University Press of Colorado
Chapter Title: Chaco Landscapes: A Personal Account
Chapter Author(s): Stephen H. Lekson
Book Title: The Greater Chaco Landscape
Book Subtitle: Ancestors, Scholarship, and Advocacy
Book Editor(s): RUTH M. VAN DYKE, CARRIE C. HEITMAN
Published by: University Press of Colorado. (2021)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1m46ffr.5
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). To view a copy of this license,
visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
University Press of Colorado is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to The Greater Chaco Landscape
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
2
Watch the video version of this chapter, recorded at Crow
Canyon Archaeological Center on August 14, 2017.
https://doi.org/10.5876/9781646421701.c002.v000
I’ve roamed over Chacoan landscapes for forty years
and I still haven’t figured ’em out. The chapters in this
volume go a long way toward that goal, with current
and cutting-edge research. They point toward the future.
My chapter looks to the past, a personal prehistory of
Chacoan landscape studies. I mix useful (I hope) history with mythical (I fear) personal recollections. Firstperson accounts, eyewitness evidence: peace officers
and trial lawyers will tell you that’s shaky stuff.
Chaco Landscapes
A Personal Account
Stephen H. Lekson
LANDSCAPES, CIT YSCAPES: CHACO CANYON
When Lt. James H. Simpson rode through Chaco
Canyon in 1849, he asked Native and Mexican guides
for the name of each ruin; they provided names, in a
variety of languages: Navajo, Pueblo, Spanish. Thus
each ruin was marked as a separately named entity:
Pueblo Bonito (which meant Pretty Town) was terminologically distinct from near-neighbor Chetro Ketl
(which meant who-knows-what). And so has archaeology taken them: each a “site,” separate and entire.
The early history of archaeology in the canyon reflects
that thinking, and also the outsized personalities of
the early heroic archaeologists: Neil Judd and Edgar
Hewett. Both were alpha males; they did not care
DOI: 10.5876/9781646421701.c002
17
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
for each other and could not share the canyon. Hewett, of Santa Fe, wanted
Chaco Canyon for the penurious Museum of New Mexico; Judd, however,
had established a robust research program for the (then) prosperous National
Geographic Society at Pueblo Bonito, Pueblo del Arroyo, Shabik’eschee, and
several other sites. When Hewett finally got to dig his site, Chetro Ketl, his
writings had little to say about Pueblo Bonito (save that it was smaller than
Chetro Ketl). When Judd finally got to write up Pueblo Bonito (decades later),
his writings had little to say about Chetro Ketl. And so on and so on, as the
philosopher says.
These divisions were not (only) the result of egos; both Judd and Hewett
genuinely considered their sites as distinct and separate villages—albeit surprisingly close neighbors. Proximity was not unprecedented: for example, First
Mesa at Hopi consists of three contiguous villages, and only a local can tell
where Hano ends and Sitsmovi starts. That situation at Hopi (and several
other Pueblos) represented a defense against Conquistadors and unsettled
times, now become habit and habitus. Prior to any colonial need for joining
forces (i.e., in Pueblo III and Pueblo IV), large Pueblo villages were more
often spaced at appropriate distance; or, in halcyon times (Pueblo II), broken
into their constituent single-family homes, scattered like Kansas farmsteads
across a peaceful landscape.
A half-dozen major “towns” and scores of smaller “villages”—in the terms of
those times—jammed together in the unlikely setting of Chaco Canyon gives
one pause. One who paused, productively, was Gordon Vivian. Gordon Vivian
was a student of Edgar Hewett’s and the first NPS archaeologist at Chaco.
He knew the canyon well and was impressed both by the density and variety
of its many sites. Vivian and his colleague Tom Mathews (1965), along with
dendrochronologist Bryant Bannister (1964), achieved the first real synthesis
of Chaco Canyon prehistory; and it was . . . complicated.
Vivian defined three contemporary phases, all sharing the canyon: the
Bonito and McElmo phases (two kinds of Great Houses, previously glossed
as “towns”) and the lowly Hosta Butte phase (small sites, previously glossed
as “villages”). These three, Vivian insisted, represented three different ethnicities sharing Chacoan space (expanding on Clyde Kluckhohn’s [1939]
earlier interpretation). Again, there were Pueblo precedents: to return to
First Mesa at Hopi, of the three coterminous villages, two are Hopi but one
is a Tewa transplant, an in-migration. How Chaco’s complex situation arose,
Vivian did not say; but in a too-often-overlooked comment on “cultural
values” he predicted where Chaco was headed: not to the ethnographically
documented Pueblos.
18
S T EP H EN H . LEK S O N
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The developments in the Chaco [Canyon] in the 11th and the early part of the
12th century were not in the direct line of the Northern Pueblo continuum as
it was exposed at the beginning of the historic period. The continuation of the
directions taken by the Chaco group would have carried it even farther out of
the stream of development that culminated in the Rio Grande [Pueblos] . . .
The distinctive traits that we have so often emphasized . . . all imply a growing
measure of specialization, social control, and interpueblo control. The elaboration
of these institutions of ever-increasing control, specialization, and centralized
authority was simply not compatible with the “slant” or “form” that directed
the destiny of the Desert Culture–Basketmaker–Rio Grande [Pueblo] continuum . . . In this light then, the highest developments in the Chaco [Canyon]
were cultural experiments or deviations that failed as they strayed from the main
course of Northern Pueblo history. (Vivian and Mathews 1965:115)
A man ahead of his times, and a passage I never tire of quoting because no
one else will. Now we need it more than ever (Lekson 2018 contra Ware 2014).
Vivian had rightly recognized (some of ) the different kinds of buildings in
Chaco Canyon and had offered an explanation congruent with the University
of New Mexico’s party line (see Vivian 1989). More than that, Vivian recognized that the various building types at Chaco were elements of a larger social
and architectural entity he called “the Contemporaneous Community,” which
he estimated at about 4,400 persons (Vivian and Mathews 1965:108). This was
a new way of looking at Chaco: not as a valley with a scattering of independent farming villages but as a large ensemble. The beginnings of a canyonscale landscape approach. . . .
There things stood for a decade: the town-village terms continued in the
work of Gordon’s son Gwinn Vivian (e.g., 1970) who further developed the
multiethnic model, but resolutely as “an egalitarian enterprise” (Vivian 1989,
1990). The early 1970s, however, saw the rise of putative “managerial elites” elsewhere in the ancient Southwest, and those short-lived enthusiasms spilled over
into Chaco: Paul Grebinger (1973) proposed that the two kinds of buildings
(towns and villages) housed two different kinds of peoples: an elite class (my
word, not his) in the Great House towns and nonelites in the smaller villages.
Here again, the canyon was not simply congeries of farming settlements, but
an integrated whole. Notions of elites and so forth frothed about for another
decade or two (e.g., Schelberg 1984; Sebastian 1992) before disappearing
beneath the awful weight of ritual and Pueblo ethnology (Lekson 2018), but
that argument is not central to our theme, which is the recognition of the canyon as a whole as a land- or cityscape, rather than a random collection of sites.
C H ACO L A N D S CA P ES
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
19
Not random at all! The next insight came from an unlikely source, a chapter in
a stridently scientific New Archaeology collection of papers: “Paleopsychology
Today: Ideational Systems and Human Adaptations in Prehistory” by John
M. Fritz (1978). Fritz, unfashionably for those times, favored the epiphenomenal fluff of ideology over good solid scientific adaptation. His case study was
Chaco Canyon, which he proposed was laid out symmetrically around an
ideological north-south axis running from Pueblo Alto on the north rim of
the canyon to Tsin Kletsin on the south. This indeed was a new way of looking
at Chaco, verging on fringe: ley lines and all that. Fritz was a decade ahead of
Maya cosmogram cities (e.g., Ashmore 1991). And he was talking about Chaco,
for heaven’s sake: Pueblo farming villages, not temples or palaces in a grand
Mayan city.
Yet there was something undeniably attractive about Fritz’s reading of
Chaco’s landscape, edging toward cityscape. It made sense. (And it has been
greatly developed by Lekson 1999b and Van Dyke 2007.) I regret to say I did
not cite Fritz in Great Pueblo Architecture, but I surely built on Gordon Vivian’s
and John Fritz’s insight that Chaco Canyon was an entity, not a collection of
sites (Lekson 1984a:272).
I added a few new wrinkles: modest monumentality (borrowing David
Wilcox’s words); regional centrality; and—most important—a class-stratified
society, marked by Great Houses and small houses: “Stratification in housing presumably reflected social distinctions in the population”—cautious and
careful, but there it was: class-stratified society (Lekson 1984a: 271). I did not
yet dare utter the word “city,” but urbanism hovered overhead. In a shorter,
more daring (i.e., less heavily censored) version: “It would not be unreasonable to see this complexity, when coupled with Chaco’s regional centrality
and relatively high population density, as nearly urban. By the middle 1100s,
Chaco was much closer to being a city than simply a canyon full of independent agricultural towns and villages” (Lekson 1984b:71). Thereafter, I escaped
Downtown Chaco, its cares and its woes, for a decade or so. But when I was
sucked back into Chaco’s black hole (e.g., Lekson et al. 2006:101–116), I called
a spade a spade, and a city a city: Chaco Canyon was not a landscape; Chaco
Canyon was a cityscape.
Through the 1990s the central canyon became the focus of the formidable archaeological talents of Messrs. John Stein, Richard Friedman, Taft
Blackhorse, and Richard Loose (2007), who saw monuments where others
saw mere mounds. Ringing in the new millennium, fresh theoretical insights
were brought to Chaco by Ruth Van Dyke (2007), whose Chaco Experience
presented a phenomenological analysis of Chaco.
20
S T EP H EN H . LEK S O N
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
REGION: OUTLIERS
The existence of Chaco-outside-Chaco was recognized in the early twentieth century at sites such as Lowry Ruin (190 km from Pueblo Bonito);
Chimney Rock (140 km from Pueblo Bonito); Village of the Great Kivas
(120 km from Pueblo Bonito); and Aztec Ruins (85 km from Pueblo Bonito).
By the third quarter of the century, Chaco-outside-Chaco faded from general interest, but not from the specific enthusiasm of archaeologists such as
Gwinn Vivian.
I got my start in Chacoan archaeology at Salmon Ruins (Reed 2006; 70 km
from Pueblo Bonito), where Cynthia Irwin-Williams had been lured away
from hunter-gatherers to tackle a major Chaco Great House in a field project
that ran from 1970 to 1978. Cynthia’s project was a lively endeavor. I joined
up in 1974 and survived until 1976, when—a husk of my former self, liver
shot to Hell (but I never inhaled!)—I moved on to the sober, sedate NPS
Chaco Center.
Salmon Ruins was a major Great House, as big as the major Chaco Canyon
sites but surprisingly unknown to science. Were there more of those Big Boys
out there, waiting to be discovered? (No, as it turns out, but we’ll get back to
that.) At the Chaco Center, as soon as it was decently possible (spring 1976, as
I recall), I approached the director Jim Judge with a proposal to go find more
Chaco sites. He informed me that only a week before, Bob Powers had made
the very same suggestion. That was propitious: I thought we would find more
Salmon Ruins, but Bob was a student of Gwinn Vivian and he knew that our
targets would be smaller, more modest: Chimney Rocks and Lowrys. So Bob,
William Gillespie, and I mounted a short survey (a month or so) in fall 1976,
to document fully three such “outliers” (Bis sa’ani, Peach Springs, and Pierre’s);
to briefly visit more; and to document as many candidates as the literature
revealed (Powers et al. 1983). The timing, again, was propitious: on the heels
of the NPS survey, another survey of “Anasazi Communities of the San Juan
Basin” was under way (1977–1979), led by Michael Marshall and John Stein.
That survey was the brainchild of Richard Loose, then an archaeologist for
the Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM). The company thought
it might burn coal from deposits in the San Juan Basin, and Loose persuaded
PNM and the Historic Preservation Bureau in Santa Fe to jointly sponsor a
proactive survey of the major sites in the coal area and beyond (Marshall, Stein,
Loose and Novotny 1979). There was considerable and convivial interaction
between the two surveys, and we visited the PNM crew at several of their sites
and vice versa. Michael Marshall went on to work with the Solstice Project
(among many other ventures). John Stein, too, continued to collect “outliers”
C H ACO L A N D S CA P ES
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
21
and Great Houses (e.g., Fowler and Stein 1992), as did others (Altschul 1978;
LeBlanc 1989; Wilcox 1999; chapters in Doyel 1992, Kantner and Mahoney
2000, Kantner 2003; Peeples et al. 2016; Heitman et al. 2016).
I’ve contributed (a bit) to the “outlier” files in this brave new millennium,
but I’d like to revisit the thrilling days of yesteryear and the initial challenges
of convincing archaeologists that “outliers” were (1) real and (2) in their backyards. The initial (1977–1979) “outlier hunts” were focused on the San Juan
Basin of northwestern New Mexico, but soon spread into Colorado, Utah, and
Arizona, and south in New Mexico well beyond the San Juan Basin, to (at
least) the Mogollon Highlands—an area to which I will briefly return.
There was pushback, as they say. Much of that resistance was simply turf:
Chaco in the 1970s and 1980s was in the news, and archaeologists outside
the media circus (and outside northwest New Mexico) wanted none of it. A
University of Colorado crew at the huge Mesa Verde site of Yellow Jacket
produced a bumper sticker saying “Chaco is a Dairy Queen Outlier.” David
Breternitz, also of the University of Colorado, stood in front of Far View
House and declared that he knew of no Chaco “outliers” on Mesa Verde.
(There’s a sizable Great House at Yellow Jacket, and Far View IS a Great
House.) The Colorado reactions were typical of the times: no Chaco at Mesa
Verde, no Chaco in Utah, no Chaco in Arizona. Indignant locals demanded
data: what were the criteria, what were lists of traits, what gave Chaco the
right to intrude on their space? In their backyards? This was difficult, because
we “outlier” hunters had more or less abandoned lists of criteria. Outlier Great
Houses were, as John Stein said, an “a-ha” experience: if you found yourself
climbing up (and up, and up) a Pueblo II ruin, that was a pretty good clue.
“Outliers” stick up. I eventually codified this as “big bump surrounded by small
bumps” (Lekson 1991)—not my most precise work, I admit. Once verticality had been established, more often than not most of the desired criteria
appeared: wide walls, big rooms, multiple stories, elevated “kivas,” Great Kivas,
road segments, earthworks, and so forth. It was a real struggle to get local
archaeologists to think globally or even beyond their green valleys. More than
once I was tempted to organize a tour, throwing the harshest critics into (not
under) a bus and visiting “outlier” Great Houses from Bluff, Utah, to Grants,
New Mexico, and from Polaca Wash, Arizona, to Guadalupe, New Mexico.
Let them see for themselves; let them “a-ha.”
In the end, objections fell before the weight of data: more and more socalled outliers piled up, and more and more people recognized that their little fiefdom was part of a larger world. Outliers were real and really were in
(almost) everyone’s backyards. Not in the Rio Grande, nor west past Hopi.
22
S T EP H EN H . LEK S O N
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
And not in the far south. There was not a lot of work going on in westcentral New Mexico at that time, so no one could object to outliers around
Quemado and Magdalena. And there were very convincing outliers near those
peculiar towns, with all the necessary attributes. And further south? That’s
Mimbres country, and Mimbres archaeologists are famously anti-Anasazi.
Which is a shame, because out on the edges, like Mimbres, Chaco archaeology
could perhaps address one of its recurrent problems: export versus emulation.
At one point, near century’s end, there was much discussion of export versus
emulation of “outlier” Great Houses. Export = came from Chaco; emulation =
copied from Chaco. I was never enthusiastic about this question; it seemed like
a last refuge of the NIMBY, as if “emulating” a Chacoan Great House somehow made matters more comfortably local. But how would we tell a Great
House built by local labor with local materials at the hand-waving direction of
someone from Chaco? And there were indications that form mattered more
than fabric, even in Chaco Canyon. The range of wall types found in Pueblo
Bonito was nearly as great, or broad, or varied as the range of wall types seen
in “outliers.” In my mind none of that mattered much: either way—export
or emulation—the area in question had come into Chaco’s sphere. But for
many people, export versus emulation was an issue. I suggested ways of thinking about the problem that turned the question on its head, or rather insideout. For a particular “outlier” Great House, the identification had already
been made that the darn thing was, in one way or another, Chacoan. Fussing
about it would quickly degenerate into an empty game of I-am or I-am-notconvinced. Why not jump way outside Chaco’s region, and work back in until
we hit things not identified as outliers but that indeed went bump in the night
(as it were): big bumps that might perhaps . . . and so forth?
Looking in from the north, through Fremont, for example: many of the big
Fremont communities along the west slopes of the Wasatch Range had conspicuously big bumps among a cluster of smaller bumps (Lekson 2013). They
were built of adobe, but when you started looking at them: wider walls, bigger
rooms, more stuff, and so on. Now those Fremont big bumps might be a good
place to start thinking about emulations! So too looking in from the south,
through Mimbres: big bumps (with wide walls, big rooms, more stuff, “roads,”
etc.) among the small bumps of Mimbres sites on the Upper Gila (and maybe
even on the mighty Mimbres itself ) might represent some sort of local version
of Great House (Lekson 1999b). The pundits laughed: I have a photo, somewhere, of a gang of Mimbres archaeologists posed atop a candidate Upper
Gila big bump: all thumbs point down. But I still think that Mimbres, and
Fremont, and other societies around the perimeter of Chaco’s world would be
C H ACO L A N D S CA P ES
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
23
a good place to start thinking about emulation—if, for some reason, you want
to think about emulation.
Chaco’s region is pretty well fixed now, four decades after the great Outlier
Hunts. North, west, and east boundaries seem solid; only the south is soft. And,
strangely, the south is where the least work has been done, or is being done. As
summarized in Duff and Lekson (2006), Keith Kintigh’s and Andrew Duff ’s
work south of Zuni and Ruth Van Dyke’s and John Kantner’s work around
Grants has been admirable but far less cumulative research than we’ve poured
into northern “outliers” from Chimney Rock to Bluff with, for example, Crow
Canyon’s current Northern Chaco Outliers project being only the most recent
of many northern Chaco projects. Compared to the north, Chaco’s south is
markedly underresearched. And, of importance, Chaco “outliers” extend far
south beyond Zuni and Grants. How far? A matter for debate . . . shall we go
down that road?
REGION: ROADS
Special agent Stephen H. Holsinger, investigating Richard Wetherill’s
Chaco Canyon excavations at the instigation of Edgar Hewett, may have
written the first Chaco report of “roads” (Holsinger 1901). Hewett, through
Holsinger, shut down Wetherill’s (and George Pepper’s) work at Pueblo
Bonito. Two decades later, before Hewett could establish a research presence
in the canyon, Neil Judd arrived with his National Geographic Society and
Smithsonian Institution expedition, and worked in the canyon from 1920 to
1927. Among his other researches, Judd was intrigued by “roads.” He interviewed several Navajo elders who knew them well—though they told Judd
the “roads” had become less visible over the years (see Frazier 2005:110–112).
(Chaco’s archaeology has diminished markedly in the last 100 years, from
grazing and casual vandalism: walls fell, roads faded, sherds vanished; what
must Chaco have looked like, at 1500? At 1800?)
Knowledge of the “roads” never entirely vanished—Judd eventually published his reports—but outside interest waned (Frazier 2005:105–127). “Roads”
intrigued Park archaeologist Gordon Vivian, who passed his interests on
to his son, Gwinn Vivian; Gwinn Vivian, in the early 1970s heyday of Karl
Wittfogel’s “hydraulic civilizations,” challenged the identification of “roads”
and suggested instead that they were canals (Vivian 1970). He quickly realized he was wrong, and by the mid-1970s he and his associates fostered a
renaissance in “road” studies (Vivian 1997a, 1997b). “Roads” engaged first
the National Park Service (NPS) Division of Remote Sensing; and then
24
S T EP H EN H . LEK S O N
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
the “outlier hunts” of the early 1980s (discussed above); and last, but most
important, Cultural Resource Management Projects sponsored by the Bureau
of Land Management (BLM) in the mid- to late 1980s. Thereafter, for twoplus decades, “roads” were only sporadically investigated—typically as short
segments seen at “outliers.” Because of the limited scale of most projects at
that time, there was an alarming tendency to localize “roads”—“roads” went
nowhere, it was said, but existed only in the parts we could easily see, usually
near outliers.
The most important “road” studies were the BLM projects of the 1980s, proactively researching roads ahead of proposed energy development (Kincaid
1983; Nials et al. 1987). These projects were prescient: knowing that a major but
poorly understood cultural resource would be or could be threatened by energy
development, the BLM decided to investigate known or possible “roads” in
the to-be-impacted areas and to develop techniques and tricks to identifying and recording “roads.” This was done well in advance of actual planning
and permitting; would that we were so wise today. Significant resources were
expended; excellent archaeologists were hired; innovative field techniques
were developed.
The maps produced by these projects and their spin-offs represent a network
of considerable range and ramifying complexity. Much of the mapped “road”
network was projected: a bit of road here, a bit of road there, and an alignment
of sites gave us dotted lines on a map (e.g., Lekson et al. 1988)—reasonably,
I think, and probably correctly but the cause of much subsequent eye rolling
and teeth gnashing. First, John Roney (1992) pared “roads” back to only those
segments visible on the ground; much later, James Snead (2017) would rightly
complain that various “road” maps differed significantly—which should we
believe? All and none, perhaps: the road network is without question far more
extensive than Roney’s minimal map (an assertion to which John would surely
agree), but Snead’s grievance is sound. We truly do not know the actual extent
of Chaco’s “roads.” But absence of knowledge is not knowledge of absence:
“roads” are surely there, but there have been no projects or programs on the
scale of the BLM’s 1980s “road” studies to map them out.
The problem for today is this: because there is a long history of “road” studies, nonarchaeologists engaged with the data (e.g., land managers) seem to
think that the preservation of “roads” is perfect and our knowledge of them is
complete. Neither is remotely true. “Roads” are archaeological sites, and it is in
the nature of archaeological sites to hide—even, sometimes, disappear. Recall
Judd’s Navajo complaining that “roads” had been far more visible in earlier
times; time waits for no one, as the poet said. As discussed below, the region
C H ACO L A N D S CA P ES
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
25
in which “roads” surely run is threatened again with extensive energy development, but today we are not as proactive as the BLM was in the 1980s. No one
is spending money to find roads ahead of development. It seems that “roads”
will have to take their chances.
VIEWSHEDS
In the early 1980s, when I was crawling all over Chaco’s Great Houses
measuring things, I noticed that the siting of several buildings—perhaps all
the buildings?—clearly addressed lines-of-sight. One Great House could see
another; but if either was moved 100 m or so, those lines-of-sight vanished. I
thought I’d discovered something wonderful. Not so: my elders knew all about
it and had observations of their own. It went beyond Great Houses, too: Alden
Hayes and Tom Windes (1975) had published their lines-of-sight observations
from “shrines” at Chaco. And views of natural features: I was at Pueblo Alto
with Peter Pino of Zia Pueblo, just the two of us; Mr. Pino looked hard to the
southeast, and pointed out a bit of the Sandia Mountains, just visible on the
horizon, over Mount Taylor’s shoulder. Tom Windes continued to accumulate information on lines-of-sight, mostly through his infamous “flare-ups”:
nighttime exercises in which volunteers stood at potential viewpoints (Great
Houses, shrines, etc.) and lit truck flares at specified times. Participants at
other stations who saw a point of red light vaguely to the south (e.g.) at precisely 9:00 PM knew that they were seeing Kin Ya’a (e.g.). Tom’s experiments
were ingenious but messy when rain turned the roads to mud. The Solstice
Project built on this work, compiling more and more line-of-sight data.
Through the years, I kept my eyes open. I was particularly interested in what
I (or someone) called “notch phenomenon:” a line-of-sight through one or
more restricted breaks in terrain; that is, through a notch or two in ridgelines.
Working at Chimney Rock in 2009, we saw a “notch” discovered some years
earlier by Katie Freeman, then a high school student working on her Science
Fair project: a just-barely visible Huerfano Mesa, seen down the narrow
Piedra River Valley. Huerfano Mesa had been our landmark on the northern
horizon when we excavated Pueblo Alto at Chaco Canyon in the late 1970s.
You can’t see Alto from Chimney Rock, or vice versa. What Ms. Freeman had
discovered was that Huerfano was a “repeater” station, relaying fire/smoke
line-of-sight signals to and from Pueblo Alto and Chimney Rock. This was
something of a revelation because there was no Great House, no Chacoan
community at Huerfano. There were “shrines” and fireboxes, but no residential
sites. It seemed likely that Huerfano was staffed; that is, it was someone’s duty
26
S T EP H EN H . LEK S O N
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
to sit atop Huerfano all the time or at specified intervals and relay the messages back and forth. That suggested that Chacoan line-of-sight communications were indeed a “system,” an integrated network; and probably the “roads”
and “outliers” were a system too.
In recent years Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has made it possible
to research lines-of-sight and viewsheds on a regional scale. Ruth Van Dyke
and her colleagues (2016) are doing exciting work with these truly intriguing
data; I think line-of-sight communications (alongside “roads”) could give us
something like a network map or diagram of the Chacoan Regional System.
As noted above, the “roads” have deteriorated and are, today, difficult or expensive to document. Lines-of-sight should remain mostly intact and readily
knowable from GIS. “Ground-truthing” viewsheds will require far less investment in time and money than a full-dress road study.
LANDSCAPES: RITUAL AND SECULAR
The idea of landscape—if not the term itself—was applied to Chaco long
before, but my public engagement with that term at that place dated to the
1990 Society for American Archaeology meetings at Las Vegas, Nevada, where
John R. Stein and I presented a paper titled “Anasazi Ritual Landscapes.” What
happens in Vegas supposedly stays in Vegas, but the idea of “ritual landscape”
had legs, coming as it did just on the cusp of British landscape studies such as
Christopher Tilley’s 1994 Phenomenology of Landscape and Richard Bradley’s
1993 Altering the Earth and 1998 Significance of Monuments. (I may have had
the first copies of these British landscape books between Philadelphia and
Berkeley; I didn’t much care for Tilley’s “phenomenology,” but I liked Bradley’s
book.) And “Anasazi Ritual Landscapes” (I think coincidently) appeared just
before the remarkable rise of ritual to interpretive dominance in southwestern
archaeology (Charles Adams’s 1991 Katsina Cult and Patricia Crown’s 1994
Salado volume opened the floodgates). “Anasazi Ritual Landscapes” was published in 1992 in a Chaco volume edited by David E. Doyel (1992), who had
organized the Society for American Archaeology session, the first of a steady
series of Chacoan stock-takings, of which the book you hold is—for a short
while, at least—the most recent.
“Ritual landscape” was Stein’s, mostly, but I contributed my bit. We
bounced ideas around long before the Vegas gig. I had a brief flirtation with
cognitive archaeology (Lekson 1981), but that was rather more clinical than
ideological. In 1983 and part of 1984, I rented a room at chez Stein. Stein had
decided to become an architect, and he was in his first year of architectural
C H ACO L A N D S CA P ES
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
27
school at the University of New Mexico. I was in the midst of graduate
classes at UNM, taking every class I could with Binford but staying out
of his way. Most evenings for many weeks, Stein and I would convene at
his pot-bellied stove (the principal heat source) and grouse about architecture school (him) and Binford (me). Sometimes simultaneously, each of us
wailed to the walls about the day’s provocations. Between ventings, we discussed architecture and landscape. My primary inspirations were not New
Archaeologists or Brits (I had not yet met them), but architectural historians and historical geographers (Karl Sauer, George Kubler, J. B. Jackson,
Vincent Scully, among others); John’s were architects—I don’t recall which.
I do recall warning Stein away from alignments, arguing that the universal
revulsion toward ley lines and New Agery made them problematic. When
Chaco Meridian came out in 1999, it must have struck Stein as derivative. I’m
sure it was; my thinking owed much to Stein.
My principal contribution to “Anasazi Ritual Landscapes” was the intracanyon argument outlined above in “Landscapes, Cityscapes.” And the demonstration that earthen architecture was real at Chaco Canyon—the two platforms mounds at Pueblo Bonito being prime examples—thereby legitimized
the less emphatic earthen architecture Stein was seeing at “outliers.” Stein and
his field colleagues (Mike Marshall, Andrew Fowler, Taft Blackhorse, Richard
Friedman, and others) developed a rich, even baroque taxonomy for Chacoan
earthworks, using Navajo words or anatomical terms for various forms of
berms. Most berms related to “roads,” particularly where “roads” arrived, circled, and departed from “outlier” Great Houses.
These, today, are part of the standard archaeological field-kit; but back then,
berms were controversial. The existence of earthen architecture inside the
canyon gave credence to the same at “outliers,” and we both held the Bonito
platform mounds (e.g., Lekson 1984a:74–77) to be such rock-ribbed, unassailable, lead-pipe certainties that no one could possibly doubt. So contrarian
archaeologists doubt them (I saw one, in a conference presentation, make
them disappear with a wave of the hand). But that’s not our problem here.
Add to the ritual landscape a secular landscape of the Chacoan community—a
term I have avoided until now. The term community came from the “outlier hunts.” Recall the work of Marshall, Stein, Loose and Novotny (1979):
“Anasazi Communities of the San Juan Basin.” Community in this usage was
a field taxon, not a social unit. It referred to the clustering of small sites (Unit
Pueblos, “small bumps”) around a Great House (“outlier,” “big bump”) with
its attendant feature (“ritual landscape”)—an ensemble, a taxon seen scores
and scores of times in the outlier hunts and thereafter. While it seemed safe to
28
S T EP H EN H . LEK S O N
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
assume that the residents of such a unit were part of a daily face-to-face “community” (i.e., a social unit), Nancy Mahoney (2000) pointed out that Chacoan
“communities” were all too small to constitute a reproductive unit; that is, “communities” were part of a larger community for which the problematic “imagined community” (Anderson 2006) might actually be appropriate (Lekson
2018). That is, the 150-or-so Chacoan communities scattered over an area the
size of Indiana were all part of an ideological “imagined community,” even
though they could not possibly have all known each other—rather, embodying the original, modern nation-state definition of the term (Anderson 2006).
At least a few community-level secular landscapes were planned: for example, Skunk Springs and Yellow Jacket had parallel rows or streets of Unit
Pueblos, ranged side-by-side like row houses. Those were two of the largest
communities; smaller communities surely had plans too, but their arrangements seem, today, more random. Perhaps we don’t yet understand their landscape principles.
Extending far beyond the secular landscape of the community were agricultural landscapes. These could be remarkably extensive and elaborate, for
example, the irrigated field complexes at Skunk Springs (Friedman et al. 2003)
and the irrigated field systems of Chaco Canyon (Gwinn Vivian and others 2006). In Chaco Canyon small fields (for what crops? County-fair-prizewinner corn? Marigolds?) interspersed between clusters of buildings; while it
is beyond the scope of this chapter, that pattern has been identified as a lowdensity, agrarian-based urbanism by archaeologist Roland Fletcher (2009).
And landscapes operated on even higher levels: Chacoan communities fit
into natural landscapes and social landscapes. The Great House and its ritual
landscape were typically on a natural rise or elevation above the community
of small bumps; the Great House looked down, the small bumps looked up:
viewsheds. And, as noted above, the locations of Great Houses were often
fixed by line-of-sight considerations, seeing other Great Houses or natural
features (Van Dyke 2009). Thus the form of a Chacoan community, as an
archaeological unit, answered questions posed by multiple scales of landscapes,
from the local terrain to regional intervisibilities. And probably a heavy dose
of cosmology—like Fritz’s north-south axis at Chaco—overarching all.
University of Arizona professor Dennis Doxtater (2002, 2003) attempted to
decode the regional landscape through the intersections of alignments from
major, far-distant mountain peaks. Thus, Chaco sits at the intersection of lines
linking Chimney Rock to Baldy Peak, and Cabezon Peak to Brian Head, and
Mount Taylor to Abajo Peak. While this is very interesting, I worry about
practical implementation and, again, the pitfalls of Ley Line methodologies.
C H ACO L A N D S CA P ES
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
29
Whatever Chaco was, it was big. It was regional. Chaco itself may or may
not have been unique, or extraordinary, or phenomenal, but its regional archaeological record is truly remarkable. Eventually the area was depopulated by the
Chacoans. Today it is home to the sparse and scattered Navajo. Subsequent
Native and modern impacts have been minimal, other than overgrazing.
Consequently, landscape features are well preserved. We have, in Chaco’s
region, the trace fossils of a social system, in buildings, landscapes, “roads” and
viewsheds. Chaco’s unparalleled regional record is threatened today by energy
development, which appears to be proceeding without the forward-looking,
proactive strategies of the “outlier hunts” of the 1970s and the BLM “road”
studies of the 1980s. Is it too late?
CHACO LANDSCAPES: GENESIS OF THE PROJECT
The reality of Chacoan landscapes is now firmly established and accepted.
There are, of course, varying interpretations of these features and, more notably,
major gaps in our knowledge of their distribution and variation. For example,
there are certainly many more “roads” out there, but, as noted above, we don’t
have that map.
Concern for these remarkable, yet fragile cultural resources prompted
Thomas Lincoln (then of the National Park Service) to approach me about
Chaco landscapes, sometime in 2005. As the head archaeologist of the NPS’s
Intermontane Region (assistant director for cultural resources), Tom’s purview
included the Four Corners states and, with them, Chaco and its region. He
had access to “year-end” funds to invest in the project—entirely his initiative,
not mine—but, alas, before the year ended, the money was scooped up by
someone else, somewhere else, for something else. New toilets at Yellowstone?
A parking lot at Carlsbad Caverns? I don’t know, but their need was greater
than ours. At the time, I was relieved that I had not acquired another project:
Chaco landscapes were certainly interesting, but not a front-burner issue.
Or were they? Tom Lincoln foresaw energy development in the San Juan
Basin and was trying to get ahead of that threat, to have data and ideas and
management concepts ready and waiting in the locker. But for the nonce, the
Chaco landscape project was sidelined.
Time goes by. In 2013 Tom contacted me again about Chaco landscapes, and
shortly thereafter the University of Colorado agreed to arrange and administer
a “planning meeting for a seminar to identify, define, and characterize the Chaco
Landscape and World Heritage values.” This was a small grant, a planning grant
prior to a larger, longer effort, which the NPS generously funded in 2014.
30
S T EP H EN H . LEK S O N
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Even in the halcyon bubble of the Peoples’ Republic of Boulder, I had become
aware of the impending leases of federal, state, and tribal allotted lands around
Chaco for drilling and fracking. Other organizations were already marshaling
data and arguments against this development—of which, more below.
I could see that the need was real, but just that year I had started a
“phased retirement” from my position at the Museum of Natural History at
the University of Colorado. Retirement means different things to different
people, but one common factor is you are old. More active, energetic scholars were needed. I asked for the help of two of our best Chacoan specialists: Dr. Ruth Van Dyke of Binghamton University, and Dr. Carrie Heitman
of the University of Nebraska. Van Dyke had written a number of highly
regarded studies of Chaco landscapes; Heitman had written excellently about
Chaco and also controlled the online Chaco Research Archive (http://www
.chacoarchive.org/cra/; originally the creation of Dr. Stephen Plog, Heitman,
and other colleagues at the University of Virginia). Van Dyke and Heitman
took the wheel and steered our course. The University of Colorado, Boulder,
facilitated and administered the project, but the intellectual and operational
leadership came from Binghamton and Lincoln.
The project advanced through a series of stages. First, a planning/listening
meeting took place at San Juan College in Farmington, New Mexico, in
August 2014. This meeting brought together several dozen federal agency
archaeologists and managers, local cultural resource management archaeologists, and Tribal representatives from the Navajo Nation (many leases were on
Navajo tribal or allotment lands). We presented ourselves not as official representatives of the National Park Service (those too were in attendance), but
rather as contractors tasked by NPS to assemble histories of research, site, and
landscape data and of management themes and options for Chaco landscapes.
The second step was a meeting at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln in
July 2015, to compile and reconcile several independent GIS datasets of Chaco
“outliers” and features, with the final product to be supported on the online
Chaco Research Archive.
In April and August 2015, and again in April 2016, we presented progress reports to the Chaco Native American Advisory Board and benefited
from their comments and advice. We learned that there were turf issues: The
cultural resources were of great interest to the various Pueblos, but Navajo
families and clans also had deep ties to the land. Much of the land involved
were Navajo allotments, not quite reservation and not quite private. Energy
companies—we were told—had already obtained permission to develop on
many allotments, dealing directly with allottees. It would be hard to deny
C H ACO L A N D S CA P ES
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
31
that income to Navajo families. But at the same time there was resistance
from some Navajo residents who were concerned about the effects of fracking
on water and health. At several meetings we learned about federal involvement: the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was the agency most directly implicated, but BIA delegated authority for subsurface management to the Bureau
of Land Management (BLM), which had more experience in that sort of
thing. And, alongside the BIA and BLM, the Navajo Nation clearly wanted
a say in how development would proceed. Some of the land belonged to the
state of New Mexico, whose land office was mandated to generate revenue
for schools. Again, it would be hard to deny those resources for education. It
was . . . complicated.
The information from the Farmington, Lincoln, Advisory Board and other
meetings informed a “white paper” on Chaco landscapes completed in February
2016 and authored by Van Dyke, Lekson, and Heitman (with a contribution by
Julian Thomas, who had toured Chaco with Van Dyke in September 2015). The
paper, titled “Chaco Landscapes: Data, Theory and Management,” summarized the history of Chaco landscape studies; identified, defined, and characterized the elements of such landscapes; and offered management considerations
for their Section 106 and National Register of Historic Places management.
With the NPS permission, the “white paper” was distributed to agencies, tribes,
and several other organizations concerned with energy development and the
Chaco landscape. (It appears here as appendix A.)
The “capstone” meeting for the project was a seminar of invited archaeologists,
tribal representatives, and agency archaeologists and managers held at Crow
Canyon Archaeological Center, Cortez, Colorado, in August 2017. Unlike the
earlier planning/listening meeting in Farmington, the Crow Canyon meeting
had an agenda developed by Van Dyke, Heitman, and Lekson and ultimately
resulted in the present volume and video products. We shot additional video
in Chaco Canyon in October 2017 with tribal members who had been at the
Crow Canyon conference.
Initially, our instructions from NPS were to not advocate against (or for)
energy development, but rather to provide management considerations
for NPS to use when commenting on BLM management plans, but those
instructions changed as the extent of the proposed leasing and development
became clearer. We were united in our concern for the Chaco landscape, and
for what appeared to be an emerging BLM strategy of treating each lease
as a separate undertaking rather than developing an umbrella master leasing
plan that would operate on the landscape level. The complex land and political situations were difficult to engage from Boulder, Colorado; Binghamton,
32
S T EP H EN H . LEK S O N
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
New York; or Lincoln, Nebraska. All politics is local, as Tip O’Neill said, and
we were not local. Several regional environmental and archaeological NGOs
banded together to save the “Greater Chaco Landscape.” The archaeological lead was Archaeology Southwest, with Paul Reed as their principal (and
outstanding) spokesman. We supported the work of Archaeology Southwest
and other organizations insofar as possible, but beyond writing letters and
comments and so forth, our participation in on-the-ground politicking was
limited mainly to our meetings, which included Tribes and agencies.
Things looked grim for Chaco landscapes, and they still look grim. Swiftly
changing news of court cases apparently won, then lost; and last-second postponements by the Secretary of the Interior of BLM leasing are too complex
and dynamic to recount here. If—as seems all too likely—we lose the remarkable record of Chaco “roads” and landscapes in northwest New Mexico, perhaps someone will write a history of how that happened. Or perhaps, at the
eleventh hour, a management plan will emerge that encourages small-footprint directional drilling, avoids probable “road” alignments, and saves part of
the Chaco landscape—a lot? a little?
The election of 2016 sent a message to archaeology and historic preservation. In January 2017, Tom Lincoln retired—along with several other senior
NPS staff—before the deluge. The book you are holding and the videos you
are viewing are the product of Tom Lincoln’s archaeological vision, commitment to historic preservation, and professional expertise. Tom wanted tools
and products for the NPS to use in its comments on the drilling that will
soon begin around Chaco. We hope that our “White Paper” will prove tactically useful in the trenches, and we hope that this volume will be strategically
helpful in presenting the broader issues to larger audiences. Chaco and its
landscape are World Heritage Sites: whoever you are, this is your heritage
under threat.
REFERENCES
Adams, E. Charles. 1991. The Origin and Development of the Pueblo Katsina Cult. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
Altschul, Jeffrey H. 1978. The Development of the Chacoan Interaction Sphere. Journal of Anthropological Research 34:109–146.
Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and
Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. Verso, New York.
Ashmore, Wendy. 1991. “Site-Planning Principles and Concepts of Directionality
among the Ancient Maya.” Latin American Antiquity 2(3):199–226.
C H ACO L A N D S CA P ES
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
33
Bannister, Bryant. 1964. Tree-Ring Dating of the Archaeological Sites in the Chaco Canyon Region, New Mexico. Technical Series 6(2). Southwest Parks and Monuments
Association, Tucson.
Bradley, Richard. 1993. Altering the Earth. Society of Antiquaries of Scotland,
Edinburgh.
Bradley, Richard. 1998. Significance of Monuments. Routledge, London.
Crown, Patricia. 1994. Ceramics and Ideology: Salado Polychrome Pottery. University of
New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
Doxtater, Dennis. 2002. “A Hypothetical Layout of Chaco Canyon vis Large-Scale
Alignments between Significant Natural Features.” Kiva 67(5):23–47.
Doxtater, Dennis. 2003. “Parallel Universes on the Colorado Plateau: Indications of a
Chacoan Integration of an Earlier Anasazi Focus at Canyon de Chelly.” Journal of
the Southwest 45(1–2):33–62.
Doyel, David E., ed. 1992. Anasazi Regional Organization and the Chaco System.
Anthropological Papers No. 5. Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, University of
New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.
Duff, Andrew I., and Stephen H. Lekson. 2006. “Notes from the South.” In Archaeology of Chaco Canyon, edited by Stephen H. Lekson, 315–337. SAR Press, Santa Fe,
NM.
Fletcher, Roland. 2009. “Low-Density, Agrarian-Based Urbanism: A Comparative
View.” Insights 2(4):2–19.
Fowler, Andrew P., and John R. Stein. 1992. “The Anasazi Great House in Space,
Time and Paradigm.” In Anasazi Regional Organization and the Chaco System,
edited by David E. Doyel, 101–122. Anthropological Papers 5, Maxwell Museum of
Anthropology, Albuquerque.
Frazier, Kendrick. 2005. People of Chaco: A Canyon and Its Culture. 3rd ed. W.W.
Norton, New York.
Friedman, Richard A., John R. Stein, and Taft Blackhorse Jr. 2003. “A Study of a
Pre-Columbian Irrigation System at Newcomb, New Mexico.” Journal of GIS in
Archaeology 1 (April 2003): 4–10.
Fritz, John M. 1978. “Paleopsychology Today: Ideational Systems and Human Adaption in Prehistory.” In Social Archaeology: Beyond Subsistence and Dating, edited by
Charles Redman, 37–59. Academic Press, New York.
Grebinger, Paul. 1973. “Prehistoric Social Organization in Chaco Canyon, New
Mexico: An Alternative Reconstruction.” Kiva 39(1):3–23.
Hayes, Alden C., and Thomas C. Windes. 1975. “An Anasazi Shrine in Chaco
Canyon.” In Collected Papers in Honor of Florence Hawley Ellis, edited by Theodore
R. Frisbie, 143–156. Papers of the Archaeological Society of New Mexico No. 2.
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
34
S T EP H EN H . LEK S O N
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Heitman, Carrie C., Ruth Van Dyke, Matthew Peebles, and Kyle Bocinsky. 2016.
“Greater Chaco Landscapes Great House Communities GIS Integration Dataset.” GIS dataset submitted to the National Park Service in partial fulfillment of
Rocky Mountain Cooperative Ecosystems Study Unit Task Agreement Number:
P14AC01703, Project #: UCOB-109.
Holsinger, S. J. 1901. “Report on Prehistoric Ruins of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico.
Ordered by General Land Office Letter ‘P,’ December 18, 1900.” Submitted to
General Land Office. Manuscript on file, National Anthropological Archive,
Washington, DC.
Kantner, John, ed. 2003. “The Chaco World,” special edition. Kiva 69(2):83–232.
Kantner, John, and Nancy M. Mahoney, eds. 2000. Great House Communities across
the Chacoan Landscape. Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona 64.
University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
Kincaid, Chris, ed. 1983. Chaco Roads Project Phase I: A Reappraisal of Prehistoric Roads
in the San Juan Basin. Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico State Office,
Albuquerque District Office, Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
Kluckhohn, Clyde. 1939. “Discussion.” In Preliminary Report on the 1937 Excavations, Bc 50–51, Chaco Canyon New Mexico, edited by Clyde Kluckhohn and Paul
Reiter, 151–162. Bulletin 342, Anthropological Series vol. 3, no. 2. University of New
Mexico, Albuquerque.
LeBlanc, Steven A. 1989. “Cibola: Shifting Cultural Boundaries.” In Dynamics
of Southwest Prehistory, edited by Linda S. Cordell and George J. Gumerman,
337–369. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.
Lekson, Stephen H. 1981. “Cognitive Frameworks and Chacoan Architecture.” New
Mexico Journal of Science 21(1):27–36.
Lekson, Stephen H. 1984a. Great Pueblo Architecture of Chaco Canyon. Publications in
Archaeology 18B. National Park Service, Albuquerque.
Lekson, Stephen H. 1984b. “Standing Architecture at Chaco Canyon and the
Interpretation of Local and Regional Organization.” In Recent Research on Chaco
Canyon, edited by W. James Judge and John D. Schelberg, 55–73. Reports of the
Chaco Center 8. National Park Service, Albuquerque.
Lekson, Stephen H. 1991. “Settlement Patterns and the Chaco Region.” In Chaco and
Hohokam: Prehistoric Regional Systems in the American Southwest, edited by Patricia
L. Crown and W. James Judge, 31–55. School of American Research Press, Santa
Fe, NM.
Lekson, Stephen H. 1999a. The Chaco Meridian. Altamira Press, Walnut Creek, CA.
Lekson, Stephen H. 1999b. “Unit Pueblos and the Mimbres Problem.” In La Frontera: Essays in Honor of Patrick H. Beckett, edited by Meliha Duran and David
Kirkpatrick, 105–125. Archaeological Society of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
C H ACO L A N D S CA P ES
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
35
Lekson, Stephen H. 2013. “Thinking about Fremont: The Later Prehistory of the
Great Basin and the Southwest” In Archaeology in the Great Basin and Southwest:
Papers in Honor of Don D. Fowler, edited by Joel Janetski, 109–117. University of
Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
Lekson, Stephen H. 2018. A Study of Southwestern Archaeology. University of Utah
Press, Salt Lake City.
Lekson, Stephen H., Thomas C. Windes, and Peter J. McKenna. 2006. “Architecture.”
In The Archaeology of Chaco Canyon, edited by Stephen H. Lekson, 67–116. SAR
Press, Santa Fe, NM.
Lekson, Stephen H., Thomas C. Windes, John R. Stein, and W. James Judge. 1988.
“The Chaco Community.” Scientific American 296(7):100–109.
Mahoney, Nancy M. 2000. “Redefining the Scale of Chacoan Communities.” In
Great House Communities across the Chacoan Landscape, edited by John Kantner and
Nancy M. Mahoney, 19–38. Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona
64. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
Marshall, Michael P., John R. Stein, Richard W. Loose, and J. E. Novotny. 1979. Anasazi Communities of the San Juan Basin. Public Service Company of New Mexico,
Albuquerque, NM.
Nials, Fred, John Stein, and John Roney. 1987. Chacoan Roads in the Southern Periphery: Results of Phase II of the BLM Chaco Roads Project. Cultural Resource Series 1.
Bureau of Land Management, Albuquerque.
Peeples, Matthew, Barbara Mills, Jeff Clark, Ben Bellorado, and Tom Windes. 2016.
“Social Networks and the Scale of the Chaco World.” Paper presented at the 81st
annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Orlando, FL.
Reed, Paul F., ed. 2006. Thirty-Five Years of Archaeological Research at Salmon Ruins,
New Mexico. 3 vols. Center for Desert Archaeology, Tucson.
Roney, John R. 1992. “Prehistoric Roads and Regional Integration in the Chacoan
System.” In Anasazi Regional Organization and the Chaco System, edited by David
E. Doyel, 123–131. Anthropological Papers 5, Maxwell Museum of Anthropology,
Albuquerque.
Schelberg, John D. 1984. “Analogy, Complexity, and Regionally Based Perspectives.” In Recent Research on Chaco Prehistory, edited by W. James Judge and
John D. Schelberg, 5–21. Reports of the Chaco Center. National Park Service,
Albuquerque.
Sebastian, Lynne. 1992. The Chaco Anasazi: Sociopolitical Evolution in the Prehistoric
Southwest. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Snead, James E. 2017. “Introduction: ‘Forgotten Maps’ and the Archaeology of Chaco
Roads.” Kiva 83(1):1–5.
36
S T EP H EN H . LEK S O N
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Stein, John R., Richard Friedman, Taft Blackhorse Jr., and Richard Loose. 2007.
“Revisiting Downtown Chaco.” In The Architecture of Chaco Canyon, edited by Stephen H. Lekson, 199–223. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
Stein, John R., and Stephen H. Lekson. 1992. “Anasazi Ritual Landscapes.”
In Anasazi Regional Organization and the Chaco System, edited by David E.
Doyel, 87–100. Anthropological Papers 5, Maxwell Museum of Anthropology,
Albuquerque.
Tilley, Christopher. 1994. Phenomenology of Landscape. Berg, Oxford.
Van Dyke, Ruth M. 2007. The Chaco Experience: Landscape and Ideology at the Center
Place. SAR Press, Santa Fe, NM.
Van Dyke, Ruth M. 2009. “Chaco Reloaded: Discursive Social Memory on the PostChacoan Landscape.” Journal of Social Archaeology 9(2):220–248.
Van Dyke, Ruth M., R. Kyle Bocinsky, Thomas C. Windes, and Tucker J. Robinson.
2016. “Great Houses, Shrines, and High Places: Intervisibility in the Chacoan
World.” American Antiquity 81(2):205–230.
Vivian, Gordon, and Tom W. Mathews. 1965. Kin Kletso: A Pueblo III Community in
Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Technical Series 6(1). Southwest Parks and Monuments Association, Tucson.
Vivian, R. Gwinn. 1970. “An Inquiry into Prehistoric Social Organization in Chaco
Canyon, New Mexico.” In Reconstructing Prehistoric Pueblo Societies, edited by
William A. Longacre, 59–83. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
Vivian, R. Gwinn. 1989. “Kluckhohn Reappraised: The Chacoan System as an Egalitarian Enterprise.” Journal of Anthropological Research 45(1):101–113.
Vivian, R. Gwinn. 1990. The Chacoan Prehistory of the San Juan Basin. Academic Press,
San Diego.
Vivian, R. Gwinn. 1997a. “Chacoan Roads: Morphology.” Kiva 63(1):7–34.
Vivian, R. Gwinn. 1997b. “Chacoan Roads: Function.” Kiva 63(1):35–67.
Vivian, R. Gwinn, Carla R. Van West, Jeffrey S. Dean, Nancy J. Akins, Mollie S. Toll,
and Thomas C. Windes. 2006. “Ecology and Economy.” In Archaeology of Chaco
Canyon: An Eleventh Century Pueblo Regional Center, edited by Stephen H. Lekson,
45–65. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, NM.
Ware, John A. 2014. A Pueblo Social History: Kinship, Sodality, and Community in the
Northern Southwest. School for Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe, NM.
Wilcox, David R. 1999. “A Peregrine View of Macroregional Systems in the North
American Southwest, A.D. 750–1250.” In Great Towns and Regional Polities, edited
by Jill E. Neitzel, 115–141. New World Studies Series No. 3. Amerind Foundation,
Inc., Dragoon, Arizona, and University of New Mexico Press.
C H ACO L A N D S CA P ES
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
37
This content downloaded from 73.203.70.70 on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:26:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms