windes 1989).   It’s true: I use other people’s data, “pre-crunched.”*  Surely that’s why data and syntheses are published.  The presenters of those data have certain rights and privileges, but those do not include immunity from re-interpretation and second-guessing.  Wills’s interpreted Shabik’eschee as a sort of Navajo “outfit,” repeatedly and seasonally re-occupied by a few families, possibly with a haitus when the place wasn’t occupied at all.  “The most direct analog for our hypothetical settlement system is historic Navajo residential strategies in the same region.” (Wills et alia p. 343 – a point to which I will return).  In A History of the Ancient Southwest, I disagreed with that interpretation.  I called Shabik’eschee a village – of which, more below.  I do not deny Wills’s contextual evidence (how could I?) but I interpret it differently than did he, and I am not alone: Wills lists a number of archaeologists who question the Navajo model, including several working directly with Basketmaker III – a period I know mainly from site visits, reports, and Will’s and others’ hard work.  My primary reference was Paul Reed’s 2000 edited volume, Foundations of Anasazi Culture, which brought together a data and interpretations on Basketmaker III across the northern Southwest.

The key issue, as I read Wills and his colleagues, is that not all structures at Shabik’eschee were contemporary; and of course I agree (and I said so, without equivocation, on the offending page 67).  I thought Shabik’eschee was a very interesting early village – small, dynamic as short-lived pit-houses must be, not a Pueblo, but still a village.  By using the term “village” I lay myself open, apparently, to charges of an “archetypical mode of inference.”  I would hope that I’m free of that sin; my distrust of anthropological classifications is second only to my distaste for French philosophical window-dressing.  Indeed, I can claim an early interest in “occupational fluidity.”  A couple of decades ago I simulated Mimbres Valley pit-house sites assuming short-term house use and high mobility – much as Wills suggests for Shabik’eschee – in contrast to the then-prevailing notion that Mimbres Valley pit-house sites were permanent “villages” (in a 1989 “gray lit” synthesis, later published as Archaeology of the Mimbres Region).   After adjusting and re-adjusting my several constants, the model worked: Mimbres pit house sites could be made to seem much like Navajo outfits, fulfilling the prophecy.  But Mimbres, I came to realize, was more complicated than that: (Late) Pithouse Period Mimbres sites were almost certainly permanent villages tied to and fueled by canal irrigation systems.  Why then, were Mimbres villagers living in short-term pit-houses?  The easy answer is that, in the Southwest, pit-houses do not necessarily indicate mobility: consider Hohokam’s centuries-long towns and villages, with pit-house domestic architecture (“houses in pits”).  That answer is easy, but it ignores context – and we should never ignore context.  In this case: history.  Historical contexts, I will argue, are every bit as important as deposition and association – the latter two well represented by Wills, the former perhaps less well.

An example of historical contexts, building on the Mimbres case: in A History of the Ancient Southwest and in Archaeology of the Mimbres Region, I argued (i.e., interpreted) Mimbres as a player in much larger regional historical contexts, first deeply engaged with Hohokam when Hohokam was going strong (700-950 or so) and then swinging to Chaco when Chaco had its day in the sun (900-1150 or so).  (Many – but not all – of my Mimbres colleagues are committed to Mimbres free of external entanglements; they are wrong.) Mimbres’s historical context might explain the misfit between ephemeral house forms and permanent settlements.  Technology (for example, irrigation acquired from Hohokam) could change rapidly and irrigation entails sedentism (or vice versa); but I submit that house-form would change much less rapidly (I commend to you Amos Rapoport’s House Form and Culture, a neglected classic from an earlier age).  Mimbres of the 8^th – 10^th centuries formed Hohokam-style permanent village, with short-lived Mogollon pit-houses.  It took a while for architecture to catch-up: somewhere around 1000 (and the shift of interest to Chaco), Mimbres switched from pit-houses to masonry pueblos.  Hohokam never really made that switch: pit-houses worked well through their millennium-long run, and only very late gave way to adobe compounds (but that’s another story, with other relevant contexts).

What contexts should we consult for Shabik’eschee?  Let’s start with Basketmaker III first; and then think bigger both in time and space.  Everyone knows Shabik’eschee is a big Basketmaker III site, maybe the biggest.  “It is absolutely true that Shabik’eschee is enormous compared to most other BMIII sites in Chaco” (Wills et alia p. 343).  Indeed, in Chaco there’s only one (known) contender: 29SJ423 (which Wills and his colleagues discuss), at the other end of the canyon.   Taken as individual sites, Shabik’eschee and 423 have no known rivals beyond Chaco, too: the vast majority of Basketmaker III sites are one or two pit-houses (an educated guess: over 90%). A Basketmaker III site with ten pit-houses is a prodigy.

How big was Shabik’eschee?  Wills says at least 60 pit-houses, plus quite a few more outside the conventional site boundaries, with many buried in canyon bottom alluvium (Wills et alia p. 332).  And 423 was of comparable size.   Of course the pit-houses were not all contemporary, but the size of Shabik’schee and 423 as sites commands our attention.  Viewed in the context of Basketmaker III archaeology, they are phenomenal: village-stable or occupationally fluid, they are big sites.  What was it about Chaco the produced sites of that size?

But wait, it gets better!  Wills makes an excellent point: “…Shabik’eschee and 29SJ423 were not two separate Basketmaker sites or ‘villages,’ but rather the east and west extremes of a single settlement or community that was stretched out along the entire canyon floor between…” (Wills et alia p. 342).  I like his interpretation very much, because the idea of a 15-km-long Chaco Basketmaker III “community” has featured in one of my regular AIA and public lectures for some years – indeed, since the last time Payton Manning won a Super Bowl.

To which I now turn: not the Super Bowl, but the 15-km-long Basketmaker III site, and what it might mean.  Insofar as we know, there’s nothing in the northern Southwest that approaches the scale and density of Basketmaker III in Chaco.  That could change: ongoing work along the flanks of the Chuska may tell another tale.  But as currently known, Chaco during Basketmaker III times was by far – BY FAR! – the biggest, baddest, oddest, most interesting “site” in its time and place.

And, if we look at 15-km-long Chaco Basketmaker III in historical context, it gets really interesting.  My AIA lecture was (and is) “A Millennium on the Meridian.”  I revisit the Chaco Meridian and update it with new information (most of which appears in a series of footnotes to A History of the Ancient Southwest).  To make a long story short, much as Basketmaker III Chaco was the biggest, baddest, etc site of its time and place, each of the succeeding Pecos System stages had one conspicuously biggest, baddest, etc sites: Basketmaker III, Shabik’eschee/423 at Chaco; Pueblo I, Ridges Basin/Blue Mesa just south of Durango; Pueblo II, Chaco Canyon (again); Pueblo III, Aztec Ruins; and Pueblo IV, Paquimé.  Insofar as we know, each of those sites were uniquely large and complicated, without peers in their times and places; they clearly are the key sites for understanding those times and places; and they are all on the Chaco Meridian.  As displayed below: the vertical lines represent longitudes; the site names and horizontal lines and symbols represent the sites’ east-west dimensions – for Shabik’eschee/423 about 10’ longitude or, as noted, 15 km.  The Chaco Meridian began as a four point problem: north, Chaco, Aztec, and Paquimé.  The first three points are now widely accepted: Chaco moved north to found Aztec Ruins.  There was abundant evidence at the turn of the millennium to support that interpretation, and much new evidence from Paul Reed and his colleagues working at Salmon and Aztec makes this even more certain.  The fourth point, Paquimé, is still a matter of debate – another story, told elsewhere.  The realization that Shabik’eschee/423 and Ridges Basin/Blue Mesa preceded Chaco, Aztec and (perhaps) Paquimé adds momentum to the Meridian going forward – but also casts Shabik’eschee/423 in a new light, looking backward.

In my discussion of Shabik’eschee and 423 in A History of the Ancient Southwest: “I say this because we know what happened earlier in the Tucson Basin [another story: read the book]…And because we know what happened next!”  Ridges Basin/Blue Mesa, and then Chaco.  Historical contexts are ascritical as stratigraphy and association; indeed historical contexts provide the frameworks in which to interpret associational contexts.

But what sort of history?  A History of the Ancient Southwest focused on political history, for several reasons: first, political systems – particularly flashy hierarchical systems – are easier to see than, for example, ideological systems; second, ancient North America was awash with polities and political systems; and third, because political systems in the Southwest are overgrown by a jungle of environmental data or swept under the prayer rug of ritual – it’s hard to even see ‘em through all that tangle and matting.  On this blog/book, I recently despaired of Southwestern archaeology’s fixation on ritual.  Elsewhere, I’ve questioned our relentless promotion of environment and climate (read the book).  This is not to say that ritual and environment were not important.  Of course they were!  But they have been elevated to Prime Movers eclipsing all other modes of power: politics, economy, and so forth.

In the case of Shabik’eschee, for example, Wills and his colleagues propose a web of local environmental conditions to explain Chaco Basketmaker’s unseemly immensity, by suggesting that specific conditions at Chaco created bigger, denser settlements than Basketmaker III elsewhere:

“Given the episodic occupation patterns at excavated sites, we also suggest that individual households, the probable units of production, were able to shift locations in response to locally altered conditions for small-scale agricultural plots determined by the dynamically changing configuration of the floodplain associated with aggradation and channel movement.”  (Wills et alia p. 342)

The usual suspect: the environment did it. To be sure, the Southwest is mostly desert and not easy to farm.  But that does not make its human history a secondary derivative of rainfall regimes.  Hohokam, in the 8^th century, got around its environment by investing in extensive canal systems, and raised cities.  Chaco, in the 11^th century, organized a regional economy, administered by a city-state capital.  Conversely, Mesa Verde, in the 13^th century, deliberately chose NOT to develop canal irrigation, which might have avoided or alleviated the Abandonment of the Four Corners.  Choices, both positive and negative, shaped history in the ancient Southwest.  But these are the kinds of choices – political, economic – which we have been taught to believe were impossible for “middle-range” or “intermediate” Southwestern societies.  Those societies had no political or economic histories – or, so we were told.

Where to look for appropriate models for Chaco Basketmaker III?  Models from intermediate societies?  Shop at home, think locally: Chaco Navajo – Wills’s Navajo model of Shabik’eschee.  Again, I am not unsympathetic to the application of modern Southwestern Native groups to distant Southwestern pasts.  They have the considerable advantage of being real societies operating on the same lands.  In the Mimbres studies discussed above, I applied the economic geography of the eastern Chiricahua Apache to the earlier Mimbres Pithouse Period.  Apache yearly rounds were intriguingly complicated (and impressively long-distance), and mapped reasonably well on the known distribution of Mimbres Pithouse Period sites.  Voila!  But, much like my cherished simulation of mobile pit-houses, I ultimately discarded Apache-Pithouse parallels because Mimbres Pithouse societies were clearly more complicated – economically, socially, politically – than the Apache people who roamed the same lands, five centuries later.  Context was key: the two had very different historical contexts, historical trajectories.

Basketmaker-as-Navajo.  Wills notes that Navajo mobility produces a cluttered landscape, in which a few families create impressive numbers of sites.  (Surely sheep have something to do with this?)   And the data (Archaeological Surveys of Chaco Canyon, 1981 – dated but handy) supports his view, I think.  Al Hayes’s survey found 135 Basketmaker residential sites spanning three or four centuries, and 377 Navajo residential sites of a comparable span of time.  Twice as many Navajo sites, but given the difficulty of seeing Basketmaker sites and the ease of seeing Navajo hogans, I think the numbers are comparable.   Hayes may well have seen half or less than half of Chaco’s Basketmaker sites – a problem Hayes fully recognized, and a situation well-documented by Wills and his colleagues.  Both hogans and pit-houses had short use-lives.  Thus, Basketmaker III archaeology resembles Navajo archaeology, at first blush.  There may be a problem: no Chaco Navajo site approached Shabik’eschee’s or 423’s size – and that’s what all the fuss is about.  A few extraordinary Navajo sites outside Chaco, such as Big Bead Mesa, reach Shabik’eschee numbers of houses.  Those extraordinary sites demand specific, historical explanations: Big Bead Mesa was the product of war between Navajos and Spanish.  So far, no one has suggested Shabik’eschee as fortress/refuge – different contexts, indeed!

Not environmental contexts (sheep do matter!), but historical context.  What is the proper context for interpreting a Southwestern site, such as Shabik’eschee?  Until fairly recently, we cast our nets close.  The site catchment area was popular, not so very long ago.  Wills expands Shabik’eschee’s context farther, to the whole of Basketmaker III in Chaco Canyon – and that’s great!  And, going even farther, he offers a useful survey of Chaco’s place in Basketmaker III in northwestern New Mexico, prefiguring new CRM in the Chuska Valley.  A good start, a great start…but perhaps not quite far enough.  In A History of the Ancient Southwest, I proposed that Southwestern sites could be contextualized at even bigger scales, both geographically and historically.  The geographic context for southwestern sites should encompass Mesoamerica, indeed all of temperate and tropical North America: they thought big, so should we.  And temporal contexts should be expanded beyond site-formation, “intra-site variation” and “occupational fluidity” to actual historical events and developments before and after the site in question.

Since the publication of that book, I’ve tried to follow my own advice, with some success.  Expanding the geographic context brought a degree of resolution to the “mystery of Chaco Canyon” – the altepetl, a Mesoamerican socio-political formation from Chaco’s time, better fits Chaco’s facts than any other interpretations currently on offer.  Now I’m stumbling through new methods to shift historical context from humanistic narrative (of my last book) to tools that can be applied systematically, perhaps even scientifically – with appreciative nods to path dependency and contingency and counter-factuals.  I’ve come think of this method as “triangulation:” fixing the entity in question (“????” below) in historical context by viewing it from what happened before (prior), what happened after (post), and what happened in its contemporary times (peer).  (My “triangulation” differs from Patrick Kirsch’s; he uses the term to describe multiple lines of evidence, an admirable strategy.)

We don’t always know priors, posts, and peers, but with Chaco we certainly know the posts and peers: after Shabik’eschee/423 came Pueblo I, Pueblo Bonito, and Chaco’s golden age.  Historical contexts are as important as stratigraphy and association for understanding southwestern sites and social trajectories, particularly those which refuse to conform to our expectations for “intermediate societies.”  We know what happened next!   For Basketmaker III at Chaco, the historical transformation into the closest thing to a city ever seen in the Ancestral Pueblo region.

I can conjure no plausible counter-factual history that turns 18^th and 19^th century Chaco Navajo into their region’s center and capital – absent colonial intervention.  Big Bead Mesa did not last.  The Navajo resisted Spain, Mexico and the United States; Bosque Redondo forged a bitter, artificial unity; and Federal policies produced Window Rock.  Left to their own devices, Navajo people would be living traditional lives which don’t include constitutions and presidents and Window Rock.  Or so they tell me.

Chaco’s world was Hohokam and Mesoamerica.   And Mesoamerica, at least, included governments and rulers – if not constitutions and presidents.  Spain, Mexico, and the United States were imperial intrusions, but Mesoamerica was kindred civilization – of which Chaco clearly aspired to be a part (read the book).  The fundamentally different historical contexts of Basketmaker III and Navajo makes one an unlikely model for the other (either way: models must be reversible), for anything beyond simple subsistence activities tied to specific conditions in the canyon.  A superficial equifinality, I think.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to my final point: the Southwestern urge to simplify – an urge stronger than sex, sin, or belief.  “Simplify” not the logic of our work, nor the structure of our data, but the very societies we purport to study.  We insist – a bedrock belief – that the Southwest was a simple place, and that interpretations making ancient societies simple, therefore, are preferable to interpretations suggesting otherwise.  I have (too often) noted with amusement and chagrin the righteous satisfaction going ‘round the audience, when a solid conservative speaker lays low the suggestion that Chaco, or Hohokam, or Paquimé might have something more than a Pueblo.  We know what we like, and we like our ancient peoples simple.

Anthropology teaches us that Native societies north of Mexico were “intermediate” or “mid-level” — essentially people without history (or the mechanisms for history), which is why anthropology scooped ‘em up.  Anthropology wants a simple Southwest, so we low-ball the past.  At risk of offense, I say that’s not good scholarship or sound science; that – as I argue in A History of the Ancient Southwest – is prejudice, inherited from our anthropological forefathers.  The fiats declaring the Southwest simple are so hoary and so basic that we today do not even see the dead hand of our discipline’s past.  They come forward from the very beginnings of American Anthropology (read the book).

Shake ‘em off!  Shake off those cold, dead hands!  I submit that interpretations straying into realms – social, political, ritual – heretofore reserved for Mesoamerica are not outrageous or extreme.  They are realistic assessments of Chaco: they are its historic context.  And in that context, a Navajo-like Basketmaker III seems to me the extraordinary claim – not impossible, but far less likely than a lively, complicated Basketmaker III.

Wills is one of our best; his archaeology is smart, sophisticated, and perceptive.   His thinking on Chaco consistently favors interpretations of a simpler ancient society than other models on offer, such as mine.  His views are consistent with the data, but so are mine.  I’m sure that many (most?) Southwesternists will prefer Wills’s Chaco to mine.  Why?  I am not asking for arguments of data, because the data support either interpretation.  (Trust me on this.)  I ask, why is a simple Southwest a priori preferable to a complicated, dynamic, historically contextualized Southwest?

Parsimony has no place here.  “Parsimony” is a rule of thumb in logic: in explanations, all things being equal, a simpler logical structure is preferable to a more convoluted logical structure.  Parsimony applies to the logic of our interpretation, NOT to the phenomenon we hope to understand.  Just as nuance is the refuge of the scoundrel, no people can be great who have been subjected to parsimony.  Nuance is not inherently evil of course, but too often nuance complicates for complication’s sake, making our work more complicated than it needs to be.  Parsimony has its place, but not in the definition of the entity in question, the object of study, the explanandum.  Mis-applied, parsimony makes things simpler than they really were. That’s no service to the ancient people we serve.

Triangulation – historical contexts – might help us avoid the procrustean bed of consensus, move us out of our comfort zone.  A half-century ago, Gordon Vivian looked at Kin Kletso this way: priors, posts, and peers (within the canyon).   He gave us a Chaco that overarched conventional contexts, far beyond individual sites; and he asked for historical contexts beyond the Southwest – at least, beyond Pueblo ethnography.  He was right on both counts: Chaco Canyon itself is the “site” (as Wills rightly notes); and we must escape the heavy gravity of Southwestern ethnology – with its “simple” societies – to understand it.  In archaeology, context is everything.

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* For example, in the “pre-crunched” syntheses of Paul Reed’s Foundations of Anasazi Culture: The Basketmaker-Pueblo Transition; and two remarkable, recent books: Lisa Young and Sara Herr’s (2012) Southwestern Pithouse Communities, AD 200-900; and Richard Wilshusen, Gregson Schachner and James Allison’s (2012) Crucible of Pueblos: The Early Pueblo Period in the Northern Southwest.

Ritual is solidly mainstream in Southwestern archaeology.  A graduate student from one of our better universities took the podium at a recent archaeology conference, and began thus: “We all know that ritual was the most important thing in the Southwest.”  Her dogma was discouraging – but not surprising.  For almost two decades we’ve drummed it into students’ heads: ritual, ritual, ritual.

A century ago, an idealized vision (almost caricature) of Pueblo spirituality was crafted by a coterie of Santa Fe political, intellectual, and artistic leaders.  The Santa Fe Myth (as I have come to think of it) became a major theme in the regional zeitgeist, which prior had emphasized Spanish, not Indian, heritage; and, not insignificantly, a major theme for marketing New Mexico – a well-known story, too long to tell here (Wilson 1997, for an architectural take).  America’s fascination with Pueblos is nothing if not spiritual (McFeely 2002), and archaeology was not immune.  (I’m lecturing on this theme in Santa Fe on March 26.)

Even in the materialist days of New Archaeology, the origins of the “kiva” remained a holy grail, as in Fred Plog’s 1974 Study of Prehistoric Change, a key text of the times (albeit “kivas” were of interest as integrative structures, rather than ritual loci).

Fast-forward: British post-processual approaches were all about ritual; while we declined their wholesale adoption, ritual was one of the British chops we added to our processual-plus toolbox (as a subset of “symbols and meaning:” Hegmon 2003:222).  Ritual and religious interests, of course, are reinforced by NAGPRA and heritage advocacy – a growing genre of Southwestern archaeology.  Ritual has (almost) displaced rainfall as the Southwest’s prime mover.

The place voted most likely to be ritual?  That would be Chaco.  Chaco is the Southwest’s best and brightest rituality (Yoffee 2001).  “It is no exaggeration to say that, in most models outlined in the last 15 to 20 years, Chaco is defined by ritual” – says Stephen Plog, in his Chaco chapter in Religious Transformation in the Late Pre-Hispanic World (Glowacki and Van Keuren 2011; p. 51).  He does not question that Chaco was, indeed, primarily ritual; rather, he complains that “countless discussions of the area refer to the canyon as the ritual center of the Pueblo region in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, but they provide few if any details about the nature of that ritual” (p. 51), which he then proceeds to do.  Predictably, most of his details are buttressed by appeals to Pueblo ritual practices.  Even Bonito’s elite burials, which elsewhere he interprets as evidence of “hierarchy and social inequality” (Plog and Heitman 2010) become ritualized a la Pueblo: whatever rituals accompanied these burials (Plog and Heitman suggest ancestor veneration), “such rituals, however, need not be viewed as distinct from ritual to promote fertility and rainfall.  Pueblo ancestors dwell in the underworld, the source of water.” (p. 64)

Plog insists that there was “substantial continuity in ritual realms from Chaco to the late pre-Hispanic era to the historic era described in ethnographies.” (p. 65).  Judd and Hewett made the same sort of arguments almost a century ago.  They are not difficult arguments to make: absent a complete replacement of peoples, we would be astonished not to find prototypes if not progenitors in prehistory.  A bowl at Bonito looks like a bowl at Zuni.  A “clan kiva” at Bonito looks…well, not so much like a kiva at Zuni, but close enough.  The problem comes when we turn those prototypes into prochronisms – pushing modern Pueblo meanings back onto ancient objects.  For example, Pueblo II and III “kivas” – a canard which will not die.

Meanings change, especially over watersheds such as the world-shift of 1300 CE (Lekson 2009:189-190).  Plog is not talking about bowls, of course; he focuses on more singular objects.  But a Chaco sword might be turned into a Pueblo plowshare – a similar shape with a very different meaning.  And that almost certainly transpired, Chaco swords re-used as digging sticks.

Positing continuities is fairly easy; we’ve been doing it for years.  The real progress we’ve made in understanding Chaco is in recognizing discontinuities; which, at Chaco, is also easy.  The discontinuities are obvious, evident, and – I think – profound.  A half-century ago, Gordon Vivian recognized that Chaco “was not on the true line of the Northern Pueblo development” (Vivian and Mathews 1964:144) – that is, Chaco differed significantly from modern Pueblos.  Subsequent research through the end of that century piled up great mounds of evidence that Chaco was indeed different (Lekson 2006).  For example: Chaco was the center of a region.  Where is the Pueblo that was or is that?   And another: Chaco provides one of the strongest cases for stratified houses and a class society we may ever see — Great Houses vs. normal “unit pueblos.”   Where is the Pueblo that was or is that?  Those very obvious facts alert us that Chaco was not Puebloan – if by that we mean the idealized Pueblo of Santa Fe boosters, ethnographic popularizers, and an alarming number of archaeologists (again, the subject of a lecture I’m writing and a blog/essay I’ll be posting — not a poke at Plog or Mills!).  We will need to think well outside Pueblo “space” to find Chaco.

This is not to say that Chaco was not part of Pueblo heritage – of course it was.  But Chaco’s social, political, economic, cosmological and — yes — ritual worlds likely were not those of modern or ethnographic Pueblos.  The same could be said for Falls Creek or Alkali Ridge: unquestionably parts of Pueblo history but surely very different societies.

And that is one problem with ritual, as we most often see it at Chaco: it appeals explicitly or implicitly (and uncritically) to modern Pueblo practices.  Plog notes that “ritual is central to understanding Pueblo society” (p. 54).  But why should we assume that Chaco was a “Pueblo society” – that is, the ethnographic and modern Pueblo societies for which ritual is seemingly so central?  There’s a odd logic here that assumes what is to be proven: Chaco must be a rituality — or something like that– because Chaco was “Ancestral Pueblo,” and everybody knows that modern Pueblos favor ritual.

Barbara Mills, in her recent take on Chaco (Mills 2012, in The Oxford Handbook of North American Archaeology, edited by Timothy Pauketat), also discounts the political in favor of the ritual.  She takes particular exception to my suggestion that Chaco had kings (which, of course, Pueblo societies do not): “Lekson (2006:37) presents an interpretation in which Chaco was ruled by kings and queens and represents ‘one of the Pueblo world’s few garden-variety chiefdoms or petty kingdoms or cacicazgos.’  He dichotomizes leadership as either ‘something political, permanent, and hierarchical or something ritual and ceremonial, spiritual, situational, and evanescent’ and rejects the possibility that Chaco was ruled by members of ritual hierarchies. Instead, he regards the archaeological evidence from Chaco as evidence for only political power, rather than for ritual power.  Proof is in three ‘facts’ about Chaco: ‘retainers’ buried with two high-status burials, great houses, and the regional primacy of Chaco. …Lekson’s three facts are not necessarily or exclusively based in political power. …with respect to the Southwest record, we should not assume that the basis for this power was exclusively economic…indigenous values were not exclusively based on economic motives.” (p. 554).  A minor quibble: I don’t recall equating political and economic power; Chaco’s beginnings may have an economic motor but its subsequent political career quickly outstripped any possible economic system (Lekson 2009:132-133)

Mills recognizes hierarchy at Chaco, but bases it firmly on ritual: “at Chaco it is increasingly clear there was at least one particularly hierarchical and powerful distinction that was based on both family relationships and ritual authority” (p. 554).  She distances Chacoan ritual from modern Puebloan ritual: Chacoan ritual hierarchies may not have been “the same forms of ritual hierarchy found in historic and contemporary Pueblo society” (p. 554).  But I submit that we would not posit “ritual hierarchies” at Chaco, absent their prominence in modern Pueblos.  If, God forbid, colonialism had destroyed the Pueblos before the ethnographers had their chance, would we even be thinking about such things?  Perhaps; but the presence of Pueblos ensures that ritual and ritual hierarchies take center stage, crowding off other contestants.

To be sure, political and religious institutions were almost certainly intertwined.  One of my (perhaps overused) taglines in public lectures – which also pops up in Plog’s piece – concerns the separation of church and state as a modern experiment.  Church and state are not so easily divided in many early societies, likely including Chaco.  In my 2006 chapter which Mills critiques, I noted that Chaco was “a complex polity, suffused with ritual and ceremony but fundamentally political and hierarchical” (Lekson 2006:37).  In the same volume as Mills’ essay, I restated that position: “The central idea at Chaco was political power, perhaps cloaked or embedded in ritual. Ritual, like the poor, is always with us, ranging from the communal and community-building ceremonials of modern Pueblos to the chilling power plays of Red Square and Pyongyang.  We don’t know Chaco’s rituals, but they probably edged (at least a bit) more toward the latter than the former.” (Lekson 2011:598).

Is this merely a matter of emphasis?  Mills highlights ritual aspect of a ritual-political system, I highlight political aspects of a political-ritual system.  But there are consequences: by focusing on the political, I can situate Chaco in the Postclassic political world of its time; while Mills, Plog, and many others’ Chaco must remain compatible with the ethnographic Pueblos – their Chaco has no room to move.   (And, coincidentally, a Chaco rituality is happily consistent with the popular, idealized Pueblos of the Santa Fe Myth — not Mills’ or Plog’s goal, of course, but an important consideration.)   Elsewhere I have described a Mesoamerican political structure (altepetl; suffused, no doubt, with ritual) which far better accounts for the data, for the things that we actually see in Chaco: elite burials, stratified housing, a center and its region, and all the many things which demonstrate that Chaco was not a “Pueblo society” sensu Plog.  Chaco, I think, will be better understood in the context of Postclassic Mesoamerica of Chaco’s time, than by prochronistic appeals to later Pueblo ritual – implicit or explicit.

I have from time to time disparaged French social philosophy.  It’s not so much the content (it’s that too), but rather the language.  To paraphrase Professor Higgins, the French don’t care what they say actually, so long as they write it properly.  Which, for French social philosophers, means convoluted, obtuse, ambiguous, impenetrable — well-known hallmarks of French philosophy, generally.  It’s not (only) a problem with translation; I’ve heard French scholars despair (publicly, at SAA meetings) of Bourdieu’s prose.

Here’s an easy bit of Bourdieu:  “Habitus is the work product of inculcation and appropriation necessary for those products of collective history that are the objective structures (e.g., language, economics, etc.) able to reproduce the form of lasting dispositions in all organisms (which can, if you will, be called individuals) permanently subject to the same packaging, then placed in the same material conditions of existence.”

And now de Certeau, commenting on Bourdieu:  “These confrontations are supposed to provide a mutual epistemological elucidation; they labor to bring their implicit foundations to light – the ambition and the myth of knowledge.  But perhaps what is at stake is different and has to do rather with the otherness introduced by the move through which a discipline turns toward the darkness that surrounds and precedes it – not in order to eliminate it, but because it is inexpungeable and determining?”

There was a time when I had some facility with French.  I tried to read Bourdieu in his mother tongue, and all I can say is that the English translations seem, to me, fair and honest.  This, apparently, is how French social philosophers choose to write.  It’s deliberately difficult in French; it’s downright bizarre in American English.  Alas, our journals are infested with faux-French vocabularies, twisted syntax, deliberately convoluted arguments.  I used to be disgusted; then I tried to be amused; now I’m just embarrassed.

Not all French intellectuals write that way.  I admire (in translation) Fernand Braudel both for his work and for his clarity.  But the philosophes ascendant in American archaeology stand solidly in the French philosophical tradition: impossible to read, and even more so to understand.  I’m sure there are things of worth, if one digs hard enough.  The same could be said for Marx or the Bible: useful or artful bits are buried in both.  But neither goes in directions I find useful, so I carry on without their hidden gems.

To be sure, there are alternatives to French social philosophy: vast libraries of theory, old and new, with which to inform our work.  For sizable segments of American archaeology, however, the French have cornered the market on ideas.  Archaeologists writing about space and architecture cite Henri Lefebvre – an unfathomable Marxist philosopher – but not Amos Raporport.   And we’ve trained them in such a way that our graduate students find it hard to recognize Rapoport’s virtues or even his applicability!  As the wicked witch said, melting down to nothing: what a world, what a world.

Theory does not require Delphic obscurantism.  Many useful thinkers think clearly and write clearly.  I list several below – a quick, short list with only a few works for each.  Some are old and some not so old.  You must judge if their thinking is useful (I find it so).   But – and this is key – you can judge their thinking directly on its merits, and not as faith that something useful lies buried in the verbiage.

To students and younger scholars reading this essay, I offer antidotes.  For every French social philosopher you read, read one of these.  If you are tempted or prompted to write like a French philosopher, take two and call your professor very, very early in the morning.

And remember, always, Voltaire: “Tous les genres sont bons, hors le genre enneyeux.”

Amos Rapopport

House Form and Culture. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969

Human Aspects of Urban Form: Towards a Man-Environment Approach to Urban Form and Design.  Oxford ; New York: Pergamon Press, 1977

The Meaning of the Built Environment: A Nonverbal Communication Approach. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1982

History and Precedent in Environmental Design.  New York: Plenum Press, 1990.

Robert Carniero

Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology: A Critical History.  Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2003

The Muse of History and the Science of Culture.  New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2000

The Evolution of the Human Mind: From Supernaturalism to Naturalism : An Anthropological Perspective. Clinton Corners, N.Y.: Eliot Werner Publications, 2010.

George Kubler

The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962

The Art and Architecture of Ancient America: the Mexican, Maya, and Andean Peoples.   Harmondsworth, Middlesex; New York: Penguin Books, 1984.

Esthetic Recognition of Ancient Amerindian Art.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

William McNeill

The Global Condition: Conquerors, Catastrophes, and Community.  Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992

Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995

The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History.  New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003. (with James Robert McNeill)

The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian’s Memoir.  Lexington, Ky. University Press of Kentucky, 2005.

Carl Sauer

Land and Life: A Selection from the Writings of Carol Ortwin Sauer.  Edited by John Leighly.   University of California Press, Berkelely, 1969

Selected Essay 1963 – 1975.  Edited by Bob Callahan.  Berkeley: Turtle Island Press, 1981.

Carl Sauer on Culture and Landscape: Readings and Commentaries.   Edited by William M. Denevan and Kent Mathewson.  Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009.

Bruce Trigger

Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study.  Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

A History of Archaeological Thought.  Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Chapter 1.D. Under Construction

I was puzzled and somewhat embarrassed by the reactions of many archaeologists to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) and Collapse (2005).  Diamond reaches large and potentially influential readerships, and he uses archaeology to make points that inform or might even influence policy!  That seemed, to me, a good thing.  And he was very favorable to archaeology.   In his Third Chimpanzee (1992), Diamond explores archaeological cases and concludes:

“Archaeology is often viewed as a socially irrelevant academic discipline that becomes a prime target for budget cuts whenever money gets tight.  In fact, archaeological research is one of the best bargains available to government planners.” (p. 336)

Diamond likes (or liked) archaeology, and Diamond reaches far more readers than any American archaeologist, with the possible exception of Brian Fagan.  He writes quality books.  Guns, Germs, and Steel won the Pulitzer Prize.  My best (and only) contact inside the Beltway (a brother who, after a State Department career, became a Senior VP at the U.S. Institute of Peace) thinks Guns, Germs, and Steel is a fine – but not flawless – book; and he assures me that most of his policy-wonk pals share that assessment.

What was academic archaeology’s reaction to Diamond’s books?  In a word: outrage.  Guns, Germs, and Steel became (and remains) a favorite target in graduate seminars across the country.   We find errors!  So we flay it, dismember it, and dance on its bones.  That’s what we teach as “critical thinking” – accentuate the negative, eliminate the positive, latch on to loose ends and yank hard.  As if ANY archaeological argument can withstand intense, sustained scrutiny!   Nothing archaeologists write or say is secure from challenge or safe from query, beyond a measurement of a post-hole or a count of flakes.    I try to teach students that critical thinking encompasses positive as well as negative, but these are dismal, cynical times.

Collapse (subtitled “How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”) came in for higher level attention: senior scholars dissected and demolished Collapse.  Joseph Tainter, who had written an influential earlier study of the subject (The Collapse of Complex Societies, 1988) wrote scathing reviews in several venues.    Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee assembled a volume Questioning Collapse, which grew out of their session at the SAAs “that would address the issues swirling around the popular writings of Jared Diamond” (p. 2).   (Yoffee has collapse credentials: he edited The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, with George Cowgill, 1988).

The tone of these reviews and books often seems partisan, even shrill.  There is, typically, some faint praise for popular writers, followed immediately by the lowering of several booms.  Both Tainter and Yoffee define “collapse” quite differently than does Diamond – and then take him to task for it.  Authors in the edited volume pick away at what they consider factual errors.  I’m sure there are errors – real errors.  Any work of this scope will have errors.  But much of the carping seems to concern not facts, but interpretations.  Diamond necessarily works from other archaeologists’ interpretations and I suspect the authors upon whom he relies would have something to say about all this.  The interpretations he accepts are not necessarily wrong; they are simply inconsistent with those of his critics.

I’m not saying that Diamond gets it “right.”  It’s hard to get things completely “right,” especially in science when many very reasonable hypotheses are probably wrong.  But the vehemence of academic reaction to Diamond is, I think, far disproportionate to his sins – sins of omission, commission or (worst of all) failure to cite the critic.  It is my opinion that much of the heat comes from Diamond’s success as a popular writer.  It’s not jealousy — well, maybe a little: after all, the guy won the Pulitzer with our data.  We don’t want anyone else to tell our story, even though we almost never tell it ourselves – accessibly.  And, it must be said, there is antipathy, even hostility from academics towards popular writers, even when that popular writer is an academic.     We all should re-read Article 4 of the SAA’s Principles of Archaeological Ethics, especially the bit about “Archaeologists who are unable to undertake public education and outreach directly should encourage and support the efforts of others in these activities.”

Back to collapse.  Tainter has one view, Yoffee another, Diamond yet another on what collapse is and how best to explain it.  We should not expect one cause, or even a single direction in which to look for multiple causes, because collapse encompasses demography, polity, economy, geography – and more.  If population plummets, that’s collapse.   If a regime falls, that’s collapse.   If the economy tanks, that’s collapse.  If a region is abandoned, that’s collapse.  But it’s quite possible to imagine these four situations independently, or in combination, or firing in sequence.  And all might cascade from entirely separate proximate causes.

Tainter, in one of his reviews, used a phrase I like a lot: “collapse happens.”   I’m not sure Tainter used it with approval, but it’s true: collapse happens.  Doesn’t matter how you got big or mighty, what goes up must come down (and the harder they come, the harder they fall).   Might collapse be cyclic, literally the downside of cycles?  In David Stuarts’s terms, the efficiency cycle after the power drive?  Or in resilience terms, the release after the conservation phase?   In another post, I review “cycles” in the Southwest, and how “up” might entail “down” — the fall may be the inevitable and predictable outcome of the rise.  While the overall trends in human evolution and development are stunningly upward (at least as we measure these things) the short-term histories of human polities average only a couple of centuries.   Then things go wrong: boom brings bust.   But that’s another story.

Archaeology, with its backward gaze, sees societies and civilizations wax and wane.  If they wane with a bang and not with a whimper, we call it collapse.  Or we did: our sympathies with descendent communities lead many archaeologists to substitute more agreeable terms.   Collapse, for Resilience Theorists, becomes “release” – sounds almost spiritual.  Abandonment is not as it seems (to paraphrase Nelson and Hegmon’s influential 2001 article).   Because “abandonment” poorly serves Native communities, we substitute “depopulation” – accurate, to be sure, and less prone to interpretations of “vacated lands” with difficult legal implications.

However we euphemize the dramatic abandonment/depopulation of the Four Corners, the facts seem clear:   the region supported tens of thousands of people in the early 13^th century and a century later it was essentially empty.  Moreover, depopulation was accompanied by political disorder, warfare, and economic disaster punctuated by a final Great Drought.   Cities fell, governments crumbled, and whole artistic traditions (and whatever cosmologies they reflected) vanished.  All that’s missing are rains of fire, plagues of frogs, and seismic convulsions.  It’s hard to imagine a more complete collapse.

Unless it’s the decline of Classic Period Hohokam.   In the 13^th century, the Phoenix Basin (the lower Salt and its confluence with the Gila River) was teeming with people.  Those people were doing wonderful things – developments economic, political, artistic, even economic that overshadowed the Pueblo North, fueled by a massive infrastructure of huge irrigation canals.  By 1450, only a few ragged settlements remained.   The story is contested (ALL interesting archaeological narratives are contested) but David Abbott’s 2003 book tells the tale: Centuries of Decline During the  Hohokam Classic Period.   It’s hard to imagine a more complete collapse.

Unless it’s the fall of Casas Grandes.  Much ink has been spilled on the origins and rise of Paquime, the Casas Grandes capital.  The city rose around 1300.  There is no indication that it survived long after 1450.   When the Spanish arrived, about a century later, all that was left were ruins and a few local legends.  What became of the extraordinary, cosmopolitan people who built and ruled Casas Grandes?   That society was, in many ways, the most remarkable ever seen in the Pueblo Southwest – rivaled only by Hohokam.   I realize that I offer judgments and opinions (“extraordinary,” “most remarkable”) but I stand by those judgments:  Paquime and the Casas Grandes polity marked a clear apex in Pueblo and perhaps Southwestern prehistory.   But after only 150 years, that society collapsed.   The end of Paquime should be among the most pressing problems for Southwestern archaeology.  So far, the collapse of Paquime has attracted relatively little research interest.  It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic and significant collapse.

Unless it’s the end of Mimbres … but enough, enough, enough.  The point is clear, I hope: the Southwest has much to offer for the study of collapse.  As Jared Diamond recognized, in all of those very interesting books.

Chapter fragment: 6 B under construction.

Video: Collapse.

The Pecos System, promulgated in 1928, offered a Whiggish account of Pueblo pre-history, every day in every way, better and better.  Stage by Pecos stage, step by step, the people who would become Pueblos acquired first corn, then pit-houses, then pottery, then kivas, then masonry, then massed apartment-like villages, then kachinas, and so forth until all the elements of the modern Pueblos cumulated and crystallized, complete and entire.  And that was, after all, a major archaeological goal: where did the Pueblos come from?

The Pecos System was not adopted without dissent: not every Conferee was satisfied.  Perhaps Pueblo history was not that simple and straightforward.  The “abandonment of the Four Corners,” for example, suggested a speed-bump on the road to the Rio Grande (and other) Pueblos.  And, a few short years after the first Pecos Conference, the Southwest had a whole other half: Hohokam.  Not all roads led to Pecos, or to Pueblos.

While misfits and exceptions appeared early and often, the Pecos System remained the gold standard chronology – even through the iconoclasms of New Archaeology.  Pecos’s steady progression tracked Neo-Evolutionary hopes and dreams.  Pecos was quintessential culture history, but its old plot fit New ideas.  Pecos provided the basic story-line (subject, of course, to correction!), and on that foundation we did science.  By and large, the Pecos System narrative underwrote New and Processual science – and much archaeology, of every stripe, through the end of the last millennium.   We thought the history was sufficiently well known that science (or something like it) was possible.

That’s fair enough, I guess: my present strategy is to write history with one set of procedures (“A History of the Ancient Southwest”), and then pursue science with another set of procedures (“The Southwest in the World”).   New and Processual archaeologies in the Southwest jumped to science without significantly revisiting history; the Pecos System was accepted as a reasonable approximation of history.   What New and Processual archaeologists failed to grasp was that history is and must be malleable; history changes.  What if the Pecos System was wrong?  The past, as some wag said, isn’t what it used to be.

New Archaeology, alas, wasn’t interested in history, and largely accepted the Received Version as a necessary framework for science; Processual archaeology did much the same.  But the Received Version was wrong, in very substantial and significant ways – not just in details.  The Pecos plot-line of steady progress upward and onward to Pueblos has been superseded by a far more turbulent, dynamic, rise & fall history – at least in my book.

Readers may reasonably object that I overvalue the importance of the Pecos System to Processual and recent research.  Not so, I think.  A fine example was (and is) the pit-house-to-pueblo transition, a classic question that launched several influential books, dozens of important articles, and countless exam answers.  And the transition continues to frame research in our post-or-plus era.  The Pecos System pinned the critical transition in Pueblo I or (at latest) early Pueblo II.   New, Processual, and much recent archaeologies accepted the Pecos placement as the right time/place for serious investigation of the question (and the correct answer on the exam).  But, in fact, the “transition” – one form replacing the other – never happened.  The transition required a neat bit of classificatory legerdemain, in which the below-grade chamber fronting every ancient home was redefined by fiat from a “pithouse” to a “kiva.”  If the pit structure was a kiva, then the pithouse no longer existed; and – voila! – absent pithouses, those ancient people must have transitioned into the pueblo.  They had nowhere else to go.

Pueblo I, II and III “kivas” were, in fact, pithouses – increasingly formalized and dandified, to be sure, but still pithouses.  Kiva-pithouses and pueblos mutually co-existed right through Pueblo I, II and III, as two integral elements of every house – a Unit Pueblo.  In a Unit Pueblo, pithouse/”kiva” and pueblo were like parlor and pantry. The pithouse part of the house finally (and quite dramatically) disappeared in Pueblo IV (that is, after 1300), by which time the pueblo element of the ensemble had already been around for centuries.  The loss of the household pit-structure (for many, even today, small or clan “kivas”) at the 1300 watershed is really interesting – and remains largely uninvestigated, because the Pecos System placed the “transition” back around 900.  (I harp on this pithouse-kiva business, I know, but it’s actually rather important.)

The early archaeologists – Bandelier, Kidder, Cummings, Hewett – did remarkable work, but they left much juice in the orange of Southwestern prehistory.  With the discovery of Hohokam, it was clear that the Pecos System worked only in certain times and places – specifically the Four Corners.  (Pecos was never welcome on the Rio Grande.)  The biggest challenge was internal to the Four Corners: with the tree-ring dating of Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl at Chaco Canyon, the Pecos System became suspect in its own region.  The Great Houses of Chaco should have been Pueblo III (aka “Great Pueblo”), but instead they were firmly dated to Pueblo II (and we now know, even as early as Pueblo I).  This was not a minor detail: Chaco was recognizably a key event in the prehistory of the Four Corners, and the new chronology undercut the old notion of paced progress from Archaic to Pueblo.

The Whig view of prehistory should evaporate with most recent changings of the theoretical guard, from Processual-plus to whatever mess we’re in now.  The Pecos System surely registers as a minor-meta-narrative, and Post-processualism never met a meta-narrative it liked.  Neo-Evolution’s sturdy linearity – a pillar for my generation – paralleled and propped the sagging framework of the old Pecos System.  The Pecos System bent and Neo-evolution broke beneath the weight of post-Processualism – even as that foreign brew was thinned down to Southwestern tastes.  Sometime around the turn of the millennium, the old order shattered into micro-historical pick-up-sticks.  New ways of archaeological thinking (coincident with 1990′s NAGPRA) emphasize, instead, local histories.  Large-scale history smacks of meta-narrative; we don’t go there.

Absent large-scale history, the Pecos System is Hobson’s choice.  It’s still used, largely as a basic chronology, with entanglements intact.  It is  the Received Version, an inherited story too deeply embedded in our thought-structures for excision.  For  many archaeologists, for example, it remains a bed-rock fact that the pithouse-to-pueblo transition happened in Pueblo I.   Oh well.

But Pecos as meta-narrative is surely gone.  If we’ve lost the Pecos System’s simple story, no one in the new school(s) misses it much.  I miss the old Pecos System – or, rather, I miss attempts to meta-narrate the Southwest – Kidder & Co’s (1927) Pecos stages or McGregor’s (1965) pan-Southwestern periods, or Cordell and Gumerman’s (1989) hinge-points.   Those schemes are little used today.  Each valley or district marches happily to its own drummer.   Many things – important things, I think – happened on larger, regional scales; and regional systematics and regional rhythms are required to discover and understand those big things.  My partialities are explained elsewhere (Lekson 2009), and need not detain us here.

If we’ve lost Pecos’s linear structure, does that mean Southwestern prehistory had no structure(s)?   Can we see that structure(s)?   Depends on how we view things.  If we were thinking historically, we wouldn’t want to assume or impose a structure a priori.  If we were thinking scientifically, we’d suspect that maybe there was a structure, or structures defined (of course) posteriori.  History is necessarily post facto. (I’ve heard Southwestern archaeologists [and Lewis Binford] dismiss historical approaches as “post hoc” – an inexact use of that term, I think, although it might apply as a logical critique of bad history.)

Absent a linear, progressive structure, an obvious alternative is cycles.  If things didn’t always go up, maybe they went up and down and up again.  Cycles have history within history, and that history is not happy.  Professional historians rejected Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, published between the Wars, as ill-informed mysticism.  Arnold Tonynbee’s Study of History, published primarily after World War II, fared no better.  Yet both were influential best-sellers: themes of cyclic rises-and-falls fit their times.  Cycles, similarly understood, formed a minor but important theme in early Sociology, through the work of founding fathers Vilfredo Pareto and Pitirim Sorokin.  In archaeology, K.R Dark’s The Waves of Time (1998) has had more influence in Political Science than in its home discipline.  Other cyclic studies, such as Joyce Marcus’s “The Peaks and Valley of Ancient States: An Extension of the Dynamic Model” in The Archaic State (1998), seem to have little impact on other studies of comparative civilizations: Norman Yoffee’s (2005) Myths of the Archaic State and Bruce Trigger’s (2003) Understanding Early Civilizations limit “cycling” to chiefdoms, in a very particular Henry Wright-David Anderson usage.  We all have to deal with the collapse of social systems and civilizations (the topic of a future post) but, these days, we prefer historical or evolutionary frameworks for rises and falls over seemingly mysterious “cycles” – too muddled, too mystical.

Cycles come and cycles go.  The most recent champion of cycles is biologist Peter Turchin.  Turchin is not mystical; he is steadfastly scientific.  In his 2008 manifesto in Nature, “Arise ‘Cliodyamics’”, Turchin announces his program: “Let history continue to focus on the particular.  Cliodynamics, meanwhile, will develop unifying theories and test them with data generated by history [and] archaeology … To truly learn from history, we must transform it into a science” (pp 34-35).  Heady stuff: reminiscent of New Archaeology in its youthful folly.  New Archaeology failed to launch; Turchin seems to be getting results or at least gaining ground.  One of Turchin’s more conspicuous contributions has been the renewed study of cycles (“secular cycles,” aka Turchin cycles) most accessibly in three recent book:  Secular Cycles (with S.A. Nefedov, 2009); War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations (2006) and Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall (2003). For shorter but more technical introduction: Turchin’s 2009 “Long-Term Population Cycles in Human Societies.”

Turchin attributes the cyclic successes of polities to a quality he calls “asabiya” (following 14^th century Ibn Khaldun): the cohesiveness and solidarity of a group, and hence its ability to succeed in collective actions.  Asabiya is a positive property of meta-ethnic identity, which often develops on frontiers: “it is hard to imagine how large groups arise and maintain themselves in a homogeneous environment populated by many small groups, with an ethnic distance separating each pair of groups of roughly the same order of magnitude.  But what if there is a major ethnic boundary? … A small group near such a boundary will be confronted with very different others, dwarfing in their ‘otherness’ neighboring groups that are on the same side of the metaethnic line.  … This should lead to enhanced alliance formation among groups on the same side of the boundary.” (Turchin 2003:53).  Thus formed, political units (polities) thereafter follow formal, predictable, secular cycles.  (Turchin’s penchant for neologisms and borrowed argot – “asabiya” –make it possible to dismiss his work as pop-political science; but his ideas, logic, and data, to me, seem sound.)

Here is a summary of secular cycles, “oscillations in demographic, economic, and social structures of agrarian societies” (Turchin 2006:8):  a secular cycle begins with a “benign integrative phase” population grows and elites prosper.  Continued population growth benefits elites and nobles – up to a point.  When population size exceeds carrying capacity (Truchin’s term, to be understood loosely), the polity enters a “troubled disintegrative phase”.   Elites accustomed to plenty must do with less, and turn on each other over diminishing resources; that is, “instability.”  Political disorder drives population decrease and societal collapse.  According to Turchin, “the typical period of a complete cycle … is around two or three centuries.  I call these majestic oscillations in demographic, economic, and social structures of agrarian societies secular cycles.  (Turchin 2006:8, original emphasis).  Note that Turchin’s cycle are inherently political.

Turchin’s cycles have been explored in the ancient Southwest by Timothy Kohler, Sarah Cole and Stanca Cuipe (2009; responding to Turchin’s 2003 use of Mesa Verde data) and in the Southeast by Gravilets, Anderson and Turchin (2010).  These treatments are highly quantitative, somewhat ambiguous, and – in the end – very intriguing.

Cycling in the ancient Southeast is understood as inherently political – “Cycling in the Complexity of Early Societies,” building on cycling in Southeastern chiefdoms (Anderson 1994, drawing on the earlier work of Henry Wright).   Turchin’s cycles require political structure – elites, nobles, rulers; Southeastern chiefdom had those.

Kohler, Cole and Cuipe work on less certain ground.  We are not prepared, as a field of study, to welcome nobles and elites into Pueblo prehistory.  We can perhaps allow elites at Chaco – accepted grudgingly, with the insistence that Chacoan political complications were a short-lived aberration.  But surely NOT at Mesa Verde!   Since the days of Fewkes and Nusbaum, we have interpreted Mesa Verde and its region as pleasantly proto-Pueblo, with all that entails and excludes.  One of the most important exclusions are political structures.  Political power seldom appears in prehistories of the Mesa Verde region.  Here is Kohler, Cole and Cuipe’s précis of the Village Ecodynamics Project (VEP) culture history for later periods:

“A major population influx in the mid- to late 1000s brought with it the earliest structures reminiscent of the great houses of Chaco Canyon and its surrounding area, some 170 kilometers south-southeast of our study area. A few archaeologists (e.g., Wilcox 1999) interpret Chaco’s fluorescence following an internal reorganization around 1030 as that of an expansionist, tributary state, though many others are more cautious; see contributions to Lekson (2006) and Kohler and Kramer-Turner (2006) for the state of the debate. The polity centered on Chaco Canyon went into decline in the mid-1100s, causing turmoil in our study area, though study area populations continued to grow. In the mid-1200s, many community centers in our area relocated to canyon head locations, and many of these are walled. Local populations began to decline by about 1260, and the area was completely depopulated by farmers sometime in the 1280s.”  (Kohler and others 2009:280)

Chaco is recognized as force to be reckoned with – then and now – but it was an exterior factor, messing with Mesa Verde.  Chaco-style politics were not native to the region; it was exogenous (a term we will meet again below).  Kohler, Cole and Cuipe reformulate the Turchin’s model, absent political structures, thus: “population growth eventually causes an increase in instability, with a lag, whereas increased instability, with a lag, eventually leads to decreases in population size” (Kohler and others 2009: 277, working with Turchin and Krortayev (2006)).   Kohler’s neutral term “instability” glosses Turchin’s explicitly political triggers.

So: population peaks should precede peaks in violence (“with a lag”).  When were those respective peaks?  The VEP data answer that question in admirable detail (Kohler and others 2009: Fig.19.3).  For population: a first, minor population peak followed by decline at about 850; a major peak with steady, relatively high growth began in the very late 900s or 1000 CE, accelerated markedly about 1080 CE, and peaked about 1225 CE, and crashing thereafter with almost complete depopulation by 1300 CE.  For violence: increased violence followed the first population peak (850), as predicted by the model; but for the second population peak,, violence peaked in the mid- to late-1100s – before the population peak.  (The importance and implications of Kohler, Cole and Cuipe’s work for understanding violence in the Southwest will be explored in a future post.)

Thus, “we find relative strong support for the Turchin-Korotayev model …during the first population cycle, when exogenous factors appear to have been weak. … The apparent failures of the model during the second population cycle may be due to the relative strengths of exogenous factors in our area …” (p. 287-288).

They identify the exogenous factor: Chaco.  Indeed, Chaco may trump Turchin.  As noted, the first peak in violence lagged behind the first peak in population and therefore was congruent with Turchin’s model, but perhaps Chaco played a role: “The [first] increases in violence in the late 900s and early 1000s [were] well before the earliest structures in our area that look ‘Chacoan’…this anomaly pointed up by the model suggests that we need to look for external [exogenous] influences before they become obvious as Chacoan-style architecture …Perhaps [defensive sites] dating to the early 1000s … represent resistance (ultimately unsuccessful) to Chacoan expansion.” (p. 289).

Kohler and colleagues continue: “The circa 1080s immigration (spanning the period from 1060 to 1100) represents the first successful Chacoan intrusions into the area.  … The slight decrease in violence in the early 1100s, if real, represents as close to a ‘Pax Chacoensis’ as our area ever experiences” (p. 289)   “The collapse of the Chacoan system in the mid-1100s brought violence to unprecedented levels…as old (but apparently resented) power structures fell apart.” (p. 289) followed by relative peace in the early 1200s.  Things really fell apart in the late 1200s.

In my understanding of pre-history (Lekson 2009), Chaco directly affected Mesa Verde (both the park and the larger region) right through the 11^th century.  The center of government then shifted north to Aztec Ruins (Lekson 1999), probably about 1110 CE.  If Aztec’s region was marked by bi-wall and tri-wall structures, Aztec’s sphere of influence encompassed most of the VEP.   How would the direct inclusion of Chaco and Aztec affect our understanding of Turchin cycles in the Mesa Verde area?

To begin at the beginning: recall Turchin’s early emphasis on meta-ethnic identities.  Chaco was probably a meta-ethnic polity, encompassing almost certainly polyglot and disparate groups within its region.  I argued that Chaco itself rose in part as a geopolitical reaction to the explosive growth of the Hohokam Colonial period.  The boundary between Chaco and Hohokam certainly constituted a “major ethnic boundary” – however that term is understood.  The homogeneous superstructure of Great Houses, roads, ceramic styles (Dogozshi), and so forth that spread over the northern Southwest stood in sharp contrast to the powerful, homogenous, highly stylized Hohokam region of ball courts, palettes, and buffwares.  If Turchin is correct, then Chaco’s region – which included all of the Mesa Verde region – could have had a high degree of “asabiya” – coherence in collective actions.

Kohler and his colleagues indeed suggest an early role for Chaco in their area: Mesa Verde populations resisted Chacoan incursions in the early 1000s.  Their evidence is indirect: they see no “structures in our area that look ‘Chacoan’” at this time, but they suggest that elevated violence might reflect resistance to Chaco.  Independently, I arrived at the tenuous conclusion that Chacoan buildings may have appeared north of the San Juan River, including the Mesa Verde region, as early as 1000 CE (see “The Sites”, Chimney Rock & Chaco).  Our two interpretations converge, perhaps.

Recall that the first, ca 900 CE peak of violence in the VEP followed peak population, as Turchin predicts; that is, the violence occurred during a time of population decline.  Indeed, violence may have contributed to that decline.  From a nadir at about 950 CE, population rose remarkably to a peak at about 1250, three times the size of the first, 10^th century peak.  Kohler and his colleagues call for in-migration around 1080 of large numbers of people, presumably bearing Chacoan credentials.  But the situation evident in the VEP and Mesa Verde area was not unique.  All round Chaco’s region, the 11^th century saw both marked increases in population and the appearance of Anasazi hallmarks: corn agriculture, masonry pueblos, black-on-white and corrugated pottery.  To the west, Virgin Anasazi; to the east, the population jump of Late Developmental Rio Grande, and the conspicuous shift from pithouse to pueblo; to the south, Mimbres populations doubled (or tripled?), and switched from Hohokam-inspired pithouse to Anasazi-like pueblos and pottery; and to the north, Mesa Verde was re-populated, with a corona that reached the Great Salt Lake in Fremont.   Everywhere around Chaco, people who had formerly minded their own business suddenly chose to look like Pueblos; and everywhere around Chaco, population skyrocketed.  This used to be called the “Pueblo II Expansion” – to return to an antique use of the Pecos System.   The Pueblo II Expansion is no longer a popular concept, but the empirical pattern it described remains.

In Turchin’s terms, this was the “integrative phase” in which population grew and elites prospered.  Population growth benefited Chaco and local elites and nobles – up to a point.  All went well through the 12^th century; Chaco had sufficient power to build a new capital at Aztec Ruins.  The “carrying capacity” of Chaco’s immediate hinterlands took a big hit with a severe drought of 1130-1180.  Perhaps Chaco entered Turchin’s “troubled disintegrative phase”.   Elites at Chaco itself – to repeat the summary presented earlier in this post — accustomed to plenty perhaps did with less, and turned on each other over diminishing resources; that is, “instability.”  I think we see early signs of inter-elite competition with the conversion of Pueblo Bonito from a solsticial/lunar cosmology to a solar/cardinal cosmology in the early 12^th century; these two cosmologies had co-existed from at least 1020 CE at Chaco (Lekson 2009).  The shift to Aztec may well have been spurred by elite competitions within Chaco itself.

It is conventionally believed (and often stated as fact) that Chaco “collapsed” around 1130; but if we understand that Chaco continued at Aztec Ruins, that’s hard to see.  Monumental construction continued through the 12^th century at Aztec Ruins and, in the VEP and elsewhere in the Mesa Verde region, population continued to climb, peaking about 1250.  The VEP area (the Great Sage Plains around Cortez CO) stood in much the same relation to Aztec as had the Chuska Valley to Chaco: both Chuska and the VEP were bread-baskets, the prime agricultural lands within Chaco and Aztec’s regions.

The politically driven disintegrative phase came ultimately from Aztec, in a climate of violence inherited from the “Pueblo II expansion” of the late 11^th century and the 1130-1180 drought (the impact of prior violence on levels of warfare will be explored in a future post).  Noble consumption (in a mildly tributary altepetl) overshot production of commoners; nobles turned on nobles; and the result was the elevated, appalling violence of the 12^th century – Turchin’s disintegrative phase.  From Chaco rise to Aztec’s end spanned two or three centuries (depending on when you start Chaco’s clock) –  Turchin notes: “the typical period of a complete cycle … is around two or three centuries.”

Then the nobles left (Lekson 1999) – went south – and peace returned (Kohler and colleagues 2009).  Briefly: beginning in the mid-1200s, whole towns left the Mesa Verde area, voting with their feet for a system not subject to the political instability of Turchin’s secular cycles.   They built their new regime instead on the sacred, constructing the Pueblo lifestyle of Pueblo IV and V in the old Pecos System.  Thus the archaeologists’ goal – whence Pueblos? – was reached, but not by a linear progress; more accurately, by the cyclic rise and fall of polities.  And far to the south, the cycle began again, perhaps, at Paquime.

Chapter fragment 6.A.: Under Construction

Video: Cycles

“Montezuma’s Castle” and “Cliff Palace” began as cowboy enthusiasms, fanciful names for dramatic ruins.  Today those names are merely tourist bait.  The Park Service greets you with denials and corrections: it’s NOT a castle, it’s NOT a palace.  Ignorance excuses the excesses of early archaeology.   We know better now.   Ruins are more fitly named for a nearby creek or peak or, better still, a Native name.   In fact, most sites today are simply numbered: LA 49 or 5MT5.

Similarly, “city” is seldom used in our region’s archaeology, save with irony.   ”City” does not fit our version of the ancient Southwest.   “La Ciudad,” a site under Phoenix, was named early, safely exoticized in Spanish.   I am not aware of other major sites (successfully) called “city” in the Southwest.   “Abandoned cities of the plains” and “Ancient City of the Sun” might be found on the web and in glossy magazines, but never in proper archaeological reports.

That’s too bad: the Southwest, I will argue, was urban.   That claim has been made before, three times: for Paquimé (aka Casas Grandes), for “budding urban settlements in the northern San Juan,” and for Chaco Canyon.   And three times, the claim has been denied: we’ll have no cities here.   I examine each of those three cases in turn, and add a fourth (Phoenix), below; but first a brief discussion of what “city” means, and why Southwestern archaeology eschews the term.

It is my impression that many (most?) Southwestern archaeologists share a vision of “city” that harks back to classic definitions of Weber, Wirth, and Sanders: densely packed, large, hustling, bustling and – importantly – integral to states.   (We don’t want states in the Southwest; see “Chaco as Altepetl“.)   The conventional definition of “city”– basically demographic: total population and density — remains influential in recent urban studies; for example, The Ancient City lists seven criteria, mostly familiar (Marcus and Sabloff 2008:12-13), and Urbanism in the Preindustrial World (Storey 2006) offers a telling rule-of-thumb: “I have always thought that a true urban center needed to have a population density of at least 1,000 persons per sq km.   However, I now think that the density need not be that high.   A true city … can have a population density even in the low hundreds of persons per square kilometer, as long as the overall site is in the tens of square kilometers” (Storey 2006:22-23).   We don’t see those densities and areas at Southwestern sites!    It’s true: we have no Londons, no Tenochtitlans, no Romes.

But not all roads lead to Rome.   It has become abundantly clear that ancient cities were not circumscribed by Western – focused models of urbanism, and their attendant criteria of density and size.   Indeed, as Michael Smith notes, using the standard criteria for urbanism there were only two cities in ancient North America: Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan.   Joyce Marcus nailed the problem: “trying to define the city so as to satisfy Western social scientists, not Mesoamerican Indians” (cited in Hirth 2003:59).

North American urban centers (with those two notable exceptions) did not look like Rome.   Nor did many cities on other continents and in other eras.   What to do with thousands of urban centers disenfranchised by the old Wirth/Sanders criteria?   A new definition of “city” appeared in recent years, which avoids density/area criteria and focuses instead on relations or functions between center and hinterland.   Bruce Trigger (1972, 2003) was perhaps the first archaeologist to formally state this new definition of “city”: “The key defining feature of an urban center is that it performs specialized functions in relation to a broader hinterland.”   What “specialized  functions”?   More on this below – but for now please note that Trigger’s version of urbanism has been adopted and developed by many archaeologists currently researching cities, such as George Cowgill (2004), Michael Smith (2005, 2008) and others.

Notably, Mesoamerican urban centers were not necessarily large in size nor densely populated.   Michael Smith (2005; see also his Aztec City-State Capitals, 2008) offers the most useful information:  most Aztec cities ranged in size from 10 ha to 90 ha.   For the metrically challenged (like me), 10 ha is a football field, squared; 90 ha is slightly less than a square kilometer.   The populations of these urban centers was as small as 600 to a median value of about 10,000 (and of course a few much larger).   These centers fell far short of 1000 people/ha or even “several hundred” people/ha; Smith notes two density classes: low from 10 to 38 persons/ha, and a higher density class of 44 to 72 persons/ha (and a third density particular to Teotihuacan: 157/ha).   Look at the lower (but not the lowest!) end of those ranges: those are Southwestern numbers!

It is worth noting, too, that “city” has (perhaps) been de-coupled from “state.”   While most cities indeed were firmly embedded in states (and, according to Norm Yoffee, critical to their rise), counter-examples have been offered of ancient cities in putatively non-state societies.   I offer this comment to coat the bitter pill of urbanism in the Southwest.   Cities may go down easier absent the taint of states.

But I see no reason to shy from Southwestern states (see “Chaco as Altepetl“), with Southwestern cities.    Three times we’ve seen claims for Southwestern cities rise and fall, and a fourth is added here: Paquimé, northern San Juan, Chaco, and Phoenix.

Paquimé: Charles Di Peso boldly proclaimed Paquimé a city in his monumental 1974 report.   He spoke of “urban renewal” (a phrase then current in American cities); thereafter “the city of Paquimé prospered and reached the zenith of its development…a massive, multistoried, high-rise apartment house covering some 36 hectares” (Di Peso 1974:313) with population of almost 5,000 people.  By most definitions, 5,000 people on 36 ha qualify easily as a city.   (That’s a density of 138/ha: pushing Teo numbers!).   And beyond demographic criteria, Di Peso’s Paquimé performed specialized functions in relation to a broader hinterland: it was a trading center and a political capital.   Recent work has not been kind to Di Peso’s Paquimé.  Indeed, his name for the site has been largely abandoned, replaced by Casas Grandes.  Paquimé’s/Casas Grandes’ region has been dramatically reduced (see “Regional Scales“).   Michael Whalen and colleagues (2010) halved the great city, cutting it down to size (see “Scalar Thresholds“).  Paquimé’s diminishment evokes a palpable sense of relief among conventional Southwesternists – even a slightly righteous satisfaction – keeping the Southwest safe for towns and villages.   (Why?)   In my book, however, Di Peso was more right than wrong — Paquimé was indeed a great and possibly powerful city, the capital of a secondary state of considerable size.   Perhaps we see what we want to see: I published a defense of Di Peso’s large Paquime based on the available data (Lekson 1999); Whalen and his colleagues (2010) looking at the very same data cut the site in half.

San Juan:  Art Rohn raised a few eyebrows in 1981 when he presented a paper on “Budding Urban Centers in the Northern San Juan.”  Rohn concluded: “by the thirteenth century some Pueblo settlements in the Northern San Juan had reached the threshold of true urban size” (Rohn 1983:178).  He was referring to a dozen very large settlements dotting the fields and plains west of Cortez, Colorado.  These sites were literally overshadowed by the famous cliff-dwellings of nearby Mesa Verde; but the large sites on the plains of Cortez were much larger than any sites on the National Park, and contained  far more people in ancient times than did their contemporaries Mesa Verde.  The largest was Yellow Jacket for which Rohn estimated a population of 1,500, which he later upped to 2,700 (Ferguson and Rohn 1986).  Subsequent work by Crow Canyon Archaeological Center places that figure at 850 to 1,360 (Kuckelman 2003).   Rohn presciently recognized a threshold at about 2,000 to 2,500 “as a demarcation between a small urban settlement or pueblo and a large one or city” (p.177 and elsewhere).  He saw the Budding Urban Centers banging up against that threshold and never crossing it.  Rohn was working with a Wirth/Sanders-style list of criteria (craft specialization, markets, waste removal, transportation, political complexity) which he did not see at Yellow Jacket or other Cortez sites.   I agree with Rohn: Yellow Jacket never made the leap to complexity (see “Scalar Thresholds“) and — more importantly! — it never performed specialized functions in relation to a broader hinterland required for urbanism.  The site was briefly interpreted as a “Four Corners Anasazi Ceremonial Center” (Lange and others 1986) based on its very large number of “kivas” (almost 200!).  But “kivas” were a canard, and “ceremonial center” a mistake typical of its times.  Quantities of kivas did not indicate phenomenal religiosity.  “Kivas” were, instead, indicative of homes and households.  Rohn (and many others) used the number of “kivas” as a direct index of population, as indeed they were: “kivas” were in fact pit-houses, one per family.  Yellow Jacket was not a regional ceremonial center, but instead a very large and important settlement in the hinterlands first of 11^th century Chaco Canyon, and later of 12^th-13^th century Aztec Ruins – marked, respectively, by the presence at Yellow Jacket of an 11^th century Chacoan Great House and a 12^th century Aztec Bi-walled Great Tower.

Chaco Canyon:  Gordon Vivian recognized a half-century ago that Chaco Canyon was a complicated settlement with multiple building types, perhaps indicating multiple ethnicities – and not a step on the path to Pueblo lifestyles (Vivian and Matthews 1964).   I built upon that foundation years later, interpreting the architectural variation not as ethnic diversity (although that was surely present) but rather as clear archaeological evidence of a class-structured society.   In it’s most recent iteration, my interpretation sees Chaco as Mesoamerican in form, if not in fact, paralleling or mimicking the central cluster of an altepetl polity.   Does that make Chaco urban?  I thought so, even before I was introduced to altepetl, most notably, I suppose, in a chapter on “Architecture” in The Archaeology of Chaco Canyon (2006, SAR Press) – the chapter was co-authored with Thomas Windes and Peter McKenna, neither of whom are culpable for my urban pretentions.  Chaco’s population was probably no greater than 2,700, and quite possible less.  Its population densities would at or below the lower figures for Aztec cities.  Chaco’s claim is based largely on its relationship to its hinterlands, and the specialized functions it performed for those hinterlands.  Chaco was the political capital of a polity (large in area if not in population), and also an economic and – yes! – ceremonial center.   My original proposals for an  urban Chaco were critiqued by Michael Smith (2008) in an SAA poster titled “Urbanization in the Southwest?“  Accepting the “pilgrimage center” interpretation then (and now) dominant in Southwestern thinking, Smith found Chaco wanting: “accommodations for pilgrims and their activities is not an urban function” and “a settlement does not have to be a city to be an important place.”  Smith did not have all the data.   With the addition of palaces, political  complexity, monumental architecture, regional economies, and a historical context favoring polity over piety, Smith now concurs that Chaco was probably urban, under the functional or relational definition of city (Michael Smith, personal communication, Jan. 12, 2011 – a gentleman and a scholar!).

Phoenix:  I think Chaco is a slam-dunk (small) city, built along Mesoamerican lines but local in its development.   Of more interest, perhaps, is Smith’s evaluation of Hohokam in the same SAA poster.   He looks at Classic Period towns, and determines that they were indeed urban based on two basic criteria: “political urban functions are inferred from platform mounds,” and “Hohokam…hinterlands correspond to either the canal system or ‘community’ (Smith 2008).   This is radical: “city” and “urban” are almost never used in Hohokam archaeology.   Indeed, two of the more important compendia on Hohokam settlement were titled The Hohokam Village (Doyel 1987) and the Hohokam Village, Revisited (Doyel, Fish and Fish 2000).   It takes a village.  Hohokam archaeology sees Phoenix as a score or more of independent peer villages, united only through the (important) requirements of  administration of canals which ran through several settlements.  The scales of  political control were calculated through partitioning by Thiessen polygons (Fish 1996).   Each platform mound village controlled only the territory half-way to the next nearest platform mound; thus, the scale was small, and safely non-urban.

Community size…for central sites witih platform mounds along the Salt River. From Suzanne Fish (1996) “Dynamics of Scale in the Souhtern Deserts”

Similarly, suggestions for market places forming a truly regional economy are made almost apologetically; markets smack of cities and states (Abbott, Smith and Gallaga 2007).   Perhaps not surprisingly, I disagree with Hohokam villages and I agree with Smith: Phoenix (and its environs) offers us a remarkable, non-Western city or, at least, urbanism in novel, non-Western ways.   Rather than each platform mound site constituting a separate quasi-political, economic unit, Phoenix might be seen as a vast segmented settlement, of the type Roland Fletcher (2009) calls “low density, agrarian-based urbanism.”  Fletcher’s cases, which confound the “standard Western compact pre-industrial model of urbanism” (p. 12), come mainly from tropical forest environments: Maya, southeast Asia, Madagascar.   Those cities extend up to 1000 sq km, or more, encompassing high proportions of agricultural lands (and consequently relatively low densities of population).  But key environmental parameters which fostered low density urbanism in tropical settings were paralleled by the Phoenix basin’s transformation from stinking desert to garden spot, via Hohokam’s remarkable canal systems.  As far as the crops knew, the valley of the sun had become a rain forest.   One very conspicuous difference, of course, is the absence of a monumental center: nothing in Phoenix provides an  obvious counterpart to Tikal’s pyramids and palaces, or to Angkor Wat’s temple complex.  We can assume that nothing comparably colossal will emerge from beneath Phoenix to surprise us; what we see is probably what we get.  But recall: cities without the state.  Perhaps a monumental core is not necessary.  Does Phoenix otherwise fit Fletcher’s model?  And if so, what does that say about the model, and about Phoenix?  Application of Fletcher’s “low-density, agrarian-based” model to Phoenix might transform Hohokam’s core from a valley of villages to a large, unconventional, low density proto-city.

Urbanism in the Southwest: so, what’s the score?  One hit (Chaco), one miss (Yellow Jacket), one outcome-under-review (Paquimé), and perhaps one whole-new-ballgame (Phoenix).  It seems clear – to me at least – that “city” belongs in the Southwestern archaeology’s lexicon, and that urbanism should become a useful focus for future Southwestern research.

Chapter Fragment: 3.B. Urbanism UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Video: Urbanism?

In this essay and the attached chapter fragment, I explore regional scales.   The Southwest is a great place to think about regional (large-scale) distributions, because we have tremendous control on the geography of ancient …  what?  What do large-scale distributions mean?   What are we to make of pottery styles which cover large portions of three states?  How do we understand large scale distributions of more esoteric items, like Hohokam ball courts?

Take, for example, Chaco and its notorious “outliers.”  We know of about 150 Chaco-era Great Houses, scattered across most of the northern Southwest.  (The official outlier count is up around 200, but at least 50 of those are post-Chaco in age.)   Does “Chacoan” mean simply a formal pattern (like “unit pueblo”), or should we understand the term to imply social and political entanglements?  Did 150 “Chacoan” Great Houses constitute a Chacoan regional system centered on Chaco Canyon?  Or something else…

Rephrased: How big was Chaco?  Several scholars have mapped Chaco’s region (e.g. Neitzell 1994; Wilcox 1993); in the accompanying illustration I simply surround the field of Chaco-era Great Houses with a polygon.  If that’s how big it was – or, rather, might have been.  If it’s that big it might have been, how might it have worked?  I will assume that Chaco was the center (leaving that term undefined, for now) and work out from the middle.  How far out from Chaco can we trust the “Chacoaness” of Great Houses?

Let’s begin with Chimney Rock, a far-flung outlier upon which everyone (more or less) agrees: it was Chacoan.  Chimney Rock is small Great House set atop a spectacular, narrow ridge, 300 m above the Piedra River (Eddy 1977; Todd and Lekson 2011).  Called the “ultimate outlier” (Malville 2004), Chimney Rock is probably the clearest, least ambiguous Chacoan “outlier” Great House in the whole catalogue.  Its architecture contrasts remarkably with the local traditions of the Piedra Valley.  And Chimney Rock was demonstrably tied to Chaco through a visual communication system (smoke and mirrors), discovered by (then) high school student Katie Freeman (Freeman et al. 1996).

Chimney Rock was linked to Chaco via a single repeater station at Huerfano Peak.  The Huerfano Peak repeater station and Pueblo Alto were easily intervisible.  The (probable) use of repeater stations suggests that this network a system: that is, a complicated arrangement that required cooperative or directed administration.  I believe, but cannot currently demonstrate, that the visual communication system extended over the entire Chacoan region.  The Chimney Rock-to-Chaco line-of-sight system was part of a much larger visual communication network originally recognized by Tom Windes and Alden Hayes (Hayes and Windes 1975) and currently being researched by Ruth Van Dyke.

Nobody argues about Chimney Rock: it’s an outlier, a Chacoan outlier, and the northeastern-most of that ilk.   At about 140 km distance from Chaco Canyon, Chimney Rock establishes a trial “radius” for Chaco’s eleventh century reach.  (Please note: I am not claiming that Chaco’s region was a perfect circle!  It was, in fact, the awkward polygon shown in the illustration.)   If we arc Chimney Rock’s radius around to the west, it neatly encompassed two other well known Great Houses that I firmly believe were Chacoan: Far View House at Mesa Verde and White House at Canyon de Chelly.  Compared to Chimney Rock, Far View and White House invite archeological demurrals, but the vast majority of Chaco scholars agree – and we hold these truths to be self-evident – that Far View House and White House were slam-dunk, lead-pipe-cinch outliers.  These three sites – all about 140 to 150 km from Chaco – offer a useful, empirically based scale for Chacoan regional dynamics.  It was at least that big.   Extended south, 140-150 km reaches Village of the Great Kivas at Zuni.

My radii have a bit of wobble or eccentricity (for example: 140 to 150 km), because it’s not altogether clear where we should hold Chaco’s end of the tape measure.  For the Chimney Rock radius, I will hereafter use 150 km.

But, of course, there were candidate Great Houses and potential “outliers” far beyond that radius.  How far?  Let’s start in the better known north, and then work south.  In the northern San Juan region, the Great House most distant from Chaco was “Owen’s Great House,” near the head of Grand Gulch in Utah and approximately 240 – 250 km distant from Chaco Canyon (hereafter, 250 km).  Owen’s, AKA 42SA24584, was discovered by Owen Severance and later recorded by Winston Hurst (IMACS 9/5/99) and R.G. Matson (p.c).  It sits near the head of Grand Gulch in southeastern Utah, the  northwestern-most “outlier.”  The site boasts the full suite of Great House features, including Great Kivas and roads, and dates to the late Pueblo II to early Pueblo III periods.  If Owen’s was picked up and dropped anywhere in the San Juan Basin, it would fit right in.

Owen’s Great House is as far out as anyone has ever claimed a Chacoan outlier – about 250 km from Chaco.  Striking a 250 km arc around the northern Southwest encompasses all would-be Great Houses, and – intriguingly – very nearly cuts through a  ruin near Reserve, NM, 245 km from Chaco, which may be the southernmost candidate Great House: Aragon, near Reserve, NM.  Aragon was first described by Hough (1907).  Hough’s photos show massive (core and veneer?), carefully-coursed walls at the pueblo and a nearby round, masonry Great Kiva.  A later, brief description in Wendorf (1954) noted a “[“-shaped pueblo of three stories with eleventh- and twelfth-century ceramics, near a deep, round, masonry-walled Great Kiva.  The site was bulldozed in the 1970s.  From Hough’s and Wendorf’s description, Aragon was identified as a candidate “outlier,” independently by Lekson (during outlier hunts of the 1980s, but not published in 1999b) and, more importantly, by Steven LeBlanc (1989b).

Those two concentric circles or, rather, partial arcs are based, more-or-less, on data.  I’ve come to think of 150 km as Chaco’s inner circle, and 250 km as the outer limits of Chaco’s region.  What do those terms mean – if anything?  The inner circle radius of 150 km was a minimum, archaeologically warranted: Chimney Rock and other Great House sites are our surety that Chaco got at least that far, it was at least that big.  The outer limits at 250 km could be dismissed as the twisted projections of a fevered imagination, yet Owen’s Site is in almost every respect identical to outliers well within the 150 km inner circle: Owen’s is a cookie cutter outlier, much like a hundred others in and around the San Juan Basin.   I think the 150 km and 250 km territorial limits are real, with real implications.

Tumpline Economies

What might 150 km and 250 km mean, when sandals hit the pavement?  I think 150 km was the practical maximum for bulk economies, and 250 km was the outer limits of Chaco’s political economies and political control.

Corn probably was moving in, through, and around Chaco (Benson et al. 2003; Benson et al. 2006).  On what scale?  Kent Lightfoot (1979) suggested a 50 km limit for “prehistoric food redistribution” at Chaco; beyond that limit, he thought, transport became uneconomical – the porter ate his portage.  Lightfoot’s 50 km limit became a rule of thumb – and another nail in the coffin of Chaco’s “complex cultural ecosystems” and chiefly “redistribution” (e.g., Sebastian 1992:88).  But 50 km is far too tight a leash around Chaco.  That radius gets you only the stinking deserts of the interior San Juan Basin, and fails to reach the relatively richer farm lands around the Basin’s edge, where it seems likely that at least some of the corn found in Chaco was grown.  Lightfoot’s limit is too small, probably far too small.  Robert Drennan (1984), looking at food transport in Mesoamerica, set a much longer limit for regular bulk commerce: an absolute (and extreme) maximum distance of 275 km.  “Ordinarily, we should expect transport of such staples to be restricted to substantially shorter distances” (Drennan 1984:110).  And, more recently, Nancy Malville (who studies porters world-wide) concluded that “foot transport of food stuffs and durable goods would have been feasible in the pre-Hispanic American Southwest on a regular basis over distances of at least 100 to 150 km and on an occasional basis over much longer distances” (Malville 2001:230; see also Santley and Alexander 1992:44, who independently estimate an outer limit of 150 km for Postclassic “trafficking in bulky goods”).  The limit for regular bulk goods transportation was on the order of 150 km – that is, Malville’s 150 km “regular basis” bulk goods distance – and my empirical radius for undisputed Chaco.

Recent sourcing research suggests that foodstuffs moved about within Chaco’s inner circle (Benson et al. 2003; Benson et al. 2006).  Those analyses are somewhat controversial, but we cannot question that long distance bulk transport took place: very large quantities of ceramics (Toll 2006) and astonishing numbers of large construction timbers (Betancourt et al. 1986).   I believe that the “empirical” radii – inner circle of 150 km for inarguable “outliers” and outer limits of 250 km for more dicey Great Houses – actually may represent real scale thresholds or limits of ancient economies.  150 km radius contained the bulk-goods, subsistence economy; 250 km was the outer edge of the region Chaco could claim to control or directly influence.  Bulk goods shipped via Chaco might occasionally have reached as far as 250 km (Drennan’s 275 km limit) – around the outer limits of Chaco’s sphere of influence.  Precious prestige goods – macaw feather artifacts, copper bells, cacao beans, and so forth – could easily reach out and touch someone at 250 km.

Certainly bulk transport moving between and among Great Houses and NOT passing through Chaco could have created local subsistence economies, even market economies (Kohler, Van Pelt and Yap 2000), paralleling markets in the contemporary Hohokam world (Abbot 2000).   But that is another question.

 A Detour: Export and Emulation

Whatever it was, beyond that 250 km radius lie sites with which to define the subtle, indefinite quality of “emulation.”  Much of the recent chatter about outliers revolves around “export” vs. “emulation:” were distant Great Houses Chaco colonies (“export”) or were they local yokels buying in (“emulation”).  How to tell?  If we seek really obvious potential emulators, I’d look for exceptional Chaco-era sites well beyond the limits of the most expansive interpretation of the Chacoan world (i.e., more than 250 km from Chaco)—sites that have large, massive, formal buildings, central to a community of relatively smaller, less formal domestic structures (i.e., the “big bump” pattern of a Great House surrounded by a community of unit pueblos; Lekson 1991). That is, emulations might be seen most clearly at sites clearly beyond Chaco’s political or economic reach — but which resemble conventional Great Houses in function, if not in architectural details.  In such places, local leaders took on the appearance, but perhaps not the obligations and entanglements, of Chacoan society.

Beyond the 250 km radius, such sites occur – I think – in the Mimbres and Fremont regions, at opposite ends of the Anasazi world.  In the Mimbres, I long ago suggested that the massive central room block at the huge Woodrow Site was, perhaps, a Mimbres emulation of northern Great Houses (Lekson 1992).  And in the Fremont region, with structures such as “Heartbreak Hotel” at Nawthis Village in east central Utah, an unusually large, formal structure built of massive puddled adobe (Madsen 1989; Talbot 2000:220-221; Jones and O’Connell 1981) that is remarkable in its Fremont context—a “big bump”?  Another candidate, far to the south, is Tla Kii (Haury 1985; contra Herr 2001 and Mills 2002): not enormous, but notably different from contemporary settlements in its area.  And attached to an odd (and oddly out of place) round Great Kiva.  Unlike Woodrow Ruin (built of river cobbles) and Nawthis Village (adobe), Tla Kii has a few Chacoan details in wall construction.  But, regardless of construction fabric, all three represent “big bumps” among unit-pueblo-sized structures and, I suggest, all three are good places to think about “export” and “emulation.”  Here’s Lekson’s postulate: “If you can argue about whether or not a site is a Great House, it just might be an ‘emulation’.”  Chimney Rock was an “export;” Woodrow Ruin was an “emulation.”

States, Secondary States, and Ethno-genesis

It has been suggested that “tribalization” (an unfortunate term) was the predicable response of indigeneous, undifferentiated populations to intrusive states (Fried 1975; see also Barth 1969; Ferguson and Whitehead 1992; Jones 1997; Levine and Campbell 1972; Voss 2008).  ”Tribe,” in this context, does not mean a stage on the evolutionary escalator between “bands” and “chiefdoms”; rather, a tribe was (and is) an ethnically self-identified group which (I add) encompassed multiple communities (see Chapter 3.A.).  Thus “tribalization” equals ethno-genesis.  In most anthropological studies, the process is or was spurred by modern colonial state intrusions.  I suggest that the same or similar processes should characterize reactions of un- or less differentiated peoples at any time, when confronted by the formality and power of a state.

Chaco was a secondary state (Chapter 4B) – not a great and powerful empire, but still a state in a place previously free from the dubious pleasures of political organization.   Chaco transformed the Pueblo Southwest – or, it certainly could have.  Chaco’s 250 km wing-span stretched from Hopi on the west, to Pecos on the east; from the limits of agricultural society on the north to the Mogollon Rim and Hohokam on the south.  In effect, the northern Southwest.  Chaco may not have “controlled” the Rio Grande, but every decision made by Developmental and Classic period Rio Grande leaders was framed and constrained by Chaco, and by memories of Chaco.  So too, for Kayenta and Tusayan to the west.

How would we see “tribalization” and ethno-genesis in the Southwest?  At a very broad – but not, I think, crude – level, we could look at ceramic decoration.  Consider the remarkably broad, homogeneous distribution of Red Mesa-style designs just prior to Chaco; and the splintering and specialization of design systems immediately after Chaco.   Does that marked change reflect tribalization, ethno-genesis sparked by a state-level polity appearing amid an undifferentiated regional population?

Of course, it was more complicated than that…or was it?   To be sure, the history was more complicated (Lekson 2009): prior to A.D. 500, the northern Southwest was split, east-west, into two populations with a very similar common materials culture (LeBlanc et al 2007) – notably, in ceramic design.  Beginning about A.D. 500, the northern Southwest saw a series of “start up” secondary secondary states, which failed in sequence but which finally “took” around A.D. 850 with Chaco (Lekson 2009).  Chaco was a successful secondary state.  Chaco thereafter dominated the northern Southwest, first from a capital at Chaco Canyon until about A.D. 1090, and then (less successfully) from a second capital at Aztec Ruins from A.D. 1090 to 1300.  After 1300, the Pueblo region balkanized and – after tumult and shouting, Sturm und Drang – “settled out” in the modern, ethnically-separate Pueblos.  Reactions to (and against) a secondary state at Chaco was the catalyst for ethnogenesis – the creation of relatively small, ethnic or “tribal” units, from a previously culturally homogeneous regional population.  I will argue (in Chapter 6 B) that ethnic diversity within the Pueblo region resulted from the experiences of polyglot or multi-lingual but broadly similar local populations (i.e., “culture areas”) – into tightly defined “ethnicities” defined by mono-lingual “us-them” identities.

The history was more complicated, but I suggest that the dynamic may have been (relatively) straightforward: just as the intrusion of European states sparked ethno-genesis, causing indigenous populations to tribalize and develop ethnic identities we see today in the several Pueblos.

This suggestion is much at odds with conventional views of Pueblo prehistory, which map ethnicity directly on (or under) linguistics.   Indeed, a state in the Southwest (with consequent ethnogenesis) probably requires a close re-evaluation of historical linguistics!  And it makes a mess of NAGPRA.  NAGPRA wants us to identify an ethnic group in the past and affiliate it with a group in the present.  What if, before A.D. 1300, there were no ethnic groups?   At least, as we use that term today.

Chapter fragment: 4.A. Regional Scales

Video (sorry: rough audio!): Regional Scales

In this essay and the attached chapter fragment, I deal with “scalar thresholds:” how big can human groups get before X or Y happens?  And why?  Scalar thresholds have been recognized for decades; they are of interest to a wide range of disciplines from philosophy to AI.   I think Southwestern archaeology can ally with evolutionary cognitive science and complexity science to resolve scalar threshold issues – “resolve” as: to make clearer; not as: to solve.

The ancient Southwest offers remarkably useful data for the study of scalar thresholds, particularly within communities or settlements (I’ll use the two terms interchangeably).  “Community” means the settlement of potential daily, face-to-face interaction.  That can be a massed, compact “pueblo” or a scattered Chacoan “community” (another use of the word, but proper I think).  Community does not mean everyone must interact with everyone, every day; rather, there’s the strong possibility of interaction between and among everyone, every day.  In this summary essay: first, the problem and its solution; then, how that solution connects with larger intellectual issues; then, back to the Southwest to apply the solution.  For a much longer, rougher presentation, see the chapter fragment.

Here’s the specific problem: how big can a permanent community get before it requires governance – specifically, centralized, formal, institutional, hierarchical governance?   Cross-cultural studies by me, Kristina Kosse, and others show that a hard threshold exists at about 2,500 people.  That is, if a permanent settlement or community exceeds (approximately) 2,500 people, it almost always will have permanent, institutional, centralized, hierarchical governance: a chieftain, a mayor, a king, whatever.  (Exceptions are discussed in the chapter fragment.)

The actual value varies of course a few hundred people either side of 2,500 – all figures in this essay must be understood as approximate, not absolute.

I’ve taken to calling [>2,500 = governance] the “Kosse-Lekson rule” or K-L rule because Kosse’s and my analyses converged and agreed, independently, in the early 1980s.  (I published first, she published best.)  At the time, I suggested that some sort of mental “hard wiring” might underlie the K-L rule – social channel capacity?  Rule of Six? – but I didn’t pursue that line of thought.  Kosse also proposed that the 2,500 limit was some sort of cognitive threshold or tipping-point: in a community of that size, people’s brains overloaded and they required new levels of socio-political structure for things to work.  But what was the mechanism or dynamic, exactly?

Kosse explored the emergent order of complexity theory – specifically Stuart Kauffman’s families of mathematical models, which mimicked important aspects of human society.  Kauffman developed K=2 Boolean networks in which everything is “connected” to everything, mathematically.  In K=2 networks, “order” (or, in this case, governance) simply emerges – intrinsically, mathematically – at particular numerical thresholds.  That is, governance might be an emergent property, “order for free.”  Using Kauffman’s networks, Kosse identified likely thresholds or tipping-points at approximately 7, 25, 150, 500 and 2,500.  All correspond to thresholds observed by other researchers in other situations, discussed in the chapter fragment:

7:   the Rule of Six  – a rule of thumb in business for the maximum number of simultaneous interactions – is actually the Rule of 5-7.

25:    Man the Hunter‘s number for hunter-gatherer band size.

150:   Dunbar’s Number (discussed below).

500:   Birdsell’s “magic number”for extended H&G social networks  and minimum for governance in cross-cultural studies.

2,500:   the K-L rule.

Kosse’s numbers are “real” – that is, they are based on empirical observations or projections from empirical data; and they are “theoretical,” derived from Kauffman’s K=2 networks.  Sadly, Kosse was unable to follow up her provocative, intriguing research.  She died in 1995 and we lost a very talented, very smart archaeologist.

Can we generate the K-L rule with Kosse’s numbers?  The Rule of Six is prominent in archaeological thinking (through the work of Gregory Johnson, and more recent developments by Wes Bernardini) but its application to the K-L problem is not immediately obvious.  Nor does the “magic number” for H&G band size – 25 – seem relevant.  (6 and 25 may prove very important; I’m simply saying that I don’t currently see their significance; suppler minds may – and, I hope, will!)  Thresholds at 150 and 500, however, almost certainly have implications – social and numerical – 150 for understanding the K-L rule, and 500 for understanding secondary states (a topic explored in Chapter 4.B, and below).

150 is “Dunbar’s number:” the number of people an individual can actually know effectively as individuals.  It is named for Robin I. M. Dunbar, a central figure in human evolutionary cognitive neuroscience.  Dunbar noticed that in primates (apes, monkeys, chimps etc) the size of a social group in the wild was closely correlated with the size of their brain’s neocortex.  Bigger the neocortex, bigger the group.  Humans have really big neocortexes.  Extrapolating from his primate data, Dunbar suggested that humans can know – really know, as individuals – a maximum of 150 people.  (2,000 cyber-friends on Facebook don’t count.)  Beyond that number, we have to categorize, put people into groups based on kinship (real or fictive), social strata, costume clues, linguistic keys, places of residence, or other dimensions that work in our particular society.

There is evidence, I think, for Dunbar’s Number at Chaco.  Consider Casa Rinconada.  Its interior above-bench circumference is 200′.  By ergonomic standards (18″ seat-width), Casa Rinconada can seat about 125-135 people.   Ruth van Dyke (2007:199) calculated that “75 people could stand around the 56 m circumference of an 18 m great kiva”; using my seating standards, 123 people could sit [added to this  post 9/16/11].   Of course those are modern standards; readers who have attended events at Pueblos know that Pueblo proxemics can be tight.   200 people might possibly jam together around Casa Rinconada’s bench; surely that’s an absolute maximum, or very close to it.  Great Kivas were designed with the thought and planning that typified Chacon architecture.  That is, they had a good idea of function, capacity, audience, and so forth before they laid the building out.  Casa Rinconada was intended to seat between 125 and 200 people – simple averaging gives us about 160.  (Most Great Kivas was not quite that large; average above-bench diameter = 16.2m; seating = 112 to 167.)   It’s important to note that we have no idea what went on in Great Kivas.  Wholesale transportation of modern Pueblo kiva functions – a la Aztec Ruins National Monument – is off the table (see “Chaco as Altepetl“).  All we can say is that about 150 people (maybe a few more) could sit around in a big circle and see and hear each other – and see and hear anything going on center-stage.   Dunbar’s number suggests that those people probably knew each other; that is, they represented a community.

How to use Dunbar’s Number?  I begin with two working assumptions (mine, not Dunbar’s) and a conundrum: (1) small groups make decisions through consensus: councils, assemblies, etc., with situational leadership, of course, but without permanent ruler roles; (2) consensus works best, and perhaps requires mutual social knowledge of all actors; it’s hard to reach consensus with strangers.  And here’s the conundrum: Dunbar’s Number suggests that the largest group in which everyone could know everyone else was about 150 people.  Thus we might expect governance to appear at or above 150, but the real threshold is the K-L rule of 2,500.

To get from Dunbar’s Number 150 to the K-L rule 2,500, we need a function or multiplier – or divisor.  Not all 2,500 people in a community “matter,” politically.  Kids, for example, don’t have a lot of political clout.  OK: how many people are actually involved in community decision-making?   How many were “players”?

I will assume that governance is normally a matter for adults (despite recent events in Washington, strongly suggesting the contrary).  And usually, sad to say, governance is very often the business of adult males (which may, in part, explain recent events in Washington).  For those annoyed by my gender assumptions, feel free to substitute “adult female players.”

How many adult male (or female) “players” could there be?   Let’s start with a community of 2,500, at the K-L threshold.  Southwestern populations averaged about 60:40 adults:kids, so we reduce 2,500 to 1,500 adults.  For this exercise, let’s assume 50:50 males:females, so that reduces 1,500 to 750.  Of course it’s not that simple.  At Paquimé, the ratio of men to women was 40:60 (captive women?).   But let’s work with 750: that’s the pool of all adult males.  Dunbar’s Number suggests an assembly of 750 equals would be unworkable.   But all adult males are not equal.  There are honored elders, for example; and at the other end of spectrum, there are young punks who have yet to do anything useful.  We can assume that not all 750 were equal “players.”  The actual number was less, probably far less.  But how many?  Can’t say: we’ve come to the end of this line of analysis.

Let’s work from the bottom up: families – the basic social unit of society.  Maybe players didn’t need to know everybody; they needed to know families.  Indeed, players needed to know only heads-of-households, heads-of-families, heads-of-lineages.  (This insight came from my colleague Dr. Catherine M. Cameron, who actually knows astonishing details about many more people than Dunbar would expect…really big neocortex?)

How many heads-of-households in a community of 2,500?   That depends on how big a family was.  Wes Bernardini estimated that a 13th century Unit Pueblo – a household – was, on average, about 13 people: 8 adults and 5 kids.  (That’s at the lower end of the global range for extended families, about 10 to 20 people.)  If families/ households averaged 13 people, then a community of 2,500 would have around 200 heads-of-households – slightly more than one-quarter of the total pool of 750 adult males.

Recall Dunbar’s number: 150.  750 is far beyond the cognitive comfort level; 200 is much closer, but still too high.  A community of 2,000 (with 13-member extended families) had about 150 heads-of-households, and a hope of consensus among players.  At 2,500, that number reached 200 and one-quarter of the assembly were strangers.  When the number of players significantly exceeded 150 – say, pushing 200 – things fell apart.  Time for a king.

Perhaps, as was recently claimed in Science, people are naturally egalitarian.  Influential political philosophies are based on that claim.  But maybe, above a certain community size, people become naturally or necessarily hierarchical – above the K-L rule.  Same people, same nature/nurture, but they’ve crossed a cognitive threshold.  If that’s so, it would be really interesting.

I do not claim that these thought experiments and number games “solve” the K-L rule, but I think they “resolve” it a bit.   The addition of other functions and factors (perhaps a role for the Rule of Six?) may lead us, ultimately, to a workable mathematical model of the K-L rule and the rise of hierarchical governance.  I continue to work on this, but I am hopeful that younger minds will tackle this problem, or some version of it. (Bernadini has done interesting work on scalar stress at Oriabi, building on the Rule of Six; we need more of this, incorporating Dunbar’s Number and other “cognitive constants.”)

The Southwest is particularly well suited for these studies.  The accessibility and clarity of settlement plans – especially later, when settlements got big – gives us a remarkable set of data.  Estimating population is a favorite activity; we do it early and often.  Archaeologists may bemoan the ambiguities and difficulties of estimating population but those gripes (about details) indicate a developed or developing methodology.  We are very good at mapping towns and better-than-fair at estimating their population.

As discussed in the chapter fragment, ancient settlement and modern Pueblo populations consistently topped out under 2,000 people.  A handful bumped up against the K-L rule.  And a very few exceeded it.

Chaco and Paquimé were two Southwestern sites for which we can safely assume centralized, formal, elaborate hierarchical governance.  How big were they?  Decades ago, I estimated Chaco’s peak population, beginning with the assumption that small “kivas” were in fact domestic structures, with one “kiva” per family.  I multiplied the number of Pueblo II “kivas” at Chaco (both Great Houses and small sites) by 6.5 – a family size calculated from the floor area of pit structures.  With those assumptions, I estimated 2,100 to 2,700 permanent residents at Chaco – conveniently straddling the K-L rule, before that rule was discovered!   If we use Bernadini’s extended family figure of 13 – derived from the floor area of the “pueblo” portion of Unit Pueblos (“single kiva sites”) – that figure doubles: 4,200 to 5,400!  (Of course it’s more complicated…etc.).  It would take special pleading to drop Chaco far below 2,500 – but the Chaco literature is rife with special pleading.

Paquimé, according to Charles Di Peso (who excavated the site) had a peak population of about 4,700 – well over the K-L rule.  Michael Whalen and others (American Antiquity 75(3), 2010) recently argued that Paquimé was, in fact, only half as big as Di Peso claimed.   I tend to trust the excavator; but maybe Di Peso was wrong and Whalen is right.   That could drop Paquimé’s population to around 2,350 – bumping up against the K-L rule threshold!   In fact, Whalen published an estimate of 2,500 people at Paquimé; but that number was offered only as an approximation.   Whalen simply halved Di Peso’s estimate, to illustrate the effect of halving Paquimé’s size; but I like it a lot!

However the cheese is pared, Chaco and Paquimé both approached or exceeded 2,500 – larger than any other settlement of their times, and almost all Pueblo towns that followed.  Ancient and modern Pueblos almost never exceeded 1,500.  Two or three reached or exceeded 2,500, with exceptional causes and shattering results   Awatovi was one; it was destroyed.   Zuni was another, with multiple villages clustering in defense against Spanish colonizers; nevertheless, it was colonized and became a part of the colonial world system, and no longer a stand-alone society.  (More on this in the chapter fragment).

Chaco and Paquimé reached that limit, developed governments, and lasted for many generations.   At both Chaco and Paquimé, governance might have “emerged” as a function of the K=2 networks, Dunbar’s Number, and the K-L rule.  But there is excellent and abundant evidence that both polities were heavily influenced by Mesoamerica; that is, both were almost certainly secondary states (the subject of Chapter 4.B).  They did not invent government.

Governance at Chaco may have developed – or rather, was purposefully instituted, by leaders following southern models – at relatively small population levels.  Here’s a K-L history for Chaco: (1) Chaco represented the last in a string of theretofore unsuccessful attempts by Great House families (nobles manqué) to establish polities in the northern San Juan area; (2) at relatively low population totals – perhaps 500, perhaps 1000 – the polity “took” in Chaco Canyon during the early and middle 900s, with three major noble families (Pueblo Bonito, Penasco Blanco and Una Vida), mimicking the Mesoamerican altepetl form; (3) starting around 1000, more noble families joined Chaco and built their Great Houses (and attached commoners built hundreds of unit pueblos) until Chaco approached and passed the K-L threshold; (4) political life then became locked-in and fixed: governance became both sufficient and necessary.

Recall that 2,500 is not necessary, it is sufficient.  With in situ growth to 2,500, order will emerge and governance becomes necessary.  But 500 people can support (or at least abide) a king.  I think the Chaco polity started – as a secondary state – well below the K-L threshold, in the Pueblo I period (Al Hayes estimated 1,600 for Pueblo I at Chaco, but of course this figure has been contested, downward).  The hierarchies and apparatus of statehood, however, became essential – absolutely necessary – when Chaco reached 2,500.  Thus, the Chaco polity was not “emergent” – it was in every sense artificial.  Chaco (and Paquimé) were secondary states, borrowing from Mesoamerican traditions of governance and rulership.  History trumped emergent complexity.   Chaco succeeded (i.e., persisted), however, because it reached the K-L threshold, at which point governance was no longer optional.  The institutions of governance became traditions.  It persisted even when it hit hard times and diminished scales – dipped back below K-L – with the shift from Chaco to Aztec Ruin in the early 12th century.  The Chaco polity lasted, in one form or another, for almost four centuries.  That’s a long time for a start-up kingdom.

Paquimé was both secondary and big – as far as we can tell, very close to the K-L rule much earlier in its history than Chaco.  There was a local run-up (and a lot of outside help) but when the city itself appeared (about 1300), it rose in a hurry right (see “Black Mountain and Paquimé” on the Sites page).  Again, scale “locked in” the need for political structure, earlier in the particular history of Paquimé than at Chaco.  Paquimé persisted until 1450 – not a bad run for a Postclassic state!

Chapter fragment: 3.A. Settlement Scalar Thresholds

Video: Scalar Thresholds

FOR A MORE DEVELOPED VERSION SEE “Chaco altepetl”

If you were directed to this essay from American Archaeology, you may be interested in “Chaco Through the Looking Glass.”

In recent publications and presentations, I advocate new ways of thinking about, and new sources for understanding the ancient Southwest.  Conventionally, Southwestern archaeology refers constantly (explicitly or implicitly) to modern Native groups – most often Pueblos.  Even in the heady, sciency, ahistorical days of New Archaeology, archaeology was still anthropology…or it was nothing.  And anthropological New Archaeology projected modern (i.e. ethnographic) Pueblo kinship systems back to 14th century Mogollon sites (Broken K and Carter Ranch).  Pueblos have always been our principal frame of reference for thinking about the ancient Southwest, at least the north half.

Ethnography may be a valuable resource for archaeology – if used critically.   The obvious pitfall, into which we leap like lemmings, is prochronism: projecting the ethnographic present back into the back.   Prochronism is an obvious logical flaw, but it’s taught as a method: “direct historic approach” in days past, and today’s “up-streaming.”  Time does not work that way; time does not flow from present to past, it runs from past to present.  

Consider the remarkable changes in the five centuries between Basketmaker III and Pueblo III – so different that early archaeologists (very reasonably) thought they were two different cultures.  Then consider the changes in the five centuries between the end of Pueblo III at 1300 – a watershed year – and the 1800s, when systematic ethnography began.   Differences were profound, between what ethnographers saw in the 19th century and what Native peoples did in the 9th or 10th or 11th centuries.  For the ancient past, Pueblo ethnography is not sufficient and indeed may not even be necessary – for some questions, ethnography does more harm than good.

Up-streaming pushes elements of the Pueblo present far back into the past, and renders the whole processes almost unbearably teleological.   Our job is not to chase kivas as far back into prehistory as possible; our job is to figure out what a pit structure actually was in the 10th century, in its contemporary context, and then follow that form forward.   In the process we should see if — or if not — 10th century pitstructures have anything useful to say about the history of modern kivas.   (They don’t, actually.)

Instead of Puebloan frames of reference, I suggest that we look at what was happening in ancient North America in those times – the Southwest’s actual context.   For example: Chaco.  Leading interpretations view Chaco through the lens of Pueblo ethnology.  I argue that Pueblo societies developed, historically, in reaction to and rejection of Chaco, after 1300.  If that is true (and it is), then we need other, independent, non-Puebloan “triangulation points” to define, delimit, and understand Chaco’s (and the Southwest’s) ancient past.  Chaco, I think, should be contextualized by its contemporaries, specifically Mesoamerica in the 9th through 13th centuries (Early and Middle Postclassic periods).

Urging (past) contemporary contexts is all very well and good, but where has it gotten us?  I make a lot of noise about this stuff: where’s the beef?  In A History of the Ancient Southwest (2009), I tried to build histories and to develop continental contexts – constructing new frames of reference, so to speak.  I suggested “kings” at Chaco, based on generalized Mesoamerican forms.  But I did not present a detailed account of Southwest and Mesoamerica, nor (apparently) did I paint a convincing picture of Chaco in its time and place.  Chaco remains everyone’s favorite mystery, with a truly staggering range of mutually exclusive interpretations.

The mystery of Chaco: we have plenty of data, so we should be able to solve that mystery.  By properly contextualizing Chaco and by casting our interpretive nets beyond the Pueblo space – into Mesoamerica – I think we can indeed “solve” Chaco.  I am now confident that Mesoamerican models more accurately and effectively represents ancient Chaco than any current, competing model.  Chaco was an altepetl.

In brief: the ubiquitous local polity in Postclassic Mesoamerica was a small unit termed, in Nahua, altepetl (plural altepeme; and hereafter not italicized).*   This political formation was also common among many non-Nahua groups.  The altepetl form probably began in the Classic period, and perhaps even earlier.  Thus, the altepetl political form was wide spread across Mesoamerica, and it was antecedent and contemporary with Chaco.  And (I assert) it would have been known to Chaco and pre-Chaco societies in the Southwest.  (Fuller descriptions with references will be found in the chapter fragment.)

The altepetl was NOT a great empire like those of the Aztecs and Tarascans.  Those empires encompassed hundreds of altepeme.  An altepetl was, in fact, rather small.  The population of known altepeme averaged about 12,000 people, and ranged from to as few as 2,000 to as many as 40,000 people.  Altepetl territory was also small; typically about 75 sq km.  We will return to the matter of size – size matters! – at the end of this essay.

Our knowledge of altepeme comes from both codices and archaeology (reviewed in the Chapter 4 Fragment).  In brief, an altepetl consisted of a hierarchy of multiple noble families and their associated commoners, within a defined agricultural territory.  It was a tributary system, in which commoners owed goods or labor to their noble families, and minor nobles to major nobles, and so forth.  But tribute was not oppressive: a few bushels of corn, a few weeks labor, occasional military service, and so forth.  Nobles ruled their own commoners, who might (or might not) be localized within a spatial segment of the altepetl.  Rulership of the altepetl itself revolved through the leading noble families.   There was a king, but the office was not strong nor did it descend in a kingly line.  By the time of the codices, numerological and cosmological rules defined the ideal altepetl form. Theoretically, an ideal altepetl would have eight major noble families; but of course this varied in practice.  If the numerological rules codified an older, existing reality, eight could be considered a reasonable “median” (if ideal) number of major noble families,

Noble families were distinguished (in life and in archaeology) by their palaces: noble houses, elite residences.  Noble houses (palaces) could be located in the countryside among commoner farmsteads, but palaces of the major noble families clustered within a tight central zone, often at a place notable in the altepetl’s history.  (Noble families might also have another palace in the countryside.)  This “central cluster” might be considered urban.  Some archaeologists call them city-states; others deny that the central cluster was fully urban.  The central cluster – most notably boasting multiple noble houses – certainly had urban aspects, but typically it was rather small: median population was about 4,750 people (with a range of 600 to 23,000 people).  One third of Aztec altepeme central clusters, for example, had less than 3,000 people.  Minor nobility and officials resided in smaller palaces in the central cluster and throughout the altepetl.

What does all this have to do with Chaco?  Decades ago, I noted that Chaco Canyon was perhaps one of the most obvious examples of “stratified housing” in all of archaeology.  It was almost Cretan in its clarity.  The major Great Houses were markedly different from normal houses, the ubiquitous unit pueblo.   This was not subtle or nuanced: the archaeology gods pitched us a softball to hit.  Great Houses and unit pueblos almost certainly demonstrated two social divisions, two strata, two classes.  The passing years have added more and more data supporting that conclusion.  The evidence as it now stands seems, to me, overwhelming.  Great Houses were NOT pueblos; nor were they temples; nor were they hotels.  Great Houses were noble houses, elite residences, or – gasp! – palaces.

If one accepts that Chaco Great Houses were palaces or noble houses, the similarities to the altepetl form become (almost) obvious.  The cluster of major Great Houses in Chaco Canyon is remarkably similar to the central cluster of an altepetl.  The Chaco central cluster was there, I think, because Chaco Canyon itself was historically important — much like an altepetl central cluster.  Centuries before the first Great House, Chaco Canyon had seen remarkable developments in Basketmaker III (huge sites, unique in the northern Southwest).  That recalls foundation myths of altepetl central clusters, built at significant places.  The seven or eight major Great Houses in Chaco, in this model, represent the altepetl’s seven or eight major noble families.  Other buildings represent cadet branches, minor nobility, priesthoods, and so forth.  Chaco Canyon itself presents a remarkably parallel form to the altepetl central cluster, as diagrammed by Aztec scholars and archaeologists .  Even the ambiguities and arguments about Chaco’s urban status mirror similar debates about Aztec central clusters.

The radial divisions of Chaco’s region, marked by scores of secondary Great Houses and above all by roads, parallel the (idealized) radial spatial sub-divisions of many altepetl, with each noble family controlling its piece of the pie.  As with the altepetl, commoner residences were built within the central cluster and (of course) throughout the region, with secondary Great Houses (i.e., “outliers”) taking care of business out in the boonies.  Like the altepetl, there is no useful separation of center and countryside: the ensemble constitutes the polity, presciently termed as the Chaco regional system.

“Downtown” Chaco was comparable in population to altepetl central clusters: the architectural evidence suggests that Chaco had two to three thousand permanent residents.  We do not know the population of Chaco’s larger region, but it was surely several tens of thousands (at a guess: thirty to forty thousand people) – at the upper end of altepetl size, but a demographic scale that perhaps could be handled administratively by altepetl political structure.  That is, the demographic scale of Chaco seems appropriate for altepetl organization – or vice versa.   (Spatial scale was decidedly different – an issue discussed shortly.)

There were, of course, differences: Chaco translated Mesoamerican forms into local idioms of architecture, ideology, and cosmology.  Most altepeme central clusters had a pyramid and many had markets.  Chaco lacked pyramids and, perhaps, lacked markets.  John Stein and his colleagues argue for pyramids at Chaco; the jury is out.  Others argue that Chaco indeed had markets; and it is worth noting that half of the Aztec atlepeme central clusters also lacked markets.  Markets, it seems, were not essential.

Chaco, of course, had features and building types not seen in altepeme; for example, Great Kivas – although Great Kivas may represent, at least in part, “schools” sometimes found in altepetl central clusters.  Domestic architecture (a cultural bedrock!) differed enormously: north and west Mesoamerican houses generally comprised three or four free-standing small buildings centered tightly around a patio; Chaco people lived in nicely-built pithouses (often called kivas) with a suite of above-ground rooms to the rear.  Chaco palaces do not look like Mesoamerican palaces – Chaco palaces are a much bigger!  But they shared other, emblematic elements.

Material culture, social systems, and (presumably) ideologies of Chaco and Mesoamerican societies were quite distinct.  But altepetl and Chacoan political structures were very similar because Chaco elites could import or impose that sort of thing, top down.  Or – to make things more palatable – Chaco could have co-evolved an altepetl structure with significant knowledge of Mesoamerican systems.

The biggest difference between Chaco and altepeme is spatial scale.  While the probable population of Chaco’s region falls in altepetl ranges (at the high end), Chaco’s region (perhaps 100,000 sq km) is quite a bit larger than the altepetl average, 75 sq km.   The alarming difference in spatial scale, I think, may reflect differences in productivity between Chaco and Mesoamerica.   Mesoamerican altepeme enjoyed happy environments for corn, and high productivity supported dense populations in relatively small areas.  Chaco’s region, in stark contrast, was bleak.  Arable lands were scarce, minimally productive, scattered far and wide.  Overall population density was consequently quite low — pockets of settlement separated by large stretches of desert.  Chaco, I think, represents the altepetl political form stretched to its elastic limits, covering very difficult terrain.  Chaco tried to solve its scale problems with technology and ideology: roads and line-of-sight signaling systems held its over-large domain together.

In the end, Chaco failed.  Perhaps the altepetl political form was ill-suited for Chaco’s difficult environment and inflated spatial scale.  Just as likely, Chaco’s altepetl failed because it stood alone.  Mesoamerican altepeme were peer-polities, city-states (in the view of some archaeologists) jammed into central Mesoamerica.  Altepeme thrived on competition.  That was the altepetl’s proper context, the social and political environment in which it evolved.  While the political form could be copied, transplanted, or co-evolved in the Southwest, the altepetl’s larger context – highly productive agriculture and scores of peer-polities – could not.

Chaco was an altepetl – or purposefully altepetl-like.  Is this an outrageous interpretation?   Perhaps, if one holds a Pueblo-centric, teleological view of the ancient Southwest.   Or if one is committed to a largely autochthonous Southwest, removed from its larger world.   But in this brave new century, Chaco as altepetl should not alarm us.  Indeed, the altepetl has much to recommend it, above competing interpretations of Chaco.  The altepetl is not a sodality or curing society or kachina cult, plucked from enthographic Pueblos and pasted on the distant past.  Nor is it a novel construct, something we invent – ritualities, pilgrimage centers, etc – papering over an ancient polity which was clearly non- or un-Puebloan.  Nor is it an anthropological theory (like chiefdom) or an anthropological case-study, abstracted from societies distant in time and space (like sub-Saharan chiefdoms without chiefs).  The atlepetl was a real (and really common) Native form, of Chaco’s time and place (i.e, North America).  There are demonstrable, direct historical connections between Chaco and altepetl societies.  The altepetl form must have known to the northern Southwest and presumably well known indeed by Southwestern elites.  If Chaco wanted to create or evolve into a (secondary) state, the altelpetl would be the obvious way to go: not too big, not too small, just right.  Altepetl fits Chaco like a glove.

Case closed.   Mystery solved?

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*After much fruitless flailing in codices and accounts of Aztec and Tarascan empires, I despaired of finding Mesoamerican models appropriate to the Southwest.  I was introduced to the altepetl by my worthy and greatly esteemed colleague at CU, Dr. Gerardo Gutierrez, who knows much about the subject.  We are together working on another paper on this subject.  Dr. Gutierrez is not responsible for my mistakes and errors in this essay.

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Chapter 4.B.(2) fragment:  Chaco atepetl

Video: Verde Valley Chapter, Arizona Archaeological Society, April 28, 2011