5 CHACO ANASAZI

5 CHACO ANASAZI July 22, 2024 Some people accuse me of inflating Chaco's importance simply because I worked there – to be fair, a phenomenon not unknown in our business. No, I tell them: I connived and finagled my way into Chaco archaeology because anyone with a half a brain could see that Chaco was important (Chapter 3). But in the early 1970s, we didn't know why or how. When I got into this business, the trendy textbook of that time was Paul Martin and Fred Plog's 1973 Archaeology of Arizona. They lamented our ignorance of Chaco, "a culture that was advanced in many ways": Less is really known about the area than of almost any other southwestern district. It is amazing that so little work has been done there and so few significant reports published … fewer than one would expect or hope for. Even at the time this struck me as rather unfair: a decade before the Martin&Plog textbook, Gordon Vivian (with Tom Matthew and Bryant Bannister) published a superb, detailed synthesis of Chaco archaeology. That book came through the National Park Service, for whom Vivian and Mathews worked: Kin Kletso (Vivian and Mathews 1964) bound together with Tree-Ring Dating of … Chaco Canyon (Bannister 1964). The yellow paper-back volume from the Southwest Parks and Monuments Association, republished in 1974, was my introduction to Chaco archaeology, and I found it pretty darn useful (then and now). I found it in a bookstore, as I recall, and like many book-store finds it played a big role in my thinking. I still have that volume, cover detached and pages dog-eared and scribbled-upon. After five decades of bungling around Chaco, today I think it was a genuine masterpiece. Dated a bit, of course; but a triumph and a monument for Gordon Vivian. Gordon got it: Chaco was all about the differences between Great Houses of what he called "the Bonito Phase" and the small houses of his "Hosta Butte Phase" – which Bannister’s tree-ring dates confirmed were contemporary. That was the Central Matter of Chaco Canyon archaeology, the key question. And the stark differences between the contemporaneous Bonito and Hosta Butte buildings led him to a realization I really appreciated: Chaco, Vivian concluded, was NOT "Pueblo" in the sense of (my) Pueblo Space: The elaboration of these [Chaco] institutions with 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 continuum [i.e., Pueblo Space]. … The highest developments in the Chaco were cultural experiments or deviations that failed as they strayed from the main course of Northern [Rio Grande] Pueblo history. That's it in a nutshell, all we really needed to know, published a half-century ago: Great Houses vs. small sites, and Chaco was not Pueblo. Published, but ignored. Why? I’d guess because Vivian was not a PhD, not an academic, not one of the Elect. He was a Park Service archaeologist, and he published in a Park Service technical series. Martin and Plog cited Vivian's work but ignored/discounted his conclusions. Drs. Martin and Plog were, respectively, snooty and snarky – but surely not the first (or last) academics to disparage Park Service archaeology. I came in for academia's disdain for NPS archaeology when I myself became a Park Service archaeologist (Chapter 1) – but that's getting ahead of the story. We will meet Vivian and Mathews and Bannister again, far below. Salmon Ruins Chaco was on my list of things to do (a story told elsewhere, Chapter 3). How to get there? You didn’t just waltz into Chaco with a shovel in hand. In the Spring of 1974, I was partaking of a salubrious survey in the Redrock Valley of the Gila River (Chapter 2), recovering from a difficult year in Tennessee (Chapter 4). I had been offered (and I had accepted) a job directing a big highway-salvage project in north Florida: big bucks, honcho status, moving up the food chain – maybe I could finally buy a car! Then came an advertisement for a ceramic analyst at Salmon Ruins, a Chaco site in northern New Mexico. Ceramic analyst? I was a field guy, not a lab lady. (Laboratory jobs were for girls. Remember, this was early 1970s). Besides, I didn't know much about pottery: I'd flipped a few sherds on the Gila, none at all in the Four Corners. But Salmon Ruin was a full-blown Chaco Great House, only 45 miles north of the Emerald City! I applied for the job, got it, and burned bridges by pulling out of the Florida project three months before we were supposed to start hiring, sub-contracting, renting houses, leasing trucks, and so forth. Enough time for them to find another field director but my jilted employers were not happy. (The “jilted employer” was Dr. David Brose, who I could not face at SAA meetings for decades thereafter. Brose taught me a lot about archaeology, Chapter 1.) That summer (1974) I moved north 250 miles from Cliff to Bloomfield NM, the home of the San Juan Valley Archaeological Project (SJVAP) and its centerpiece, Salmon Ruins. SJVAP was, essentially, Cynthia Irwin-Williams; and she was a force of nature. She came from an archaeological family, mentored by Marie Wormington at the Denver Museum of Natural History. Her interests were early: pre-agricultural in the US Southwest, pre-Clovis in Mexico (WAY pre-Clovis), and Paleolithic in France. She acquired, in France, her signature field uniform: white short-sleeved shirt, black pants, black beret. And Bastille Day. Back in her Paleolithic era, when Cynthia assigned her French crew various duties for the next day, July 14, they mutinied. According to Cynthia, they held her upside-down over a Dordogne gorge. When all was explained and understood, she vowed to honor la Fete Nationale each and every quatorze Juillet. Which she did, with gusto. Her Bastille Day celebrations were famous/notorious. Not with a nice bottle of champagne, but a tin tub of "Klang Juice," a blended beverage which began with a half-gallon of Everclear and went downhill from there. In the late 1960s, several citizens of San Juan County, New Mexico asked Cynthia to visit a ruin on the old Salmon farm. Some bad person was planning to buy the ruin and rent it out to vacation diggers, so much per day per square yard. Would it be possible, they asked her, to develop a research program to turn the site into a tourist attraction? Maybe, she said; let's go look at it. Climbing up a low hill, Cynthia looked around and asked: where's the site? The reply: you're standing on it. And thus was born SJVAP.   Salmon Ruins had 300 rooms, rear rows three-stories tall, in a rectangle over almost 2 acres. They excavated about 30% of that monster from 1972 to 1980 (after minor testing in 1970-71). Cast of thousands. SJVAP was Cynthia…with a huge staff. Over 700 people worked at Salmon – not all at once, of course. Scores and scores at any one time. That figure comes from an official published list of "Salmon Project Staff" and I know the true number is slightly higher: that list omits me. Edited out. Cynthia collected characters. Her crews were spiced with madmen and poets and eccentrics. One of her permanent acquisitions was the scion of a wealthy New England family, who chose to live in a Rio Puerco cave. Another character surveyed in the nude, carrying a spear. Libertines and reprobates made up much of the (hard working) crew – this was, again, the hedonistic '70s. And of course a sizable contingent of stunned (hard working) onlookers, staying out of harm's way but sometimes joining the fun. I was an onlooker, most of the time. For her field camp, Cynthia bought a dozen temporary buildings (all of which still stand, forty years later). One building housed a communal shower and semi-communal toilets. A more solidly built cook house had an attached open-sided dining ramada. The other ten plaster-board shacks were bunk-houses, some zoned by genders, some not. By 1975, at least three bunk houses were decorated with my murals inspired by Walt Kelly (dancing elephants in straw boaters, playing banjos) and Edmund Gorey (the Insect God) and other bagatelles. I do not know if those murals survived. The dancing elephants were good. Cynthia's fleet of VW Bugs required a full-time mechanic to keep them moving. They were not particularly good at navigating sandy stretches, but when they got stuck, they were so light that a crew of burly boys (and burly girls) could more-or-less hoist them over the problem. The artifact labs, where I worked, were in a new (and very nice) museum, which the San Juan County had built for the project. It sat 100 feet above the site (and the temporary housing, showers, cook tent, etc) by the side of the Bloomfield-Farmington highway (easy on, easy off). The basement of the museum had lab tables, storage areas, flush toilets and … a shower. A real, solo, clean, hot-running-water shower. That shower became a refuge for lab staff not enthusiastic about communal hygiene. But those who grabbed an "upstairs" shower suffered scorn from the "downstairs" field crew. Field people sniggered at lab people. And I was a lab person. I knew nearly nothing about Four Corners pottery, and even less about high-end ceramic analysis. The lab's previous director developed a rigorous, systematic but baroquely complicated attribute analysis, in which sherds were individually measured, categorized, classified in many ways, and then coded into a data processing form, which were punch-carded into a Fortran data base. Only the blessed Computer People could manipulate the data-base. (SJVAP was intensely computerized, long before computers were tamed for easy use; all artifacts and all excavations went through the same coding-computing treatment.) Not every sherd received that level of attention, of course: Salmon produced pottery by the crate-full – the truck-full – and we were but three (sometimes four) analysts. So sherds were first sorted into conventional southwestern "types" with the conventional southwestern nomenclature, a place name followed by a descriptor: Mesa Verde Black-on-white, for example. And that was by far the most frequent painted type found at Salmon Ruins (and at Aztec Ruins, 10 miles to the north). If those pottery naming conventions had been in place when Lewis Henry Morgan excavated Aztec Ruins, ten years before the discovery of Cliff Palace, the pottery type associated with the cliff-dwellings might well be known as "Aztec Black-on-white" – and a certain amount of mischief avoided. But that is another story (discussed below with Chaco Meridian, and probably in Chapter 13). I learned conventional typology from Helene Warren, then associated with the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe. She was the intellectual heir of Anna Shepard (who, I later learned, had strong attachments to the CU Museum; Chapter 11). Shepard pioneered scientific analysis of ancient pottery – chemistry, geology, firing temperatures and atmospheres, and so forth. Shepard spent years at the LA in Santa Fe, and some of that time mentoring Helene Warren. Warren was a small, quiet women, and a Yoda-figure in my first season at Salmon Ruins – with better grammar. She lived apart in a small travel-trailer parked in an old apple orchard, safely distant from the riot and bacchanalia. I visited her encampment most days after work – an island of calm in Salmon's bedlam – and she shared her Scandinavian beer (Carlsberg, as I recall, or maybe Tuborg) and her wisdom. She was skeptical about the elaborate attribute analysis – she was more of an old-school sherd-flipper, augmented by Shepard-like studies. And beyond ceramic matters, she was skeptical of the youthful enthusiasms of New Archaeology – which, in 1975, was still new or new-ish. New Archaeology launched a rush to theory (understood in the scientific use of that word). Research must test theory or it wasn't really research, so grad students needed theories to test. They grabbed random ideas from ecology, economics, evolutionary biology, and – who knows? – quantum physics and pulled them through worm holes and draped them over squalid little five-room Unit Pueblos. It was sort of funny. Helene opined that not everyone should "do theory;" only the smart people. I agreed then, and now. But in the democratic free-for-all of Southwestern archaeology, everyone took their swing at theory – a problem magnified in more recent years by our discovery of the hundred blooming flowers of French post-structuralism, “theorie” in a very different sense. If we couldn't make unit-pueblos vibrate like sub-atomic particles, maybe we could deconstruct 'em. See, if you wish, A Study of Southwestern Archaeology. Or not. But I digress. We spent long summers at Salmon, and the rest of the year at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, NM (Chapter 3). (The cast of thousands went home; only the core staff and lab people migrated.) Portales was a West-Texas farming town which happened to be in New Mexico. Cattle, peanuts, cotton, and a Baptist church on every block. We did not lock our doors: Portales was safe. But if we wanted a beer, we drove 20 miles to Clovis: Portales was safe…and dry. Back in Portales, we'd catch up on our backlog of bulk sherds, and hold meetings to decide This-and-That, and occasionally, What-To-Do-Next. I was a very minor player, of course, of short seniority and no great influence. But I did make one contribution of which I was proud: I suggested that perhaps we should look across our analytical silos and consider more than one data set at a time. Heretofore, the lithics lab had been asking for and receiving computer print-outs of its data; the ceramics lab ditto; the other analytical units ditto. (All of this on old 15" wide, continuous-folded green-bar paper with sprocket holes along each edge, a type-fossil of the punch-card era.) But we hadn't ever compared lithics, for example, and ceramics across contexts; we hadn't compared apples and oranges. So, with Catherine Cameron (Chapter 3), I designed an analysis of combined lithic and ceramic assemblages in Room 93, a unit with really good stratigraphy. We characterized the ceramic assemblages and lithic assemblages, context by context; then created a sort of typology or classification of each; and then compared/contrasted the combined lithic and ceramic assemblages from top to bottom of Room 93's many layers. It was interesting. Then we expanded the analysis to 70+ floor assemblages in the 46 rooms excavated 1973-4 (many had multiple floors). That was interesting, too. Not a stop-the-presses earth-shaking Nobel-Prize save-the-planet break-through, but interesting. We "published" that trial study in one of the many Salmon annual reports, off-set-print and staple-bound. To my knowledge, Salmon Ruin never tried anything like that again. The Lithics Lab wrote its report, the Ceramics Lab wrote its report, the Ebot Lab wrote its report – and never the twain did meet. Another contribution, again minor, was leading a Lab revolt – back in Bloomfield – to let us out of Salmon Ruins Museum basement and into the sunlight. I proposed a "Lab dig" where, one day a week, interested laboratory staff (which was most of 'em) could work together on a small excavation. I further proposed that the small excavation could be a test of a line of cobble-walled rooms that seemed run across the front of Salmon Ruin's plaza – much like the arc of cobble-walled rooms at Aztec Ruin (or so we thought…). Both proposals were accepted. We established that the cobble-walled rooms were really shallow, and did not in fact arc across the front of the plaza; they were, instead, one of two "floating" rows of a half-dozen rooms each, quite possibly (in retrospect) unit pueblos much like those in the Aztec Ruins "Annex." Again, not earth-shaking, but something useful. One of my less successful ideas was to clear away the fill along the long rear wall of Salmon Ruins. The rear wall was the first thing tourists saw when visiting the site, if they could see it at all (remember Cynthia climbing up the bump, and not seeing the site beneath her feet). So my idea was cosmetic or, rather, economic: I thought the rear wall would emerge like Chetro Ketl's in Chaco Canyon – a striking sight – and lure more visitors to not-so-photogenic Salmon Ruins. That was one of Cynthia's many concerns, because local leadership wanted tourism. It didn't work out: the rear wall of Salmon Ruin was much reduced, and when exposed (a combination of back-hoe and hand shoveling) it looked less like the Great Wall of China and more like grandma's garden edging. My most excellent superb wonderful personal triumph came in one of Salmon's pueblo rooms, a very deep excavation from which fill was hauled up in buckets or – for real burly field boys & girls – tossed up from shovel's end to a couple of screens well above the shoveler's head. (With practice, the Practical Archaeologist could flick/dip the shovel at moment of launch and the shovel-load of dirt would sail through the air in a compact ball, and not a shotgun scatter of sand and gravel.) It was a tight pitch, no room for wind-up, a strong wrist/shoulder shot. I was good with a shovel, back then, although no one at Salmon knew it. Somehow I talked whoever was in charge of that unit to let me take a turn at throwing dirt up into the screen. The real field people smirked. The site supervisor came over to watch – and to call a halt, I suppose, if the lab rat screwed up too badly. But I proceeded to fill two screens – a fair number of shovel-loads – tossing dirt five feet over my head, backwards, with almost nothing gone astray. Very pretty shovel-work, if I say so myself. When the screens were full and screeners called halt, I leaned my borrowed shovel against the wall, climbed the ladder out of the room, and walked back up to the lab, never looking back. A fine moment. Fortunately, they did not demand a repeat performance, because I doubt I could have pulled that off again. If I shoot pool after a long time away from the game, sometimes my first few games are really good; then I start thinking through my strokes and my game falls completely apart. Ditto in hoops, nailing baskets in the first few innings, then tossing up bricks and airballs. I suspect the same would be true of shovel-work. In Fall of 1975, I was allowed to escape Portales for a few weeks back at Salmon Ruins, where I served as Assistant Director of Stabilization – a grandiose title bestowed on me by Larry Baker (who ran Salmon's stabilization crew) because he thought it would look good on my CV, I suppose. The Assistant Director's duties included repointing and repairing eroded stones in Salmon's Room 56, where I learned the rudiments of the craft. But only the rudiments: I never got close to the skills of Larry's Navajo masons. I've been back to check, and my work at Room 56 remains sound; but it took me five or six times longer than it would have taken the guys who really knew what they were doing. Portales was calm and safe and boring. A good place to get away from. My parents had retired to Albuquerque, so when I could cage a ride I'd arrive on their doorstep with a garbage bag of dirty clothes and a healthy appetite. Cynthia was married to a scientist at Sandia Labs in Albuquerque. Their home was in my parents' neighborhood. So I'd sometimes catch a ride to-and-fro with Cynthia. She had a small red sports car – I have no idea what brand – and drove aggressively, swigging a bottle of whiskey kept between her legs. (None was offered, none was taken.) Oddly enough, my recollections of those drives are not clouded by panic and terror. On the contrary: we had some very interesting conversations and saw more than few bald eagles, atop fence-posts on the unpoliced backroads she favored. For the most part, my work with SJVAP (and a bit of Cynthia's Rio Puerco project) was indoors. But I had some limited fun in the sun – and my magnificent macho shovel moment! After three years of alternating Bloomfield debauch and Portales rectitude (and a Masters Degree from Eastern New Mexico University; Chapter 1), I was ready for the big time: Chaco Canyon. But, how to get there? Chaco Project The Chaco Project was a big National Park Service effort, the successor of an earlier big NPS effort, the Wetherill Mesa Project at Mesa Verde (1958-1963). Chaco and Wetherill Mesa had much the same goals: flesh out the local pre-history and open new sites for visitors to visit. Initially, the Chaco Project was run by Mesa Verde veterans: Robert Lister (who for many years led the University of Colorado's field station at Mesa Verde) and Alden Hayes, a Park Service archaeologist from the Wetherill Mesa project, whom I (and many others) came to respect, greatly. Work began at Chaco in 1969 (my first archaeological field school was in January of 1971; Chapter 2) and was supposed to last ten years. As we shall see, it dragged on for a half-dozen years beyond its original ETA. But that was in the future. I say that the Chaco Project was a big NPS effort, but there was more to it than that: originally, the Chaco Project was a joint University of New Mexico and NPS effort. That partnership started out strong, but (as we shall see) sputtered out about one-third of the way through. Some background: Back in the glory days of Edgar Hewett, UNM actually owned a good bit of Downtown Chaco; ultimately those parcels were turned over to the NPS in exchange for an “easement” – my term, not NPS’s –granting UNM research preference. Thus UNM (and Hewett, of course) were proprietary about who got to dig at Chaco; that was, probably, one reason for the UNM-NPS partnership in the Chaco Project. Hewett created and controlled UNM's Anthropology Department from 1928 to 1936. For most of those years he led an influential field school in Chaco Canyon. Thereafter until 1941, Edgar pulled down a paycheck but distanced himself from departmental duties. He hired Clyde Kluckhohn, who ran the Chaco field school for several years, and later went on to glory at Harvard. Hewett's hire that arguably had the most impact (for me) on Chaco was Florence Hawley, who joined the faculty in 1934, the year she completed her dissertation (University of Chicago) on the dendrochronology of Chetro Ketl – a beacon work for me, fifty years later, when I studied that site (below). “The Significance of the Dated Prehistory of Chetro Ketl, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico” identified, for the first time I think (I may be wrong), the Central Question of Chaco: tree-ring dates showed that Great Houses were contemporary with small sites, the “Bc sites”. (Florence’s titles were usually pretty long; her sentences could run for pages.) Everyone had assumed, quite reasonably, that the small sites preceded the Great Houses; the earlier small sites aggregated later into big Pueblo-like structures. The puzzle of Great House-small house contemporaneity was subsequently expanded and expounded by Clyde Kluckhohn, Donald Brand, Gordon Vivian, Gwinn Vivian, Tom Windes, and yours truly – among many others. But Florence got there first – I think. Hired by UNM, she spent "11 seasons in Chaco" before shifting her focus to modern and protohistoric Pueblos. Ethnology and ethnohistory informed everything she wrote about Chaco and Southwest archaeology. Several Chaco Project staff studied with her at UNM and worked on her endless field projects before she retired in 1971 – just as the Chaco Project and New Archaeology were starting. A seismic shift. The Chaco Project started in 1969, and after initially surveying the canyon, NPS began excavations at several “small sites.” The idea was to excavate a sequence of earlier small sites for display, like those on Mesa Verde’s “Mesa Top Loop” or the roofed, preserved excavations on Wetherill Mesa. The selected small sites were less than a mile from the Visitors Center. The small-site warm-up would be followed by a big, set-piece excavation of a major Great House – originally slated to be Una Vida, again very near the VC, only about 1/5 mile away. Easy on, easy off! Never happened. The “small sites” excavated near the Visitors Center were all backfilled and forgotten. VC-adjacent Una Vida was deselected, replaced by nearly inaccessible Pueblo Alto – a hike of 2+ hours! The Chaco Project swerved from a Wetherill Mesa model to a more “pure research” strategy. The public does not get to see our sites; and Park Service interpretation mostly ignores our archaeology. (A small Chaco Project crew visited Una Vida briefly, cleaning up Gordon Vivian’s overly-eager excavations: before the Chaco Project took the field, Vivian’s crew cleared the rubble fill from several rooms at Una Vida, to advance the planned excavations. The Chaco Project crew removed the thin fill remaining over the rooms’ floors and recorded features etc., before those rooms, too, were backfilled.) In 1976, seven years in, the Chaco Project changed leadership and buffed up, adding staff for the Big One—now Pueblo Alto, not Una Vida. Bob Lister and Al Hayes retired. James Judge, a UNM professor who was already on board with the Chaco Project, took over. Gearing up for excavations at Pueblo Alto, he hired four new junior staff. I managed to be one of those four – a sordid tale of nepotism related in Chapter 3. The other new faces were Cory Breternitz, Wolky Toll, and Bill Gillespie. Those three all had worked with Dave Breternitz (Cory, almost from birth) and thus had considerable field experience in the Four Corners. I did not, beyond the thin Salmon Ruins "lab dig." My time, up until then, had been spent in the South (Chapter 4). Our first task in Summer 1976, along with the rest of the crew, was to complete 29SJ629, later named "Spadefoot Toad Site." (29 = New Mexico, SJ = San Juan County, 629 = the site's sequential number within that county.) 629 was a late Pueblo I-early Pueblo II site with eight rooms and three pit-structures. The year before, Tom Windes excavated most of 629 with two NPS archaeologists and ten Navajo laborers. In 1976, with the staff additions, Tom led a crew of eight NPS archaeologists and eight laborers. The shifting labor-management mix signaled the change from Old School (Lister, Hayes) to New Archaeology (Judge): from business-like excavation of an entire site to slower, more exacting excavations of samples of sites. The Navajo men were excellent excavators – “laborer” did not do them justice – but they were not note-takers. Under the old regime, one or two NPS archaeologists took notes while a half-dozen Navajo laborers dug. With the second season at 629, and the Pueblo Alto excavations which followed, that changed: the NPS archaeologists did most of the paydirt digging (and mapping and note-taking) and the Navajo laborers, by and large, labored. There was plenty of that at Alto: three-plus meters (10') of fill in rooms was mainly wall rubble, tumbled sandstone blocks. Pick and shovel work. NPS and Navajo shared in that work, taking turns picking & shoveling, running wheelbarrows, hoisting buckets, shaking screens, lifting bales, toting barges, and so on and so forth. And of course Navajo workers did much fine-work excavations – many were superb diggers, trowel artistes. My role at 629 was clean-up: excavating units and dozens of features in the "plaza" area in front of the row of excavated rooms. One feature was a doozy: a bell-shaped pit, 4.5 feet deep. It was a complicated hole-in-the-ground, with sub-features galore. They filled it with layers of trash: the usual bits and pieces plus a human arm, several turkeys, and – micro-spectacularly – tens of thousands of turquoise flecks, debris from bead manufacture. We screened the fill through window-screen mesh, but those tiny flecks fell through the cracks. The only way to recover them was to scoop out some fill, spread it out on a flat surface, and pick 'em out with tweezers. The Navajo guys really enjoyed tweezing turquoise. But it took hours to process a 10-cm level, and that wouldn't do. So we tweezed a small, consistent sample of each level, and sent the rest through the screens. On breaks, the workers scrounged flecks of turquoise out of our back dirt piles; which was a little odd, but what the heck. One man's trash is another man's treasure. Looking down from the pit's mouth, I thought I could see layers in the fill, color changes etc. So instead of slicing the silly thing in half and digging from the side, I excavated the bell-shaped pit head-first and rear-end up, hanging into the pit with a flashlight taped to my shoulder. Not easy. The lab, alas, punctured my illusions: sherds that fit together were scattered through all my "layers." Oh well. Home in the field was a busted-up trailer, one of our half-dozen eye-sores parked in the middle of the NPS housing – and obnoxiously visible to anyone driving to the Visitors' Center and park headquarters. The Chaco NPS staff were not amused by our jalopies, our wash hanging on improvised lines, our lawn chairs, ourselves. Park staff were real NPS – flat hats, uniforms, rules, regulations, careers. We were none of the above. The upper levels of the Chaco Project were Federal employees, but most of us were retained on yearly contracts, temporary appointments, student programs (me, at the end; and several others), and whatever other personnel legerdemain the administration could devise. I lasted ten years on various non-career dodges (Chapter 3); others were strung along even longer. At the time, we were just happy to be working in Chaco Canyon. It was only later, when we saw our contemporaries with homes and retirement savings, that we wondered if we could claw back from a decade of professional holding patterns. Most of us did. The real NPS people looked askance at us and at the Chaco Project. We didn't wear NPS uniforms – a matter to which we will return, below. Chaco had a Park Archaeologist who, as far as I know, was not involved in our planning, much less our research. For much of our time, that Park Archaeologist was Randy Morrison, who not fondly referred to Chaco as "the Gulag," and insisted that no archaeologist who had not spent a full winter there should be allowed to write about Chaco; he had a point. The rangers, whose job it was to maintain order and decorum, considered us a menace to public decency. And to some extent, they were right: we were measurably more bohemian than our NPS keepers. There were tensions; cherry bombs dropped down their chimneys, reprimands, memos to the files, and so on and so on. I was sometimes involved (Chapter 3). The trailer houses were symptomatic. The original park budget, paralleling the original ten-year Chaco Project, included construction of three "room blocks" of single-story apartments, intended for us (originally) and for park staff (ten years later). The Chaco Project lasted rather longer than planned; the apartments were postponed and postponed and were eventually built several years after we'd left. So we had our semi-wrecked trailers whose next stop (and I speak from knowledge) was the junk yard. But, for several long summers, they were home. I did four useful things at the Chaco Project: the central room block of Pueblo Alto, Great Pueblo Architecture of Chaco Canyon, "Points, Knives and Drills of Chaco Canyon," and Outliers. Those are not in precise chronological order but, after the first summer at Alto, things were going on at more or less all at the same time. I'll take them in (synoptic) sequence: Alto, Great Pueblo…, "Points…", and Outliers. Pueblo Alto We wrapped 629 and moved onward and upward to Pueblo Alto. Alto (as its name suggests) sits high on the mesa above Chaco Canyon. Getting there was not fun: the drive to work was a pain but the view was worth it. It would never be the exhibit-in-place NPS had anticipated at Una Vida. The first season (1976) was largely exploratory. I think it was my suggestion to trench along the walls, to reveal the building beneath the rubble mound (Alto, when we first saw it, was just a hump covered with rocks, like Salmon Ruins). We trenched – as shallowly as possible to expose the wall faces -- without the niceties of our otherwise finicky practices and customs: no screening, no measuring, etc. The assumption – which proved correct – was that we would be scratching the very uppermost portion of deep rubble fill. It was quick and effective, and gave us a dandy photogrammetric map of the site. Based on that map, we pondered the eternal question: what's next? (For me, Bill Gillespie, and Bob Powers, what was next was the Outlier Survey, a tale told below.) Summer of 1977, I was assigned the "central" roomblock, the long east-west back part of the staple-shaped site. I looked at how much time we had, how much I could hope to get done, and took my troops to the smallest room in the tallest part of the building, 12' by 8' Room 145. (I speak in feet and inches; we dug in meters and centimeters.) We had a handle on Pueblo Alto's plan, but not its height: how many stories? The betting favored two, possibly three. The top of Room 145 was about ten feet above Alto's plaza. This was the tallest part of the mound, so Room 145 should settle that question. It did: we went down 9' to a lovely floor, and then another 2.6' to the original construction surface. (They built up almost a meter of clean sand fill over the construction surface to the actual floor level; more on this below.) And nary a beam socket did we see: the roof of Room 145 was gone, somewhere in the collapsed rubble that filled the room and littered the site's surface. So Room 145 (and the rest of the ruin) was single story with nine-feet-plus ceiling/roofs – and in Room 145, originally 12-feet-plus above the construction surface. How much "plus"? For each unit and layer of room fill (in Room 145 and thereafter), we gathered up all the building rubble, wheel-barrowed it off the mound, and stacked it neatly in square cairns. We could measure the volume of the cairns, divide that by the width and length of walls, and mathematically reconstruct how much higher the room would have been. In the end, I think it added less than a meter to the room's height – but still, that's about 12 feet above floor, 15 feet above construction surface! (Most of those guys were 5'5" or less, although a few of the Chaco dudes were taller; but no one was 12' tall! – unless they were Lovelock redheads?) There were many layers of rubble and many separate cairns, and one of my jobs was keeping track of them all: which cairn had rubble from what layer etc. I tried to keep the cairns together, clustering all the stacks from Room 145, all the stacks from Room 142, etc. For one cairn I favored order over comfort: without realizing what I was doing, I pinned out a place immediately next to a red ant hill. Red ants bite. After my third or fourth trip to the cairn, standing atop a swarm of angry ants while I carefully stacked stones, I'd been bitten enough. My old Tennessee remedy for ants was gasoline (Chapter 4): pour some down the ant hill hole. The Navajo guys saw my antics, dancing and slapping my pants legs; saw me walk over to the gas can, walk back to the ant hill, and douse the hole. Long about stage two or three, they all quit pretending to work and watched in silence. As I turned away from my formicidae-cide, I saw them looking at me, frowning. Red Ant Way is a major healing ceremony, and depends of course on the good will of the red ants. The Navajos disapproved, of course, and I apologized. They warned me that the coming karmic pay-back was mine, not theirs. When thunder-storms swept through, they edged away. At the end of the summer 1977, we had a good map of the central roomblock and a fair idea of its heights/depths. Now what? Back at our offices in Albuquerque, we considered that question. The decisions I made were of course in conjunction with Jim Judge, Tom Windes, and my several colleagues, but the basic plan (as I recall) was mine. From the wall-cleared map, I (and others) noticed that the central roomblock consisted of a line of eight repeated units: a big room in the plaza row, backed by a similarly-sized big room in the second row, backed by two small rooms in the rear row. In the plaza directly ahead of each unit, or pair of units, was a line of 30'-diameter "kivas." And a weird skinny gallery add-on "room" ran along the plaza-facing wall, between the front big room and the kiva. The small rear rooms were probably storage rooms; the large front-row rooms were probably living rooms; the middle row – who knows? At that point (1976-8) I still accepted that "kivas" were kivas; I later realized that "kivas" were part of the household architecture. Indeed, “kivas” were the house, and the rooms behind them were ancillary to domesticity: pantries, work areas, and above all storage space. A subject to which we return, below. If we were going to excavate one of those repeated rooms-kiva units, we might as well pick the middle one, which included already-excavated Room 145. The work expanded from rear to front: one small rear room, one big middle-row room, two big front-row rooms, as much of the "gallery" as made sense, and then the very large kiva. A trench up to the rear wall and a trench out into the plaza would give us a cross-section of the building. That was the plan. And mostly, we got it done – except the kiva. (And by "we" I mean we; by the end, almost everybody on the crew had a piece of "my" central roomblock.) The details from my long and tedious report (yes, children: Grandpa can do boring) are summarized in the site report (Windes 1987). A few random observations: The rooms were big. Room 12 at Saige-McFarland (Chapter 2) was the biggest thing I'd dug prior to Alto (not counting Mississippian mounds, Chapter 4). Room 12 was about the same size as Room 142 (27' x 12'), the largest of the central roomblock units we excavated. But Room 12 at Saige-McFarland was only 4' deep (or rather, 4’ tall, plus a bit of spillage); Room 142 was more than twice that, maybe three times that. We excavated two rooms the size of 142 plus five other rooms. Quite a pile of rubble, sand, trash and what-have-you. In our section of the Central Room Block, I expected things to get increasingly complicated from rear to front. That is, rear-row rooms should be simple, middle-row rooms a bit more complicated, and front-row rooms and the plaza-facing gallery real challenges. That's how it worked at Salmon Ruin (most of the time), and that seemed to be how Neil Judd found things at Pueblo Bonito and Pueblo del Arroyo, and (from what little I could find to read) Chetro Ketl. And at Aztec Ruins, from my reading of Earl Morris's reports. Since we were new to this Chaco Great House business, I thought we should start simple (rear- and middle-row rooms) and work towards the more complicated front row and plaza. Some of the Colorado boys might have worked at small Great Houses like Chimney Rock or Escalante (I don’t know), but none of us had tackled anything as big or potentially complex at Pueblo Alto, some intelligently paced OJT seemed in order. As things fell out, we started in the middle row of rooms, expanding out from already-excavated Room 145 and the much larger, adjacent Room 139; and then moved out both ways, to the rear and to the front. For the three years we worked at Alto, we left excavated rooms open -- that is, not backfilled. To protect them over the winter, we built very solid, heavy rectangular lumber frames covered with fiberglass corrugated panels – lighter than "tin" corrugated roofs, but not as strong. Two or three of these flat "roofs" covered a large room. With one or two people hoisting each corner, we slid them on and off for rain or thunderstorms. They were heavy, but the winds were strong: several times a whirlwind or down-burst lifted an entire roof unit and, more often than anyone liked, corrugated fiberglass panels peeled away, spinning through the air. Dive for cover! No one got hit by those flying fiberglass machetes, and that was a very good thing: it was a long drive to the Farmington hospital. Cory Breternitz excavated the small rear row room (Room 138). It was (relatively) simple, although of course its excavation was a lot of work. Like the middle-row room (below) the walls of the room rose from a graded ground surface 2' below the actual floor of the rooms, with clean sand packed above the ground surface to the designed level of the floor, which was a nicely finished adobe/mud layer, with one real feature, a post step just below the small, high-sill doorway to/from middle row Room 139. Hereafter, doors like that will be called “storage doors,” because that’s what they were – discussed below. The middle-row room (139/145) was originally designed to be two smaller (but larger than rear row) rooms: a foundation for a dividing wall remained unused, with unused bonding stones projecting from the walls at either end. (This will sound complicated, and it was; but not as complicated as the front-row room and the plaza-facing gallery. If you really want to understand the Escher-esque wall patterns, read Windes report.) That surface (not really a floor) had a line of post-holes along the long axis of the room, offset toward the plaza. The floor (raised on clean sand 2' above the base of the walls) had a cross-wall about a quarter of the way in (Room 145's west wall), and a line of post-holes running right down the middle of the long axis of the room. Post steps were set just below the several storage doors opening into rear- and front-row rooms. Otherwise, there were no features: no fire pits, no mealing bins, no crypts bursting with loot…nothing, really. Moving a row closer to the plaza, in 1978, the floor of the big front-row room (142) was mostly devoid of features: a row of roof-support posts along the long axis of the room, and step posts below the storage doors. Unlike the rear- and middle-row rooms, however, the front-row big room (142) had beam sockets for "room-wide platforms" – a distinctive furniture of Chaco Great Houses, which later appeared at Aztec Ruins and later still at Paquimé. Unlike the middle- and rear-row rooms, the front rooms' floors had been renewed/replastered. And the two smaller front-row rooms (146, 147), in contrast to the middle and rear-row rooms, had multiple floors, floor features like formal hearths, etc. Below those room floors, things got really interesting – Rooms 50 and 51, to which we will return, after we finish Room 142, the gallery, and Kiva 10. Room 142 was big, 27' long, 12' wide, and 8' deep. We shoveled out 80+ cubic yards of rubble, sand, roof-fall, and what-have-you before finding the first floor. A standard pick-up holds two cubic yards, but most manufacturers recommend only one – so, like 60 or 70 pick-up trucks of rock, sand, and clay. 80 cubic yards of room-fill was a LOT of pick & shovel & wheelbarrow work, and everyone took their turns. People cycled in and out; only my aching back was constant. I was down in the hole broad-siding a trench face when out of the rubble popped a fist-sized stone frog, bright blue. There was no context beyond wall-fall; and it wasn't at all clear from where in the tumbled rubble the thing had sprung. I was excited, of course; and after doing what little I could to record its location, I walked around the site, proudly showing off my Blue Frog. My colleagues oohed and aahed, but there was something wary in their wonderment. I believe it was Cory Breternitz who took the frog, flipped it over, and broke my heart: the inscription on its belly read "Thailand." Tom Windes, the site director, confessed: he'd planted the frog in the trench, targeting not me but LouAnn Jacobson, who had been assigned to assist with the Big Dig of Room 142. But that morning I'd picked up the pick, and found the frog meant for her. LouAnn, having dodged disgrace, went on to a successful career as the director of BLM's Anasazi Heritage Center, while I became the Great Satan of Southwestern Archaeology (Chapter 13). Was it The Blue Frog? I date my initial devolution to that shattering experience in Room 142. I never quite trusted archaeologists – or indeed, humanity – again. Before The Blue Frog, I was optimistic, trusting, naive. After The Blue Frog, I turned cynical and bitter, old and broken before my time. Better me than Jacobson, I suppose. The gallery – the long, narrow Room 143 fronting the plaza – was by far the most complex unit in the Central Room Block, with ten sequential floors (each separated by thin layer of clean sand) and many floor features. And, of course, working from rear to front, the gallery was almost the last place we worked, up against the ticking clock. Unlike the front, middle and back row rooms, the gallery had a lot of material scattered on the uppermost floor. Towards Alto's end, people lived in the gallery, which would surely be easier to heat than the cavernous front- and middle-row rooms. And, as it turns out, they dumped their considerable trash into the kiva, in the plaza immediately in front of the gallery. Kiva 10 … ah, the kiva: the kiva was supposed to be the final, culminating excavation. It probably should have been the first, although chances are that if we'd gone into the kiva, that unit would have eaten up all our time and labor. The thing was big, 30 feet across and 13 feet deep, and filled with very dense trash, many more sherds per cubic whatever than the trash in Alto's Trash Mound (which was not really a trash mound…). It had been rebuilt at least once: the arc of an earlier, slightly larger version was tangent to the plaza-facing wall of Room 142 (with its possible T-door); the later kiva, which we were excavating, was tangent to the plaza-facing wall of the gallery, which clearly was a later addition but in much the same style masonry and construction techniques as the rest of the building. We dug a 3-foot-wide (OK: 1 m) trench half-way across our kiva; about two feet below surface, we hit the top of an enormous mound of trash, probably thrown into the kiva (through its roof opening?) by the residents of the gallery. Trash is tricky. It's loose ("unconsolidated") and shifty. Being at the bottom of a one-meter wide, four-meter-deep trench in a giant underground pile of trash was not comfortable. Adding to the unease was the collapse, shortly before Kiva 10, of our trench through the Trash Mound – a great pile southeast of the building, 250’ x 100’ x 15’ tall. We’d dug a narrow trench across the short axis of the Trash Mound; that trench was 70 feet long and 13 feet deep. Several sections of its wobbly "walls" slumped. Most memorably, a cave-in that buried a volunteer up to his thighs, deep in the bowls of the trench. Memorable of course for the volunteer, but also for all of us who rallied to dig him out, anxiously wondering if the rest of the thing was about to go. OSHA stepped in, requiring elaborate bracing throughout the trench. Necessary, but a real pain in the neck, pinch on our labor resources, and a bust of our budget. Moreover, the Trash Mound (which did indeed have a lot of trash in it; but it wasn’t really a trash mound…) swamped the labs with many thousands of sherds, flakes, and other junk – far more than our collections from Alto's rooms and plazas. Collections were reaching critical mass. Kiva 10 might become Trash Mound 2.0. The trash from Kiva 10 was “richer” than the trash from the trash mound: more sherds per cubit whatever. The materials from our original trench dwarfed the combined collections from the rest of the Central Room Block. And that trench was about 5% of the kiva’s area. The contents of the whole kiva might sink the ship. And, absent bracing, OSHA and NPS ordered us out of the kiva, under threat of dire penalties. We couldn’t face another round of brace-building. And excavations would have been complex and time-consuming and possibly dangerous: as noted above, the kiva we were working in was built inside a larger, earlier kiva, which ran under the walls of the plaza-facing rooms; we couldn’t excavate the earlier kiva without undermining the very substantial walls above. Kiva 10: too many artifacts, too many restrictions, too much mess. Too much monkey business. So it was decided to terminate the kiva excavations. Given my then-emerging understanding of “kivas,” Kiva 10 should have been the best, more important part of the Central Room Block. My Grand Finale fizzled: nuts. Back to the mines: when the NPS shut us down, we had not yet reached the kiva's floor and we had not mapped and recorded its busy stratigraphy. One of my last semi- quasi- maybe/maybe-not official acts at Pueblo Alto began with a night drive up to the site, headlights off to elude the rangers, a stumble over to Kiva 10, hurried flashlight-lit excavations to clear the kiva bench, a small "test" down to floor, and a hasty sketch of the stratigraphy of the ill-fated trash-filled trench. Several hours of work under the dim light of camp lanterns. I did this myself, with a rope around my torso and a friend above poised to drag or dig me out if the walls collapsed or the cops arrived. Nothing bad happened. I mucked around, and I may be the only living person who has excavated Chaco kiva "wainscoting" – another peculiar Chaco feature, wattle-and-daub rising from the bench to form an upside-down-basket, a false roof-dome (of which, more below). But I didn't have a lot of time, or a lot of light, to pick it apart; or to record the many thin layers of trash (some likely basket-loads). With my far-from-satisfactory clandestine data, we kissed the kiva goodbye and filled in the trench. Officially, in daylight, with a front-end-loader. My plan, working from simple rear-row rooms to complex plazas and kiva, failed. We ran out of time, money, energy – and, forsooth to forfend, OSHA forbade. In retrospect, maybe we should have started in the kiva and worked back into the building. No kiva, and a couple of front-row rooms were excavated only to their uppermost floors, with no probes below for earlier floors, features, or whatever. And there were indeed important whatevers to find. Beneath the Central Room Block we found an earlier building: Rooms 50 and 51, alluded to above. Rooms 50 and 51 were an entirely separate, earlier pre-Alto small building, raised and then razed. It sat below the exact center of the central room block (as originally built; the room block was later expanded). That, my friends, was no coincidence. The central room block rose directly from the ground-surface of Rooms 50 and 51. And those rooms had been leveled, scraped down to the tops of their impressive foundations, before construction began. When they built the central room block, they knew exactly where Rooms 50 and 51 were. I’d guess that Rooms 50 & 51 were the reason Alto was where it was. Rooms 50 and 51 were not large – 6' x 12' and 9' x 12' – together about half the size of Room 142. But they were serious rooms: their stone-and-clay-filled foundation trenches were only slightly smaller than those below Pueblo Alto's later walls. Foundations like that were not common in the Four Corners; indeed, such foundations are a hallmark of Great House architecture. A small, early Great House? The floor levels of 50-51 were the same surface from which rose Pueblo Alto. Which brings up an interesting aspect of the central room block: construction debris. In most of the rooms we dug, the final plastered floor was laid over a foot or two of clean sand, beneath which was the original Room 50-51 ground surface – littered with construction debris. Hammerstones, whole and fractured. Abraders. And thousands of sandstone spalls, struck off the stones shaped right there, by masons right there, for wall construction. In one room, among the construction debris we found a sherd which had been snapped in half; the other half had been used as a spall in the wall. Very cool! Everybody on the crew took turns fitting the loose half-sherd to the half-sherd stuck in the wall; even the Navajo guys thought that was interesting. We had, essentially, "workshop" debris from construction of a Great House. Chaco was all about Great Houses. So I collected all those spalls – which seemed to me the moral equivalents of conventional chipped stone flakes – and all the debris and busted hammerstones. People thought I was nuts; similar construction debris in the lower levels of the trash mound were noted and discarded. Back at the lab (Winter 1977-8 in Albuquerque) I was allowed to analyze a sample of those spalls. All I could do in the time allotted was characterize 'em by size. And then away they went, sent to storage. I have not forgotten those sandstone spalls. I mention them to graduate students. Much could be learned from those spalls – but you'd have to look also at stones in the walls, and how they were shaped. We understand flint knapping, but I’m not sure we understand hammer-stoned masonry. And those walls are reburied under eight feet of back-fill. We took extensive photos etc of those walls, but I think any analyst would want to re-excavate the Central Room Block to see the actual masonry. Not likely. The painted pottery associated with both 50-51 and the construction debris was almost entirely Red Mesa Black-on-white, a type made from 875 to 1040. 1040 at the latest; the type was far more common earlier on. Pueblo Alto's construction has been dated to about 1045, based largely on a cluster of dates from a dis-assembled burned roof – or something – tossed into the Trash Mound. Clearly, something was built in 1045; but the half-dozen tree-rings dates actually from rooms we excavated all dated prior to 1021. Most of those were not cutting dates; the two cutting or near-cutting dates from rooms were 1004 from the central room block and 1021 from the west wing. I suggested in Chaco Meridian (Lekson 2015) that maybe the actual construction – and the construction debris under the central room block – was between 1005 and 1020. Not a big difference, but a difference. Tom Windes, who was in charge of Pueblo Alto and who wrote its report, agreed. Pueblo Alto pointed me towards architecture. The central room block produced its share of pots and rocks (and a lot of turquoise and, of course, The Blue Frog) but nothing truly extraordinary – beyond those tasty sandstone spalls! No spectacular finds, but the intricacies of its lattice web of walls (built and unbuilt) and foundations (used and unused) intrigued me. And the doors: fifteen doors! Running in both axes. Great fun to excavate! Mystery portals opening … into what? Well, of course, into the room next door. Most were the high-silled, jump-through doors so common at Great Houses, window-sized openings with sills two-plus feet above the floor; sometimes with niche toe-holds or short stepping-posts to assist the ancients up and over. ("They must have been very short people?") Many had "secondary jambs": odd insets out a few inches into the open doorway, with a slanting edge on one face, a vertical edge on the other. What were those? Doors into storage rooms: small enough to seal with a stone or wood slab that rested against the secondary jam. I’d seen tiny granaries tucked high up Four Corners’ cliffs: they had exactly the same secondary jams, and details. Nobody lived in those. So, based on doors, most of our rooms were storage rooms. That’s correct: the huge middle and front row rooms were NOT living rooms, but storage rooms. One exception: a front-row room which had a possible (but not certain) T-shaped door. The most likely T-shaped door (Door #12 in Room 147, for those keeping score) had a floor-level sill and opened from a front-row room directly onto/into the kiva – the earlier, larger kiva. That door was later masked by the gallery (and the kiva remodeled and made smaller). At the time, I didn't recognize door #12 as a possible "T" because I didn't know all that much about Great House architecture. I was about to learn. And I learned that T-doors almost invariably opened onto plazas – although, like Door #12, they could be masked by later additional construction. Great Pueblo Architecture of Chaco Canyon (GPACC) In recent years, some senior Southwesternists (who should know better) have griped about Great Houses. Great Houses get all the love – they carp – while small sites beg for scraps. The real crazies even attempt to "normalize" Great Houses, to somehow wish them away. Reducing, rhetorically, the trumpeting elephant-in-the-room to a Disney-Dumbo pygmy. Chaco is Great Houses. Absent Great Houses there wouldn't be a National Park or a Chaco Phenomenon. Of course small sites are also important. They set the context: small sites at Chaco are pretty much like small sites (Unit Pueblos) everywhere else around the Four Corners. The vast majority of people lived in Unit Pueblos before, during and after Chaco. It's Chaco’s Great Houses which are different – remarkably different – and it’s Great House which make Chaco interesting. The difference between Great Houses and contemporary small sites/Unit Pueblos is the central problem of Chaco. Florence Hawley (and others in Hewett’s UNM crew) figured this out at least by 1934: the “town-village” problem. Gordon Vivian in his Kin Kletso report gave the problem its most thorough airing; he concluded (developing the UNM line) that Chaco was inhabited by three ethnic groups, represented by Great Houses, “McElmo” Great Houses, and Bc sites/Unit Pueblos. He was (mostly) right. We were excavating a Great House – Pueblo Alto – but we were not studying Great Houses as a class. I volunteered to do that. Everybody else was busy writing technical excavation reports, or analyzing ceramics, or staring a flakes, etc. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I studied Great Houses in the field and in the archives; and I wrote Great Pueblo Architecture of Chaco Canyon, with a little help from my friends: Peter McKenna on a study of Chetro Ketl; Tom Windes on Great Pueblo’s section on Pueblo Alto; and Bill Gillespie on Great Pueblo’s section on Una Vida. Tom had directed our excavations at Alto; Bill had participated in the Chaco Project’s excavations at Una Vida (noted above) – really interesting! In recent years, I've repeatedly heard Great Pueblo Architecture of Chaco Canyon (1984) referred to as my dissertation. I may be mistaken, but this assertion seems to imply that my first work, under the sober direction of an academic advisor and committee, was useful; and my subsequent excesses resulted from lack of guidance, external or internal. In the unfounded statements that GPACC was my faculty-mentor-directed PhD thesis, I hear a sub-text discounting my subsequent, un-faculty-mentored works. I’m not making this up, and it's annoying. Great Pueblo Architecture was NOT my dissertation. My dissertation was not signed, sealed and delivered until 1988 – five years after I'd polished off the final draft of Great Pueblo Architecture; and while – like almost all my work – the dissertation built on my earlier studies, its committee-muted excesses ranged in very different directions. The diss gathers dust, unread, on the library shelves of the University of New Mexico; I recycled a few bits and pieces, but by and large it's never been available to the reading public. (There’s also a rumor [promulgated by my wife…among others] that my dissertation was simply a re-packaging of previously published articles. Not true. The thing was a typical dissertation of that time: question, theory, cross-cultural info, tests, etc.) Great Pueblo Architecture was the product of research that was entirely my own. I had to convince my superiors that the research was needed and that I was the guy to do it; and that the funding required was a good investment. Of course, the work was not "entirely my own": I had excellent partners in the fieldwork (noted above and expanded below). But I recognized the need, I figured out the program, I sold the idea to my superiors, I planned the project(s), I framed the analysis, I outlined and wrote the blasted book – with, again, a little help from my friends. The result was peer-reviewed and published in 1984 by the National Park Service as "Publications in Archaeology 18B" and re-published by UNM Press in 1986 (Chapter 12). The confusion, perhaps, is understandable. In the standard academic trajectory, the newly-hired assistant professor buffs up his/her dissertation – which has already passed the stern "peer review" of his/her dissertation committee – and publishes it as The Book required for retention and tenure. That's the standard path. But I didn’t take the standard path (for my mis-adventures, Chapters 1 and 2; for my mis-adventures specifically in publishing, Chapter 12). But I digress. When I joined the Chaco Project – MA not quite in hand, PhD not even on the radar – the project was already five-years into its planned ten-year run. Routines had been established. The field crew, in the winter, became the Albuquerque lab crew. The usual analytical categories had already been claimed: People were already deep into ceramics, lithics, ground stone, fauna, flora, what-have-you. I helped with ceramics and lithics (discussed below) but surely there was something I could contribute which was not already being done. I looked for gaps: architecture! Not the "architecture and stratigraphy" of the sites we'd dug; those were being "written up" by the various field directors. Indeed, they were so busy writing up their sites they didn't have time for much else (site reports, uniformly excellent, continued to appear as late as 2015). So I proposed to study the architecture of the Great Houses, the things that made Chaco, Chaco. There were only a dozen or so in the canyon and nobody had looked at them systematically since Gordon Vivian and Tom Matthews and Bryant Bannister, whose 1964 Kin Kletso publication (lauded above and below) I referenced with gratitude. More than a decade had passed since they did their thinking, and paradigms shifted: perhaps it was time for a new look at Great House architecture? I spent the Christmas break of 1977-78 pulling together published resources, to see what I could see: site reports, tree-rings, a few theses and dissertations. Neil Judd’s site reports (Pueblo Bonito, Pueblo del Arroyo) and Earl Morris’s site report (Aztec Ruins) were useful for those individual buildings, but the best synthetic study remained Vivian, Mathews and Bannister (1964). Vivian and Matthews reported the excavation of Kin Kletso, and concluded their report with a short but insightful synthesis of Chaco's archaeology. Much of that synthesis was based on tree-ring data presented in the second half of the volume, by Bryant Bannister. Bannister's contribution was an enormously useful compendium of tree-ring dates from all Great Houses and “small sites” as of 1960 – the report was a reworking of his 1960 University of Arizona dissertation of that year. A few years later, the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research did a comprehensive re-dating of all their collections, with most of the actual work done by Dick Warren (with whom I'd later work at Chetro Ketl). They issued a series of reports for various areas of the Southwest. The Chaco volume was the second-to-last to appear, in 1974, a couple of years before I joined the Chaco Project. So…we had new and better dates. Bannister included plans and maps of all the Great Houses, taken mostly from various NPS drawings available at that time. In 1973-4, the Chaco Project hired Koogle and Pouls Engineering, an Albuquerque firm, for photogrammetric maps of all the Great Houses, which were then interpreted by the NPS Remote Sensing Division (a parallel effort with the Chaco Project). Maps based on the Koogle and Pouls manuscript maps appeared, piecemeal, in various Remote Sensing Division publications, and as a complete (if somewhat sketchy) set as an Appendix to Al Hayes’s 1981 “Survey of Chaco Canyon Archaeology” – another NPS publication. (I used the K&P original compiled maps and orthophoto renditions.) So…we had new and better maps – when checked/amended/annotated in field, a huge improvement over what was available ca. 1978, when I started thinking about Great House architecture. Bannister worked mainly from notes and records available at Tucson, in the Laboratory of Tree-ring Research and the NPS Southwestern Archaeological Center. His dissertation research involved very little field work at Chaco. We were doing field work at Chaco. So…we had new and better dates and maps. I could add what context from field studies of the Great Houses. So we had better dates, better maps, (maybe) better context. All set for an architectural study of Chacoan Great Houses… What did that mean, an “architectural study”? I cast about for archaeological approaches to architecture, and came up short. Early Southwestern archaeology offered some useful nuts-and-bolts studies – the Mindeleff brothers and Lawrence Roys, for example. The then-current New Archaeology seemed blind to architecture, treating it mostly as containers for artifact assemblages. Real data, it seemed, came in bags, labelled "Room 7 floor" or some-such. Around UNM, Binford didn't study architecture, in the sense of permanent constructions. He certainly had no interest in palaces and temples. Jerry Sabloff did; but as I recount in Chapter 1, Sabloff scoffed at Chacoan pretensions. Good-naturedly. I decided to look elsewhere, and I kept it mostly regional. Wandering through the appropriate sections of UNM's Zimmerman Library – library wandering is a wonderful research tool, gone with the web – I stumbled onto George Kubler's (1940) Religious Architecture of New Mexico. I came to admire Religious Architecture of New Mexico greatly; and followed its author to his Art and Architecture of Ancient America and especially his The Shape of Time (both published in 1962, and both major influences on GPACC) – and for Kubler's outspoken skepticism of archaeology's reliance on ethnography for the interpretation of ancient "Amerindian" art and architecture. (Kubler's 1991 Esthetic Recognition of Ancient Amerindian Art later influenced the first two chapters of my Study of Southwestern Archaeology.) I met Kubler several times in Santa Fe and we discussed Chaco's buildings – a thrill of my then-young-ish lifetime. He died in 1996. Religious Architecture… focused on Colonial Catholic churches. Kubler combined archive and conventional historical research with extensive visits to the surviving churches – aided by the official blessing of Archbishop Gerken of Santa Fe. Kubler measured things, drew or adapted maps, looked at walls and roofs, talked to padres and sacristáns and mayordomos. And produced a classic, published in 1940 by the Taylor Museum in Colorado Springs and then through three subsequent editions by School of American Research Press. I liked its structure: the first half of Religious Architecture was thematic, with chapters "materials," "plan," and "structure," and so forth; the second half of the book described "the buildings" individually. I modelled GPACC on Kubler's Religious Architecture… First half, themes: "Construction" and "Form." The second half, buildings: site-by-site descriptions and analyses of Chaco's Great Houses. (Choking on irony's dust, I note that Religious Architecture… was Kubler’s dissertation at Yale University.) Kubler was not my sole source for method (Religious Architecture…) and theory (Shape of Time). I read a fair number of "design theory" books and found Alexander Broadbent and Christopher Alexander particularly useful. I read a lot of vernacular architecture and – rather by chance – discovered Amos Rapoport, who stands alongside Kubler in my pantheon. Amos Rapoport was then about 50 years old and Distinguished Professor of Architecture at UW-Milwaukee when I – a 30ish NPS drudge – bumped into his work, by accident, in the UNM Bookstore. (This was back when university bookstores sold books.) On display was his House Form and Culture, published 1969 as part of Prentice-Hall’s “Foundations of Cultural Geography” series ($1.95, paperback). Looked interesting, but $2 then is $30 now, and I wasn’t making a ton of money at work. After a few moments of fiscal angst, I bought the book. It was an eye-opener: the kind of cross-cultural work that Binford championed at UNM, but a bit more humanistic (which I liked). I bought other Rapoport titles, most importantly his 1976 Mutual Interaction of People and Their Built Environment: A Cross-Cultural Perspective; 1977’s Human Aspects of Urban Form; 1982’s The Meaning of the Built Environment: A Nonverbal Communication Approach; plus many articles and chapters. Not all of these were cited in GPACC (Meaning… came out after GPACC was published) but they all impacted how I thought about architecture, then and now. Rapoport cranked out more books since then. (I tried to meet him once when my travels took me to Wisconsin; he was not receiving.) Pushing 95 now and two-decades retired: I wish him well! (I still have my Kubler books. Religious Architecture is cracked and tattered, its spine attached only by a few threads. Shape of Time, a paperback, is dog-eared and creased. I still read them, from time to time. Alas, I lent my Rapoport library to a student at CU; I’ve never seen them since.) I read a lot of architecture stuff which archaeology graduate students did not read, then or now. That bothered me. Amos Rapoport, for example, was brilliant and essential, but UNM's graduate students had never heard of him. (Nor, today, have CU's.) I fussed about this; someone noticed and I was invited in 1981 to deliver a departmental colloquium on "Architecture in Archaeology." My lecture made zero impact on the bright young New Archaeologists in the audience; but just for the heck of it I deposited "Architecture in Archaeology: A Critical Bibliography of Sources for Theory" in UNM's Clark Field Archives. When thinking about buildings, grad students today routinely cite not Amos, but Henri Lefebvre – a long-dead French Marxist, one of the cohort of French social philosophers who wrecked much of American academia in the 1980s and who now are ignored, even obscure in their native land. So I had notions about “theory” – by which I mean, in Binford’s science-sense: ideas about how the world works. In this case, the world of architecture. What questions did I want to ask, informed by this theory? I was enamored with Lesley White at the time (I got over it) and White was obsessed with energy, so I’d look at labor and architectural logistics: “social ramifications of construction.” New Archaeology loudly proclaimed interests in social structure and other anthropological folderol, so I’d say something about architectural form and social and/or political organization: “social correlates of form.” Both of these questions required a coherent, systematic description of Chaco's Great Houses. Even if my research flopped, that kind of a study would be useful for those at a distance wanting to know Great Houses, and for hard-working but sketchily-informed NPS seasonal rangers whose job it was to interpret Great Houses for visiting citizens. So: a field and archival study of Chacoan Great House architecture, a la Kubler per Rapoport. That was manageable; there were only a dozen or so Great Houses. (I once naively asked Binford: what was an optimal sample size? He replied, so few that you know them all by their names. Great Houses actually HAD names, and I knew them all and mispronounced a few.) Field work would consist of annotating/amending our new photogrammetric maps and creating measured drawings ("elevations") of standing walls. I estimated that it would take four or five months. Too long: I had to bargain, so I bargained away Pueblo Bonito, Pueblo del Arroyo, Kin Kletso and Pueblo Alto – which all had (or would soon have) published reports with varying degrees of detail (and some previous documentation). Those four I visited and studied, reports in hand, marking marginalia as warranted – but no time-consuming mapping and elevations. That brought my estimates down to maybe two months. OK: I was allowed to drag Peter McKenna away from his ceramic duties for a month-plus of field work, drawing all the rest (Peñasco Blanco, New Alto, Hungo Pavi, Wijiji, and so forth). That work (described below) was followed, as time permitted, by solitary field visits to Pueblo Pintado, Kin Bineola, and Aztec Ruins – crawling all over those ruins, amending maps and taking notes but no new elevations. Another month for archival studies, mostly as a solitary monkish researcher. Three archives were close at hand: the Chaco Project at UNM, the Park's at Chaco Canyon, and the NPS Southwestern Archaeology Center in Tucson. Others, with records from earlier excavations, were at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Smithsonian Institution in D.C. Again, I had to bargain; and again, I lost: NPS declined to send me for weeks to revel in flesh pots, libraries, and archives of the Big Apple and The Swamp. No NYC, no D.C. Tucson might be possible, for a short visit, but otherwise I'd have to depend on UNM and Park resources, which included many volumes of stabilization records and – importantly – the surviving notes from Edgar Hewett's work at Chetro Ketl. Chetro Ketl was a problem. Edgar Hewett and his associates excavated most of the site in the 1920s and 1930s, in the later stretch as a field school from the University of New Mexico. Hewett was not known for his archaeological acumen, nor for writing up his research. He published extensively, including several popular accounts of Chetro Ketl; but he never got around to any systematic or coherent account of the site. Which was disappointing, because Chetro Ketl was either the largest or second largest Great House at Chaco Canyon, and it produced about 60% of all the tree-ring dates published in the Laboratory of Tree-ring Research's 1974 Chaco volume. Most, however, with sketchy or no provenience; to be fair, many Chetro Ketl dates came from beams washed out in a disastrous 1947 flood, a year after Hewett's death. Over winter break 1977-1978, I tried to reconcile those new dates with what little we knew about Chetro Ketl, and failed miserably. Early the next year I sent the report of my effort to the Laboratory of Tree-ring Research and they agreed: I'd failed miserably. One thing led to another, and a year later I'd convinced my superiors to fund a study, for which I wrote the scope-of-work and negotiated the budget, with the Tree-ring Lab (1) to comb their archives and (2) to resample exposed wood on-site. I was much impressed by Jeff Dean's tree-ring sampling of beams, lintels, etc at Betatakin and Keit Siel (his dissertation, I believe…) and I thought we might do something like that at Chaco. Originally, I tried to sell my bosses on resampling project for the entire canyon, but… I lost. So I bargained, getting the nod for Chetro Ketl, one of the most important Great Houses and, as noted, the source of the bulk of Chaco's tree-ring dates. In May 1979, Jeff Dean and Dick Warren from the Tree-ring Lab came to Chaco with electric drills and (barely) portable generators. (Long before battery-driven power tools, kiddos.) Those gentlemen started their engines and revved their drills. Noisy. At the same time, Peter McKenna and I mapped elevations of Chetro Ketl's many walls. This was before (affordable) terrestrial photogrammetry, and long before laser scanning. Drawing – with pencil on paper, youngsters – Chetro Ketl's walls was much like drawing archaeological profiles: we nailed up a horizontal line of twine, ran a measuring tape along its length, and then with folding rulers measured up and down to points on wall features (doors, vents, whatever), obvious changes in masonry styles (ancient or modern, from stabilization), and beam sockets and floor off-sets, etc. Horizontal control came from the photogrammetric maps. I shot in vertical controls with a hoary engineer's transit. Pretty standard stuff. The process was not, however, without challenges. Rooms were big and deep, and mostly two or even three stories tall. NPS loaned us ladders, and OSHA looked the other way. Our work was mostly quiet. Our biggest problem was keeping the level-lines attached to the walls. We'd hammer nails at fixed elevations into each corner of a room, string the twine, pull it tight, and – bingo! – two or three nails popped out, forcing us to re-string and re-string and re-string. The second or third re-stringings were often accompanied by a certain amount of verbal complaint, sometimes in colorful language. I noted, with candor, in the official report (Lekson 1983:xxxix): "Between their portable generator and electric drill, and our miles of line-level string, Park Rangers on Chetro Ketl tours must have been forced to invent some rather creative answers." McKenna and I drew all the walls at many Great Houses – including Peñasco Blanco, which required a daily two-mile hike, one-way, with tools, transit, tripods, ladders, and water – and we grew very weary of that foul twine and those blasted nails. While otherwise frugal, we decided to not reuse string. Several early attempts to spindle it resulted only in a frustrating mess. So we left our lines up throughout the building (which, in fairness, helped us to check elevations, fix errors, etc). At the end of a particular piece of work, we wrapped a Great House's worth of string onto an ever-expanding ball, with no attempt to keep things tidy or reusable. Think of the core of baseball, only much bigger – volley-ball-sized, basket-ball sized. (The ball of twine met an ugly end, Chapter 3.) We turned Chaco’s Great Houses into low-rent Christo installations, not draping over but tying up the ruin in a web of white. On balance the work was a lot of fun, but it wasn't all skittles and beer. Beer maybe, but no skittles. McKenna and I lived a quiet monastic life in one of the beat-up trailers, returning to Albuquerque on weekends. We traded cooking duties. Peter can actually cook, and often did so. I leaned towards simpler things: burgers, PB&Js, hot dogs. Hot dogs, in fact, became something of a fetish: Peter and I competed, each weekend’s shopping, for obscure or unusual brands. I don't recall who won, but I do recall the winning entry, clear and obvious by virtue of its ingredients: "Poultry faces and beef lips." We ate 'em and lived to tell about it. (Poultry faces? Beef lips?) Our elevations were not Historic American Building Survey (HABS) quality. In the Chaco Archives, we had WPA-era HABS drawings of (part of) Pueblo Bonito, marvelous renderings that began at the southeastern corner of that site and continued inward until the collapse of Threatening Rock, January 22, 1941 – which apparently ended WPA's interest in Bonito. Those drawings were beautifully rendered and admirably precise. Our drawings were accurate, but – in comparison to HABS – rudimentary. Back in Albuquerque, I compiled our drawings of Chetro Ketl (and other Great Houses) into continuous lines of north-south and east-west walls. With vertical controls provided by the trusty transit and that blasted string, it was possible to build an accurate model of Chetro Ketl (and the other sites) as it now stands, by assembling the various wall lines at their appropriate junctures. Dennis Holloway, an Albuquerque architect, actually did that, using our drawings (https://www.dennisrhollowayarchitect.com/ChetroKetl.html). Our Chetro Ketl drawings and records from a half-dozen other Great Houses should be in the Chaco Archives at the University of New Mexico. (As far as I know, no one ever used them again – other than Chetro Ketl – after I finished Great Pueblo Architecture of Chaco Canyon.) Back to Chetro Ketl. We finished our field work in a few weeks, and retired to our corners: Jeff and Dick back to Tucson, Peter to his sherds, and I to my drafting table. And then to the archives; I spent many hours with the notes in the Chaco Archives and more time with the stabilization records for Chetro Ketl (and the other Great Houses) at both Chaco Canyon and in in the NPS Western Archaeological Center in Tucson. The Chaco Archive – a conventional paper archive, not to be confused with the future online Chaco Research Archive – had been collected by Gordon Vivian (I think) and included student notes from the field school excavations. I learned to love the two Woods sisters, Janet and Margaret: superb note-takers. Other students, who will remain nameless, deserved big red Fs or, at best, Ds. Even so, much could be gained from their wreckage. But not from Edgar’s notes, which no longer exist (his wife burned his papers); rather, from his lieutenants’ and students’ notes. I compartmentalized the project’s products (titles in quotes are chapters in The Architecture and Dendrochronology of Chetro Ketl, Lekson 1983): Peter and I compiled "Excavation Notes" room by room from the archives, and "Wall Notes" wall by wall from our field work. From the evidence of walls and notes, I proposed a construction sequence for Chetro Ketl, "Building Stages." Meanwhile, Dick down in Tucson dated the new dendro samples and with Jeff worked in the Tree-ring Lab's archives for old samples and dated, individually, rooms and kivas – "Dendrochronology." (I think Julio Betancourt was involved with the Tree-ring Research lab’s preliminary inventory.) Then they evaluated (and dated) my proposed building stages. The final step was a "Construction History of Chetro Ketl," written by me, with Jeff's advice. These siloed chapter drafts flew (or crawled) back and forth from Albuquerque to Tucson by USPS – no email in those days, no Zooms, no Skypes. We also cast about for artifact collections. Beyond Chetro Ketl's famous painted wood and Great Kiva niche offerings (both extensively published), we located only a few objects at the Museum of New Mexico and a few more in NPS collections. Not enough to do anything with – just a short appendix to the report. I interviewed Florence Hawley Ellis (the most notable survivor from the Hewett era), and she graciously contributed a 15-page "Foreword" – very much worth reading! All this I compiled into a report of 355 pages (and a dozen over-sized elevations of wall lines, tucked into a pocket in the back). When it came time for front-matter, I initially insisted on four authors in alphabetical order: Dean, Lekson, McKenna, and Warren. (I was rather naive about publishing; Chapter 12.) My democratic impulse was over-ruled – I lost again – and I became the volume's Editor. Which I suppose I was. Chetro Ketl was a lot of work, and very good work if I say so myself. I am vexed and perplexed by repeated claims, in print, from Senior Chaco Scholars (and their followers) lamenting that we know so little about Chetro Ketl – citing Hewett's 1936 Chaco book, but pointedly making no reference to our 1983 study. Our report is obscure, to be sure; but it’s available online on the Chaco Research Archive, as a "Digital Monograph.” Well, Senior Chaco Scholars, we know quite a bit about Chetro Ketl. And it's been published for years. And you're welcome. The program at Chetro Ketl was more-or-less the model I followed for other Great Houses in my architectural study – minus, alas, the in-field tree-ring sampling. That same spring (1979), Peter and I drew every wall of every Great House that didn't have a published report (and Alto, whose report was in progress). I wandered alone over, under and around the ruins with published reports, which we did not draw: Bonito, del Arroyo, Kin Kletso. My solo work, done at various times summer 1979 to spring 1980, was not without incident. I literally crawled all over three high-visitation ruins, climbing walls, poking into locked rooms, etc. Please recall that we did not wear NPS uniforms. To conscientious visitors, I was just some yahoo flagrantly breaking the rules. (Which, in a way, was true.) I was yelled at. I was reported. Rangers got tired of explaining my antics to irate tax-payers, and I was granted permission to wear an NPS shirt. Not the full uniform, just the shirt. So I wore my own tattered jeans and one of several disreputable hats, and a nice crisp gray NPS shirt, with all the patches and insignia. That helped, a bit. When I was yelled at, I'd point at the brown arrowhead on my sleeve and say "NPS." That probably did not help NPS's reputation, but it spared me much wasted time. I still have that shirt but it seems to have shrunk. I also spent a week crawling over, under, around, and through Aztec Ruins. I got yelled at, several times, by civic-minded citizens and by NPS staff who hadn't read the memo. I wrote an architectural analysis much like those in Great Pueblo Architecture but I decided not to include it in the book. To do Aztec justice would require trips to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which sponsored Earl Morris's excavations – but, as noted, NPS declined to send me to Big Apple. I suppose my Aztec analysis is filed away at the Chaco Archives at UNM. It's been superseded by Gary Brown's work. (Many years later, I academically "advised" a graduate student at the University of Colorado who went to all the Earl Morris/Aztec archives and scanned everything and learned quite a bit about the old pile.) And, as targets of opportunity, I visited a half-dozen other excavated extra-canyon Great Houses, like Far View at Mesa Verde, among others (back then, a citizen could walk around inside Far View; no longer). I was interested – in a White-ish way – in energy: how much labor, how was it organized, etc. How many maids with how many mops? Most of that research took place in the library, although I interviewed masons, and experimental archaeologists, and their allies. I myself did not attempt experiments. As I noted above, I done a brief stint with Larry Baker's stabilization crew at Salmon Ruins. Watching Larry's professionals – Navajo craftsmen, including several veterans of Chaco's stabilization crew – I realized that I was a pup amongst wolves. I was not proficient in Chaco masonry; any experiments I might personally attempt would be jokes. So when I heard that Chaco Canyon was re-doing its Visitors' Center exhibits, with the stabilization crew building cases in each of Chaco's several masonry styles, I jumped at the chance. Real pros building, from scratch, measured volumes of Chaco masonry in all its varieties: what an opportunity! I begged leave to visit Chaco for the week or so that they would be working. I arrived at Chaco with graph paper, clip board, camera, and stop-watch. Running from case to case, measuring progress, timing everything. I explained my mission to their boss (who thought I was crazy) but the boss didn't tell his troops. After a day or two, I could not help but notice concerned and increasingly unfriendly looks from the stonemasons. They thought I was from the Home Office in distant Santa Fe, a young whipper-snapper sent out to critically evaluate their work – possibly leading to reprimands, replacements, terminations. One guy I knew (slightly) explained this to me; and with their boss's permission, I called a break and explained (through translation) what I was really about. They, too, thought I was crazy; but with jobs no longer on the line, they cheerfully pitched in and even gave me pointers and insights from their combined decades of experience. In the course of my study, I learned a lot from stabilization professionals, at Chaco and elsewhere. As noted above, I had Kubler's Religious Architecture in mind when I began writing my book. Paralleling, approximately, Kubler’s structure, I started with three thematic chapters: "Theory," "Construction," and "Form"; followed by descriptions of the individual "Sites" (the Great Houses); and a short chapter of "Conclusions" which addressed two issues: "Social Ramifications of Construction" and "Social Correlates of Form." Very Kubler-esque; and I was delighted when the finished product was about the same size and length as his Religious Architecture… Thinking about architecture as shapes rather than functions led me to "forms" of rooms, most notably at Chaco, rectangular and kivas. No, wait: NOT KIVAS! Instead, round rooms! So: rectangular rooms and round rooms. Why did we call these things kivas, anyway? Not just "kivas", but in the 1980s "clan kivas" – whatever that was supposed to mean. And now we slide into a brief digression on kivas… To make a not-very-long story even shorter, those round rooms at Chaco were not kivas (in any useful ethnological sense of that word); they were pithouses. In the first, ill-fated 1984 edition of GPACC, I asked (timidly, mutedly): "is a 'clan kiva' a kiva, or is it simply a pithouse built in stone?" And I answered my rhetorical question (timidly, mutedly): "I suggest that the latter is correct." And went on to identify round rooms as index unit for a household, and thereby a marker for estimates of population: one "kiva" equals one family. To hell with (rectangular) room counts, keyed to person-per-room figures at historic pueblos. Bonito was not a "pueblo." Wijiji, with two “kivas,” 200 storage rooms, and no “living” rooms was NOT a farming village – it was a warehouse. All those storage doors! The underlying thought was presented (timidly, mutedly) in GPACC, republished in 1986; and the calculations around kiva = family in my 1988 dissertation. If anybody read either, they missed those bits. I have no idea how many times over the last 35 years I have had to walk archaeologists, junior and senior, through kiva = pithouse, pithouse = family, therefore number of kivas X family size = resident population. (See Chapter 13.) (At the time, we thought a Pueblo II family averaged about 6.4 people; I revisited the matter in Study of Southwestern Archaeology, and concluded that extended families average about 10 people; so my early '80s estimates of Chaco Great House populations should probably be bumped up by 50%.) A more historical treatment of the problem (and a somewhat more forceful presentation of the argument) appeared in the journal Kiva in 1988: “The Idea of the Kiva in Anasazi Archaeology.” (Another irony, but Kiva is the journal of record for the Southwest.) People read that. It was short, it was easy to hand, it was peer-reviewed – which many believed, wrongly, GPACC was not (it was). The Kiva kiva article provoked/inspired an SAA session and a subsequent edited volume with the unwieldy title The Architecture of Social Integration in Prehistoric Pueblos (Lipe and Hegmon, 1989). "Social integration" was something of a red herring: while modern kivas integrated their villages/societies, BMIII-PIII pithouse/kiva/round rooms were simply family houses, with no obvious role "integrating" anything. That point went over several authors' heads – people who just couldn't pry themselves away from kivas – including an interesting (to me) exchange with Steve Plog. I pointed out, in the Kiva kiva article, that the total number of pitstructures (pithouses, round rooms, small kivas, whatever) increased fairly steadily from BMIII to PI to PII to PIII over a sizable region (NW New Mexico); they looked a lot like an index of a steadily growing population. Plog responded that the total number of rooms (that is, rectangular "pueblo" rooms – conventionally used as an index of population) jumped up and down in that stately progression from Basketmaker to Great Pueblo. Lipe and Hegmon allowed me the final riposte: exactly my point, Dr. Plog, all those thousands of rooms in PII Great Houses – which created the confusion – were NOT an index of population but, instead, storage space; a wonky fact that threw everyone off from Julian Steward's classic 1937 room-kiva ratios to kiva-entranced archaeology today. If you deflate Chaco Great Houses' storage bloat, the room counts over time even up nicely, and parallel the steady increase of pithouse/round rooms. With the Kiva kiva article, people finally got it. Some of ‘em, anyway. Archaeologists around the Four Corners started talking about "round rooms with primarily domestic functions" and using their numbers as an index for population (which somehow became known as "the Lightfoot protocol"). But the popular press and NPS never stopped calling 'em kivas; and as time passed, so did younger archaeologists. Recidivism? To a degree, yes. But also the allure of ritual, which became enormously fashionable in the '90s, and after NAGPRA, in deference to Indians, who are happy to call Chaco and Mesa Verde things by Pueblo names. The terrible lure of what I later called “Pueblo Space,” in A Study of Southwestern Archaeology. It seems impossible, in the Southwest, to do archaeology – to let the record offer up its evidence – without invoking the modern (or idealized ethnological) Pueblos. Kivas will not fade away. In 2014, my old friend Tom Windes published an article in the journal Kiva, titled “The Chacoan Court Kiva,” a full-on slide back to the good old days when kivas were kivas – and a curious renaming of what I (and many others) had long called “Chaco-style” kivas. And Tom is not alone. After a brief period of lucidity in the ‘90s, we are back where we started from. (My focus on form over function, inspired by Kubler and others, led in 1999 to a doomed work on "Monumental Architecture in Pre-State Societies," whose sad tale is told in Chapter 12. In that work, never published, I galloped globally and grouped monuments by form: hemispheres, truncated cones, enclosures, lines, etc. It never went past a first draft and my geometrizing was far from successful – I still used "palace" and "tomb" etc – but I thought it was a good start.) Enough of kivas! Returning to Great Pueblo Architecture … I finished the first draft of GPACC late in 1980, and the manuscript went out for "peer review" – Davy Stuart and another anonymous reviewer. Their comments were largely quite useful, but Davy made me get rid of my "Theory" chapter, which was essentially my "Architecture in Archaeology" manuscript, applied. He described it as "seat of the pants theory" and there was some justice in that remark: I'd gathered my methods and theories from disparate sources, because I couldn't find anything useful in American archaeology or anthropology. Not sure if Davy did me a favor, or if my expunged chapter might have changed the course of American Anthropological Archaeology (and – who knows? – Western Civilization). Odds favor the former: Davy probably did me a favor. Among several other duties, I revised the thing in 1982-3 and worked with Jerry Livingston on the illustrations – mostly line drawings, maps, plans, elevations, etc. Livingston was our draftsman, and he (and I) were Old School: drafting tables, T-squares, Rapidograph pens. I did a lot of the graphics. I enjoyed drafting (Chapters 1, 3) and I enjoyed working with Jerry. He was a member of the NPS Underwater Archaeology Team, which oddly enough was headquartered in Santa Fe. They left for weeks of diving in Hawaii (one of Jerry's big projects was a detailed map and rendering of the sunken USS Arizona – pretty creepy, he said) and then returned to the High Desert of the City Different. The best of both worlds. But they also had a long-term project at Isle Royale in the middle of Lake Superior. They dived in late Fall, and then coughed their way back to health through the Holidays. Jerry was a great ally and friend. It was a NPS publication, nominally one of their prestigious “Publications in Archaeology.” As explained in Chapter 12, the Chaco Project publications were demoted from “prestigious” to “desk-top.” They were house-published, and looked like (nice) CRM reports. When GPACC came back from the printers, we got less than half of the number I had requested. In a matter of weeks, we "sold out" those 400 – a story told in Chapter 12 – I shopped the book to UNM Press. They took it. I fixed a few glitches, and they re-published it in 1986. It ran through at least three printings at UNM Press before it finally died and went out-of-print. Beyond its stunted NPS print-run, GPACC had three big problems. (More than three of course, but three I'll write about here.) First, it was published a long time ago. Second, it was written in deferential academic prose. Third, it didn't dwell sufficiently on doors. First: GPACC appeared 35 years ago at the on-set of desk-top publishing, and it looks it. For the (slightly earlier) Wetherill Mesa Project, NPS produced very handsome hard-bound volumes through the Government Printing Office. For the Chaco Project, that changed to in-house, word-processed publications. And we were all learning about how that might work. The word processor wasn’t a desk-top computer; it was a dedicated stand-alone machine, to be used only by designated office staff. The actual printing was off-set and of course off-site, with paste-board paste-ups of every page. Neither Jerry nor I were brilliant designers and consequently the layouts were very mechanical; one review in an architectural history journal complained (rightly) about the layout, and the excessive amount of open space on many pages. More importantly, for Xs, Ys, Zs, Millennials, what-have-yous, the book is now ancient history. OK, I'm a Boomer: superannuated, superseded, superfluous. But I continued to crank stuff out through 2018 and (this matters) my work is cumulative. I don't (usually) repeat arguments and data. Many of my "Ten Fun Facts About Chaco" in 2018’s Study of Southwestern Archaeology are based on arguments and data first presented in 1984’s GPACC (and developed in subsequent publications). My “Fun Facts” are not assertions: they are reasonable arguments based on solid data, first presented in GPACC – and referenced in Study… But ya gotta read the references! Including the really old stuff. Like GPACC: my university’s library has a copy – stored off-site and available only by request. It’s online on the Chaco Research Archive but … who’d read that old, old, old stuff? Second: GPACC was too polite. It was one of my first efforts, as a non-PhD, NPS nobody. I hinted at "urban," "stratified society", "beyond Pueblo ethnology" and other heresies. I should have followed Alden Hayes’s advice: rear back and let 'em have it. Or maybe not: I was, after all, a non-PhD NPS nobody. And as recounted in Study of Southwestern Archaeology, that Chaco – like the giant rat of Sumatra – was a story for which the world was not yet prepared, and nobody would credit an author with my very thin credentials. Third, and perhaps most important: I did not sufficiently dwell on doors. At the time I understood that doors were important (they were all over the cover of the UNM Press edition), but through the years – through 2024 – I'm realizing that doors are REALLY important! Recognizing Chaco storage doors – those small rectangular openings half-way up the wall – tells us the function of upper story or interior rooms – rooms left without floors or floor features, floor assemblages, etc. Doors are the writing on the wall, if we can read 'em. 90%-plus Great House doors were storage doors; ergo ditto Great House rooms, 90% storage. I’m pretty sure about the “storage” attribution because the Chaco doors are very similar in size, placement, and hardware (secondary jambs, loops, etc) to the doors on all those tiny granaries tucked high up into the cliffs of the Four Corners. Nobody was living in those things – they are undeniably storage facilities. I was aware of this from reports and photos while I was writing GPACC, but I got up close and personal with ‘em while prepping for a survey of Natural Bridges (below) and working in southeastern Utah (also below). Over the years, more than a few Southwesternists have complained that we don't know the function of Great Houses because we don't have artifacts or floor features or whatever from rooms, especially upper story rooms. They don't know … but I know; and I knew back in 1984, and I said so: doors tell us what rooms were originally designed to do, when built. With, as it turns out, very little ambiguity. Storage room doors mean storage. The realization that Great Houses were (largely) warehouses underwrote everything I've subsequently said about Great Houses. But I didn't hammer it home in GPACC: I described the doors and what they meant and applied that insight to the sites without showing my cards, without publishing maps of doors in sites, or totaling doors in tables, or otherwise making it plain to the reader. The data were all in my elevation drawings and notes, stashed in the archives. I should have dwelled more on storage doors. And – beyond that -- I failed to understand 35 years ago the critical import of "T"-doors. OK: I'm slow. It was the turn of the Millennium before I realized that "T"-doors migrated along the Meridian (below). After a 2019 trip into the Sierra Madre to see Chihuahua cliff-dwellings I am firmly convinced that by their doors shall we know them. "T"-doors map Southwestern history, passing through changing forms, shifting fabrics, evolving structures as a big bold mark of heritage and identity. I revisit this briefly, below, and in Chapter 2 in a section on Casas Grandes. There were, of course, more than three problems with GPACC, but they spring (mostly) from #2 above: GPACC was too polite, too deferential, too conscious of its authors non-PhD, NPS-minion status. For example: I did not sufficiently emphasize doors, but also failed to hammer home “kiva” roofs – more of a detail, less impactful on our understanding than doors; but still, worth noting. The domestic function of “kivas” (above) mattered, a lot; how their occupants chose to build ‘em, less so. I hinted above, Chaco “kivas” had false domed ceilings – upside-down basket/wattle ceilings, rising from the “bench,” under a conventional flat load-bearing roof. I described this discovery at some length on pages 32-34 in GPACC; but when I tried to illustrate it, my “editors” (bosses) vetoed my figure and replaced it with a standard, seen-it-a-thousand-times NPS diagram of a cribbed roof. I lost again. The illustration, on a page directly opposite the text, effectively undercut my actual conclusions. Everyone looked at the pictures – which simply reinforced the Standard Version – and apparently didn’t read the text. I first got the idea from photos of long “bench-backing” poles arcing over the heads of Navajo laborers in Bonito's "kivas," and from my excavation of Kiva 10 at Pueblo Alto. (I may be the last living human to have actually seen an intact "bench backing" or "wainscoting" emerge from the dirt.) I studied –reports, notes, field observations -- “kivas” at Bonito, del Arroyo, Chetro Ketl and a few others here and there (such as Aztec), and my conclusion: upside-down basket ceilings, rising from the back of the “bench,” below flat load-bearing roofs. Saved thousands of beams, and wood doesn’t grow on trees in Chaco Canyon. That’s what the archaeology shows. And that’s what Florence Hawley assured me was the correct interpretation of that archaeology, at least for Kiva G at Chetro Ketl – which she saw being excavated. And that was the conclusion of Paul Reiter, who knew Chaco kivas first-hand, in his 1946 dissertation "Form and Function of Some Prehistoric Ceremonial Structures in the Southwest" (unfortunately, unpublished). I cited Reiter in GPACC, but I guess nobody bothered to look. Archaeologists of a certain age/inclination assume and insist that all Four Corners "kivas" had “cribbed” roofs. That's silly. There were a few cribbed-after-the-fact kivas at Pueblo Bonito – and like most re-model projects, surely there were tales they could tell – and a few late, intrusive cribbed-roof kivas. But reading the notes and the descriptions of people who were there during the excavations of Bonito and Chetro Ketl make it very clear that almost all "kivas" lacked the hundreds of beams required for cribbed roofs. It was not that their roofs had been robbed; they had big beams, about as many (in the correct sizes) for a flat roof. Why take the cribbed roof but leave the best and biggest beams? Upside-down basket “false ceilings” in Chaco kivas: for me, QED in'83. Years later, in 2001, one of my myriad journal rejections centered on my argument for upside-down basket roofs being a possible ethnic or political marker for Chaco. One reviewer's comments (which were fatal) involved asking a Chaco expert who had "taught an entire graduate seminar on Chaco recently." The Chaco expert informed the reviewer "he hasn't heard of this style" – i.e., the upside-down basket. That was enough for the Editor: reject. The Chaco expert, in 2001, was ignorant of a really interesting discovery I'd made and published – timidly, deferentially – in 1984. And more recently, my friend Tom Windes (in the “Court Kivas” article referenced above) concluded “there is no physical evidence” for the upside-down basket ceiling. Well...yes, Tom, there sure is. Buckets of evidence. (Tom also does not like the idea of “kivas” as domestic structures.) 35+ years later, kivas roofs are cribbed because … well, just because. Another specter raised from its death in GPACC: a few years ago, my friend Chip Wills exhumed and reanimated the McElmo phase, in an article in Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory (edited by my wife!). I thought I’d debunked Gordon Vivian’s (1964) McElmo phase and laid it to rest in GPACC. I did not reply to Chip’s article, because Wills never actually engaged my arguments (and data) in GPACC; he just repeated and expanded the original Gordon Vivian argument. I won't revisit my McElmo discussion in CPACC; it's all there, read it yourself. The truth, as told in GPACC, is that Chaco "kivas" had those roofs and McElmo belongs in the dustbin of taxonomy. On the positive side, GPACC was a boon to architects with time on their hands. William Morgan was a practicing architect with a side-gig of archaeology. He published reconstructions of many Southwestern sites in an excellent book, Ancient Architecture of the Southwest (1994, and still in print) which began, he told me, with my plans/maps of Chaco Great Houses. Those ground plans showed all the walls for all the rooms, and in each room a number – 2, 3, 4 – showing how many stories. It was relatively easy for Morgan to convert those ground plans into shaded renderings, which he did for sites all across the Southwest; I’ll take credit for introducing him to Hohokam and Casas Grandes. Morgan's images were hand-drafted – really nice! It was even easier to use my ground plans with CAD (once that became available) which many people did, most successfully Dennis Holloway (who we met briefly, above). Dennis's remarkable collection of virtual ancient buildings now spans the globe; but, he told me, it started with ground plans from GPACC. I was rather proud of another of my images in GPACC: a schematic cross-section of a three-story Great House, with every sort of door, vent, feature, whatever. My workmanlike image – legacy of my father’s instructions in “mechanical drawing” (Chapter 1) – got redrafted, very nicely, for Scientific American (see "Roads" below). It was then redrawn/reprinted so many times that I doubt today's users know its original provenance (Chapter 12). That's OK: all of my images were Public Domain from the moment the Park Service published the book. If I'd had copyright and licensing on that drawing, maybe I'd have retired sooner. Great Pueblo Architecture of Chaco Canyon was a crappy title. As recounted in Chapter 12, I try to give my books short, descriptive titles (and then have fun with chapter titles). But GPACC was over-abbreviated. There's no such thing as a "Great Pueblo"; it's a sad, sorry mash-up of "Great House;" but it got the word "Pueblo" into the title. I thought that might be useful for potential readers – most of whom were happily ignorant of the term "Great House." And we were all operating, back then, in Pueblo Space (Lekson 2018) – simply assuming that Chaco could usefully be called "Pueblo." Live and learn. "Points, Knives and Drills of Chaco Canyon" One of my several odd jobs with the Chaco Project involved arrowheads. There were lots of 'em, and the lithics expert (Catherine Cameron) was up to her neck in 30,000+ pieces of debitage (not a happy image). In Spring 1979, she subbed out our 500 or so points, knives, and drills to me. Standard Issue Anasazi: a few ringers, but mostly things we had all seen before. I thought that, by themselves, the 500 probably would not tell us a heck of a lot: "they had points, knives, and drills"…wow. I wanted more context: were the Chaco Project collections "representative" of Chaco's larger chipped stone tool assemblage? I believe in context for context's sake: you almost always learn things by looking back from a few orbits out, or from a few outside angles. As Frederick the Great (or was it Danton?) might have said: "Le contexte, le contexte, toujours le contexte!" For sure, there were things Judd found at Pueblo Bonito which we did not see at any Chaco Project site – of which, more below. Additional collections were easy to hand: surface collections from all sorts of sites, from Al Hayes's survey of Chaco Canyon; miscellaneous NPS excavations (salvage, stabilization, etc) stored at Chaco (another excuse to escape to the canyon!); UNM excavations at Chaco, held at Maxwell Museum (next door to our NPS offices at the Anthropology Dept); and – in a bit of a stretch – some real high-end stuff and a grab-bag of half of Judd's collections from Pueblo Bonito and Pueblo del Arroyo, which I borrowed from the Smithsonian. We tripled the collection of chipped stone tools, from 500 to about 1,700. Of those, 15% were Archaic points and another 15% were unclassifiable fragments. So we wound up with about 1,100 Pueblo period points, knives and drills. A bit more than half of those came from datable contexts. I worked with these collections intermittently from 1979 to 1982. This was an era when people were measuring arrowheads' every dimension and angle – calipers, goniometers, electron microscopes, what-have-you. And noting every non-metric attribute. Lithicists poured these floods of data into clunky old mainframes. The primitive clustering programs available at the time – big surprise! – made things cluster. My clusters looked mighty like the conventional typological projectile point forms devised by the Old Guys (one or two or even three generations before me). I was then (and still am) leery of clustering programs, algorithms few of us understand (certainly, I don't), spinning iterations no human can reproduce, to cluster things. That's what clustering programs do: they find or force clusters. I've seen several intelligent, well-structured applications, but alas I've seen many many more black-box hail-Marys (clustering then, Bayesian now). Hopeful grad students feed undigested data into a clustering program and then dance with excitement when … things cluster. Absence of clusters, in programs designed to cluster, probably indicates final, maximum entropy. Turn out the lights, the party's over. I wondered: was it necessary to rediscover a perfectly good (if old) typology with statistical hocus-pocus? I read the latest analyses and chatted up lithics enthusiasts, but it smelled like data overkill, generating statistics that represented…what, exactly? I measured the usual suspects (including weight) and noted SOP things and ran all sorts of exploratory cross-tabulations and correlations and clusterings. But after looking at a sample of 400 well-dated points, I was happy with the established typology: stemmed = PI, corner-notched = early PII, side-notched = late PII and PIII. I am not a knapper; I knap not. (Homer nods but never knaps?) Any interest I might have had for breaking rocks vanished as an undergrad during a class demonstration at CWRU, when a grad student showing us tricks-of-the-trade drove a large sliver of obsidian more-or-less right through his hand. Blood everywhere. After that, I considered knapping a spectator sport, from a safe distance, wearing goggles and possibly Kelvar. I understood knapping, theoretically; I reviewed several attribute-analyses that purported to track various aspects of knapping on tools; and I decided to cut through the crap and have a real craftsperson look at the "technology of manufacture" of our collections. I (or my wife?) knew Bruce Bradley, who is one of the finest knappers above ground. I scraped up enough money to hire Bruce in September 1979 to review our collections, to see if we had anything out of the ordinary, or if he could detect a specialized hand, or whatever. Bruce, who'd seen vast numbers of Four Corners arrowheads, jumped at the chance to look at tools from Chaco. Alas, Chaco's chipped-stone tools were nothing out of the ordinary, par for the Four Corner's course. (As J.J. Brody pointed out years ago: Chaco’s arts and crafts were not extraordinary, with a few quite extraordinary exceptions.) Then we looked at Bonito's Burial 10. I'd borrowed many points from the Smithsonian – if NPS would not let me go to the mountain, I'd bring the mountain to Albuquerque. I got about half of Judd's Bonito points and knives, specifically including Burial 10 in Room 330, one of two clusters of high-status burials. Judd, channeling his inner Kipling, described Burial 10 as: "A warrior in his prime … On the floor between his knees 28 finely chipped arrowheads had been arranged to form a triangle; under his right hip lay a bundle of reed-shafted arrows. … Here, truly, was an honored defender of the village!" The points were larger and far better-made than the run-of-the-mill Chaco arrowheads, and included some forms not seen elsewhere at Chaco. Bradley identified five different knappers, with all five contributing points to both burial lots. Things like that provided context for the Chaco Project points: for example, we didn't have anything remotely like Burial 10. That’s context for ya… By 1982, all my data and analyses (exploratory, structured, useful, useless) and Bradley's reports were gathered into a three-ring binder which had a color photo of Hank Aaron on the front cover. (Hank Aaron, for younger readers, was a terrific outfielder for two Milwaukee clubs from 1954 to 1976; he held the record for career home runs for 33 years, when Barry Bonds [asterisk] took the title.) My work sat in the Hank Aaron binder until 1985, when I wrote a summary which was published twelve years later, in an NPS volume on Ceramics, Lithics, and Ornaments of Chaco Canyon (edited by Joan Mathien). Chaco points, knives, and drills are a lot more interesting than I've made 'em sound here. Read the report; or if you are fanatical, go to the Chaco Archives and check out Hammerin' Hank. The Archive might not know the three-ring binder by that name, but that’s what I called it… Chaco Project End Game The Chaco Project was never really "The Chaco Project," although it had that name on a tee-shirt cartoon of a gargantuan Jim Judge lofting up a bull-dozer. The thing started out as "Chaco Canyon Archaeological Center," and after a few years NPS upped the ante with "New Mexico Archaeological Center," until it stabilized in 1973 as "The Chaco Center." Towards the end, NPS changed the name several times, each shift increasing the distance of the project (and staff) from their original mission. It was originally a joint UNM-NPS venture, but that partnership unraveled before I arrived. (As recounted above, UNM had a special relationship with Chaco; when UNM turned over parts of Chaco it owned outright to NPS long before the Chaco Project, the transfer gave UNM first dibs on future excavations.) Our NPS offices and labs were on the second floor of the old Anthropology Department – spaces built specifically for the Chaco Project in 1972. Our collections were held in temporary storage in the basement – again, a space modified at some expense for the project. Years later, the Chaco collections moved to an upper floor of the adjacent newly-built Hibben Center. The Hibben Center was built with funds from the estate of UNM professor Frank Hibben; the NPS floor required a special appropriation from Congress, years later, to finish out its storage areas and offices on the third floor. I arrived at a changing of the guard: Bob Lister and Al Hayes were retiring, and young Jim Judge was taking over. And UNM's department was changing, too. Lewis Binford was already in place; he arrived in 1968 and stayed until 1991. Linda Cordell arrived in 1973 and left in 1986. Jeremy Sabloff came a few years after Cordell, working at UNM from 1978 to 1986. From my arrival at the Chaco Project in 1976 to my enrollment in UNM's PhD program in Fall 1981, I (and most of the NPS gang) ignored the Department and the Department ignored us. We met and mingled with graduate students, going to their parties and they to ours, but on the professorial level, things were tense and getting tenser. The Department didn't think much of NPS archaeology (Chapter 1), but they thought very highly of our office and lab spaces – always in short supply at universities. UNM wanted NPS gone. A tale also told, with a different spin, in Chapter 3. Things came to a head when Jim Judge bailed out in 1984. Dick Sellars, a mid-level NPS administrator in Santa Fe, detailed Larry Nordby to be Judge's replacement. Nordby – a good guy – was a career NPS archaeologist and he did not have a PhD. A fatal combination: UNM was deeply offended. Judge's job had been a faculty position, and the Department felt (correctly, I think) that it should have a say – perhaps THE say – about who filled it. And, of course, the Park Service should pay for it… Sellars, by all appearances, was trying to get rid of the Chaco Project and scrape off its peculiar non-career-NPS staff. The Project had long-ago exceeded its original ten-year life-span, and its staffing was awkward: quasi-jobs, term-appointments, not-quite-legal-positions. The personnel situation would probably not have withstood scrutiny by GAO or Civil Service. From Sellars' perspective, time to pull the plug. Poor Nordby, who was an excellent archaeologist and a fine fellow, was a placeholder until the Chaco Project could be resolved/dissolved. The problem was – and I think the NPS knew it – the Chaco Project was not finished, not complete. We (and others) in the 1980s had discovered something big: Chaco was really extraordinary, for the Southwest and perhaps for America north of Mexico. You wouldn't really know that from our site reports, even Pueblo Alto’s. They were just site reports (big, thorough, excellent) concluding with a bit of time-space synthesis. Even together, our considerable output didn't present what we'd actually learned about Chaco: the sum was much greater than those parts. Lacking leadership, we did not know how to do that, how to pull it all together – no rap on Nordby, that was not his job. We – the remaining staff –wanted a Final Volume, the book pulling it all together, but we didn't know how. Sellars just want to close the book; NPS wanted the whole thing to go away. A pissing-match ensued between UNM and NPS, and it made the newspapers. UNM disparaged Nordby, publicly. NPS threatened to take all the Chaco collections away (to where? they never said). UNM replied: fine, take your toys and get outta here. And so on and so on, in the pages of the local press. In the end, Sellars closed down the Chaco Project; UNM got our offices and kept our collections; and with a few exceptions, the Chaco Project staff got walking papers early in 1986. My final official act, just before they scraped me off, was a nasty letter to Dick Sellars on NPS letterhead, cc'ing his boss, explaining how NPS bungled the Chaco Project end-game. I kept a copy: it’s pretty juicy. Sellars was just doing his job. So was I. Outliers: The Great Outlier Hunts Circling back in time again. Before the Chaco Project ended – whimper or bang – there was still work to be done… Not all our work at Chaco was digging. Both Hayes and Judge had surveyed the canyon, before I joined the gang. We new guys did a bit of survey, wandering around on various missions and assignments. One hike of note (not for its archaeology; I can't recall what the heck we were doing) took four of us well out into Chaco's wilderness, high up on Chacra Mesa. We stopped for lunch under a sandstone overhang, littered with bark and debris and a small yellow scorpion, upon whom I sat. I saw the beastie scuttle way after it stung my behind. (My thick work pants probably spared me a few ml of venomous grief.) Aside from the fact that it hurt, I was concerned – as were my colleagues – with secondary effects. I’d been stung by a variety of critters (see “Wounded Nose,” Chapter 2), but never by a scorpion. Would I puff up, turn purple, die? It was a long way to haul my carcass back to camp. No one volunteered to suck the venom out of my bottom. (It's times like that when you find out who your friends are; turns out, I didn't have any.) So I toughed it out with a hitch in my giddy-up – as we say, sarcastically, in the trade. After a half-hour absent anaphylaxis, we carried on with whatever we were doing. I sat gently for a several days. Even a reduced dose of scorpion hurt. Bigger worlds beckoned. As noted above, I got my start in Chaco archaeology at Salmon Ruins, 70 km north of Chaco. I survived Salmon from 1974 to 1976, when – a husk of my former self, liver shot to hell (but I never inhaled!) – I moved on to the more sedate NPS Chaco Center. But I didn't forget Salmon. At least, I didn't forget what little I could remember of Salmon. Salmon Ruins was a major Great House, as big as the big 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 (late summer of 1976) I approached director Jim Judge with a proposal to go find more unknown Chaco sites. I pitched a sort of "Lost City of the Lukachukais" vision: boldly going where no man had gone, King Tut's Tomb, and so forth. (This was before Raider of the Lost Ark, or I would have worked that in, too.) He informed me that only a week before, Bob Powers had made the same suggestion, more rationally. I thought we would find more Salmon Ruins, but Bob was a student of Gwinn Vivian and he knew that our targets were smaller, more modest: Chimney Rocks and Lowrys. So Bob, William Gillespie, and I mounted a short survey (a month or so) in fall of 1976, to document fully three modestly sized "outliers" (Bis sa'ani, Peach Springs, and Pierre's); to briefly visit more; and to document as many candidates as the literature revealed (Powers, Gillespie, and Lekson 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, once of the Chaco Project but then an archaeologist for the Public Service Company of New Mexico. PNM might someday burn coal from deposits in the San Juan Basin, and might string power lines back and forth across northwest New Mexico. 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, convivial interaction between the two surveys. 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 continued to collect "outliers" and Great Houses both in stand-alone projects (e.g. “Anasazi Monuments Project,” Fowler and Stein 1992 – sponsored by Steve LeBlanc) and in his work with the Navajo Nation. Steve LeBlanc, David Wilcox, John Roney, and Dennis Gilpin were among early enthusiasts. Mike Marshall and Rich Friedman worked with Anna Sofaer’s Solstice Project finding more outliers and landscape features (now a Major Motion Picture “Written on the Landscape”). Chaco outliers and roads and landscapes continue to fascinate, with a new wave(s) of scholars like Ruth Van Dyke and Rob Weiner and Kellam Throgmorton and Susan Ryan (and others) adding new findings and insights. I’ll nod at these efforts in tangents, below. Roads were a big part of all this; they merit a separate discussion, below. (Stein and Friedman eventually rated their own Youtube channel, put together by Larry Ruiz in Durango: The Chaco Canyon Sessions - YouTube ) That was all in the future. At the beginning in 1979, there were a half-dozen guys on the two original outlier surveys. We built a bandwagon and many smart people hopped on board – which was great (and of which, more below). Alas, a large number of less-clever people turned away, stuck their heads in the sand, and NIMBYed. I've contributed a bit to the "outlier" files in this brave new millennium – f'rinstance, Camelot-on-the-San-Augustin (below) – but here I'd like to revisit those thrilling days of yesteryear, and the initial challenges of convincing archaeologists that "outliers" were (1) real and (2) really in their back yards. The initial (1976-1979) "outlier hunts" were focused on the San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico, but spread like a bad stain well beyond the Basin into putatively uncontaminated Colorado, Utah, and Arizona, and New Mexico, and south to the Mogollon Highlands and even, perhaps, beyond (an area to which I will briefly return). The original hunts and their spin-offs found outliers everywhere, on land and in literature. There was, of course, push-back. Much (most?) of that resistance was simply turf. Turf, turf, silly turf: my valley's different, I'm not a periphery, not in my backyard. Plus, sometimes, a mix of envy/inferiority: Chaco in the 1970s and 1980s was much in the news, and archaeologists outside the media circus resented it. A University of Colorado crew at the huge Mesa Verde site of Yellow Jacket (which has a fine Great House!) produced a bumper sticker saying "Chaco is a Dairy Queen Outlier." (It must have been funny at the time…) 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. Far View itself is the most famous “outlier” in the park, but not the only Great House. Colorado reactions were typical of the times: no Chaco at Mesa Verde, no Chaco in Utah, no Chaco in Arizona, no Chaco in New Mexico outside the San Juan Basin. Indignant locals demanded data: what were the criteria, what were list of traits, what gave Chaco the right to intrude on their space, into 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. Normal "unit pueblos" do not. 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 other 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, UT to Grants, NM, and from Polaca Wash, AZ to Guadalupe, NM. Let them see for themselves; let them have personal "a-ha" experiences. In the end, NIMBY objections fell before the weight of data. More and more "outliers" piled up, and more and more people recognized that their little fiefdom once was part of a larger world. "Outliers" were real, and really were in (almost) everyone's back yards. Not in the Rio Grande, nor west past Hopi – exceptions which proved the rule: outlier Great Houses weren't some sort of universal Neolithic phenomenon (yet another wish-'em-away argument); they were a historical event centered on Chaco. Outlier enthusiasms clung close to the Four Corners. In southeast Utah and southwest Colorado, the northern limits were pretty clearly defined. To the west in Arizona and the east in New Mexico, we thought we knew the farthest-out outliers. But how far south? The southern boundaries were sketchy. There was not a lot of work going on in west central New Mexico at that time – a couple of big CRM projects and two wide-ranging reconnaissance survey – so no territorial archaeologist could object to "outliers" around Quemado and Magdalena: no turf issues there. CRM was transitory. My forays to outliers near those two peculiar towns were fairly typical of the quirky milieu that surrounded the early outlier hunts. Quemado was an odd, even weird little town. Its populace ranged from anti-government rednecks to avant-garde landscape artists, plus many people on various tangents to that continuum. Characters, all. I was down at Quemado in March sometime in the late ‘80s – I remember the date, but not the year – visiting ruins with John Stein. Large Tularosa towns, Chaco Great Houses, and famous pit-house sites. Many of these had been located by the Peabody Museum's Upper Gila Project of the 1940s (which, oddly enough, never quite made it to the upper Gila; Chapter 2) and many had been located and recorded by Stein and Andrew Fowler on their legendary "Anasazi Monuments Project" (1985-6). Sites like Kin Cheops (quirky times, as I said) had the whole "outlier" package: Great house, great kiva, berms, surrounding community, etc. Big bump surrounded by little bumps. There were several more like that around Quemado: seen one, you've seen 'em all – as Al Hays said (facetiously, about ruins in general). After a day bouncing over two-tracks and ranch roads, we repaired to the town's sole watering hole, Jonay's. Jonay's Bar had turned green. Green bunting, people in green – camo and Polo -- green shamrocks. St Patrick's Day! Apparently the entire population of Quemado – militiamen and artistes – were Irish, and they were all carousing at Jonay's. There was a Navajo band playing Credence Clearwater Revival, poorly. They knew about eight CCR songs and played them over and over. Edging away from the music, I parked myself at the pool table. And boy did I have a night! My eye was in, my luck was good, whatever: I couldn't lose. I'd never played like that before and never have since. This might seem a pathetic "high point" for anyone's life, but … it was (and remains) a high point of mine. Sometime after ten, an impressive Pueblo man in a snappy three-piece suit and immaculate hair walked into the bar, followed by four large Pueblo lads, well-dressed – but not suits. The boys opened a path through the crowd to the pool table. Three-piece wanted to play. I beat him three or four times, and he announced that he was the Governor of a Pueblo – just which, I've forgotten; probably just as well. His lads glowered. I was bigger, but there were four of 'em. Quit while ahead (and while alive), I thought. Perhaps the Governor would like to shoot pool with one of his … friends? Yes, the Governor replied, he would. Letting him win was probably in their job descriptions. We parted on good terms, and I returned to the St Patrick's Day party, which by then (early AM) had spilled out into the street – the "street" being US Highway 60, now filled with frolicking Quemadans. The band sounded even worse outside the building than inside but Quemado’s Irish were past caring, hooting and hollering and dancing to Bay Area swamp-rock, filtered through Window Rock. And then it began to snow. Big fluttering white flakes, lit by the town's few street lamps and the neon glow of Jonay's sign. I don't recall much more of that night, but next morning the snow was deep. The St Patrick's Day blizzard of … what year was that, again? Magdalena, 80 miles east of Quemado on Highway 60, was equally odd. Or so it seemed. Someone from back East must have named their High School football team: Go Steers! Oops. And for ladies' sports: Go Steerettes! (I’m not making this up.) Things got even odder, I was told, from there. I knew the town (not very well) from site visits, specifically to the huge Gallinas Spring site, 12 miles northwest of town in the National Forest, and several big Piro Pueblos. (Gallinas Springs was the "mothership" for Pinnacle Ruin; Chapter 2.) And somewhere northwest of town lay a fabulous ruin I’d yet to see, perhaps mythical: Camelot-on-the-San-Augustin! Camelot (for short) had been discovered decades earlier by Emma Lou Davis. The NPS's Wetherill Mesa Project hired Emma Lou in the early '60s to chase Mesa Verde from the Park to the Rio Grande or wherever it went. The Peabody Upper Gila Project steered her to Gallinas Springs, and while she was around Quemado she found more ruins, including Camelot. She hadn't liked that name, but her crew of college kids insisted: with its standing walls, the thing looked (to them) like a castle, and the 1960 musical "Camelot" was the "Hamilton" of that moment. So the ruin became Camelot-on-the-San-Augustin (the latter part of the name referring to the plains which today host the Very Large Array.) I found Camelot buried deep in Emma Lou's notes at the Laboratory of Anthropology when I was doing archival research for the original NPS Outlier Survey. I was entranced both by the name and the description: a hulking central building with two Great-Kiva-sized large depressions, surrounded by a cluster of smaller ruins. Big bump / small bumps; plus two big holes-in-the-ground. Sounded like a Great House, a Chaco community. We did not visit it at that time – our portfolio was more constricted than Emma Lou’s – but I filed Camelot away for later retrieval. It came back to mind each time I visited Gallinas Springs; from Emma Lou's sketchy map location, Camelot had to be a couple of miles west of Gallinas Springs, just over the mountains at plain's edge. The area of interest appeared to be the Double H Ranch, a hunting preserve of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation – from the information by the gate on Highway 60. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation was founded in a double-wide in Montana in 1984; today it owns and manages 8 million acres of elk habitat in a half-dozen states. It's a big deal. I asked them, by letter, if I could look for Camelot. I wrote their business office. I wrote their president. I wrote their board chairman. None of 'em answered. Maybe the "Camelot" thing sounded loony; maybe they weren't interested in some archaeologist poking around. The elk people said: no. At a random social event, I told this tale of woe to Chuck Wheeler, a stalwart of CRM in Farmington NM. He heard me out, thought for a moment, and announced: "I'm a member of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation." And offered to mediate. Months later, in 2007, he and I visited the headquarters of the Double H to explain my quest to the head cowboy, the Ranch Manager. He listened politely; I could sense that he was unsympathetic. Maybe it was his eye rolls. But as I described the site, reading from a Xerox of Davis's notes, the Ranch Manager's wife, who had been listening in for amusement, jumped up and said: I know where that is! I can take you! We were in; the Ranch Manager’s objections were overruled. Mrs. Manager (God bless her) hopped on her ATV, we jumped in my truck and followed her out to … Camelot! No standing walls – cows (and elk?) had probably scratched their itches on those, with predictable results – but otherwise just as shown on Emma Lou's sketch map. A Great House. Two great kivas, one very deep and one not so deep. A surrounding community of small unit-pueblo-sized ruins. And possibly, I thought, hints of a road just east of the deeper great kiva – clearer on Google Earth than in the field. Another life-highlight: less shining than my St Patrick's Day Pool Massacre but still a long-standing goal achieved, after years of frustration. Camelot was the southeastern-most outlier; it filled in an unsightly, annoying blank in the southeast quarter of the outlier atlas, and turned the Chaco map from a cookie with a bite out of it to a smooth oval. It is my fate to be disbelieved: I had to argue with the Keepers of the Outlier Map to award Camelot its coveted dot, and it still slips off published maps of those who should know better. Too far south, they say. It is what it is, I say. I noised Camelot about a bit in New Mexico archaeological circles, at conferences and gatherings. To my surprise, it turned out that the Double H had an on-call house archaeologist (never mentioned by Ranch Manager and Mrs. Manager): Michael P. Marshall, a key member of the original Outlier Hunts. Mike did CRM work for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation ahead of range management. He got out to Camelot, mapped it, and agreed that it was a Great House. There were very convincing "outliers" – Great Houses, anyway – near Quemado and Magdalena, 120 miles south of Chaco. And further south? That's Mimbres country and Mimbres archaeologists are famously anti-Anasazi (Chapter 2). Which is a shame, because out on the edges, like Mimbres or Fremont, Chaco archaeology could address one of its recurrent, if perhaps unimportant problems: export vs. emulation. At one point, near last century's end, there was much discussion of export vs. emulation of "outlier" Great Houses. Export = came from Chaco; emulation = copied from Chaco. I was never enthusiastic about this question; emulation seemed like a last refuge of the NIMBY, as if "emulating" a Chacoan Great House somehow made it not-a-Great-House, and restored matters to comfortably local scales. Was a Great House an emulation if it was built with local labor and local materials under the hand-waving direction of someone from Chaco? How could we tell? I mean, the thing was still recognizably at Great House. 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." Puddled adobe, poured adobe, jacale, river cobbles, dandy sandstones – you name it, it was somewhere in the other Chaco Canyon Great Houses. Heck, Pueblo Bonito had every "style" of masonry (good, bad, ugly) and plenty of adobe. 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 vs emulation became an issue. It seemed (to them) like a big deal. I suggested ways of thinking about the problem that turned the question on its head, or rather inside-out or outside-in. For a particular "outlier" Great House, the identification had already been made that the darn thing was, in one way or another, a Great House. Fussing about it would quickly degenerate into an empty game of I am/am not convinced. 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 (most famously, Heartbreak Hotel; my take: Lekson 2013). They were built of adobe, but when you started looking at them, the big bumps had wider walls, bigger rooms, more weird stuff, etc. 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 probably on the Mimbres itself) might represent some sort of local version of Great House (Chapter 2). The pundits laughed. I have a photo, somewhere, of a gang of Mimbres archaeologists posed atop Woodrow's candidate big bump: all thumbs point down. But I still think that Mimbres, and Fremont, and other societies around the perimeter of Chaco's world offer 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. Perhaps not strangely: the south is where the least work has been done, or is being done. In what I think of as the Near South (Zuni-Acoma), 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 they total 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 project. Compared to the north, Chaco's south is markedly under-researched. And, importantly, Chaco "outliers" extend far south beyond Zuni and Grants – in my opinion. How far? A matter for debate...shall we go down that road? Outliers: The Expanding Universe I got "big bump, little bumps, great hole-in-the-ground" from John Stein's insights. Not those words, but the idea that Great Houses weren't a laundry list of Chaco core-and-veneer, Chaco blocked-in, Chaco black-on-white, Chaco whatever-it-was. Turns out "big bumps" usually had most of that stuff, but it wasn't traits we should look for, but relationships (big vs small) and even experiences. Stein had another bit of wisdom: if you were walking over a rubble mound and it was up-hill, you probably were on a Great House. (Recall Cynthia Irwin-Williams's introduction to Salmon Ruin…) Once people got over their inner NIMBY, the dam burst and outliers went viral. So to speak. Nothing went viral circa 1990 except communicable diseases. Here's what we didn't have: no cell phones; no Internet; no GPS. Yes, children: it was the Dark Ages. Here's was we did have: accurate paper maps, on which 1 inch equaled 2000 feet, and (if you had money) aerial photos. There were centralized site files, in the early clunky stages of computerization. We did a lot of work with those paper records, but they failed to convey the a-ha, big bump experience. But there were enough of us, after a year or two, who had encountered big bumps that we could understand each other, mostly by comparison of one known and shared big bump to another new big bump. Communication happened the old-fashioned way and, wow, was that inefficient: you bumped into somebody at a meeting or a party or a bar, and they told you about a possible "big bump" a mile west of Nowhere, Arizona. A dot (or, rather, a large circle) on a map to check out if someday you found yourself in the middle of Nowhere, Arizona with time on your hands. I thought there must be a better way. (So I invented the Internet; no, wait, that was Al Gore…) My thinking was this: instead of randomly bumping into people, why not get all the players in a room and…share data! I convinced my NPS bosses to fund a working conference, getting the half-dozen hard-core outlier hunters together with various agency archaeologists and a few others. The San Juan Basin Conference met at UNM in 1978. It failed. Not a smoking-crater disaster: no fist-fights, no arrests. Just a waste of everyone’s time. My fault: they put me in charge because it was my idea, I suppose. I really didn't want the job because I didn't know how to run a meeting, how to be in charge. I was just past half-way through my ten-year novitiate (Chapter 3), I just barely had an MA, I hadn't yet figured out that I was not an idiot – and there I was, a Park Service punk, trying to control a room-full of middle-management Agency archaeologists and puffy Chaco experts. A wasted afternoon, with me sinking lower and lower into my chair. Not my happiest memory. But I learned from it. My next attempt at a data-gathering conference began at a Crow Canyon Archaeological Center "research retreat" in Bluff UT, in January 1989 (to which we will return, far below). I was invited to join, as an outside agitator, with the staff of Crow Canyon archaeologists as they hammered out their future research plans. There was much interest in aggregation, and the formation of really big PIII towns like Sand Canyon, Yellow Jacket, and a dozen others that dotted the Great Sage Plains west of Cortez. These sites were pretty big. Yellow Jacket, for example, had 1200 rooms and 200 kivas & towers, all jammed together in a fair-sized town. Prior to PIII, they'd lived in scattered "unit pueblos", sometimes loosely clustered around a Great House but with plenty of space between families. Why aggregate? The times being what they were, the default then was (of course) environment. Quirks of the Mesa Verde-Great Sage Plains environment, bright lights that drew people into the big city. Crow Canyon had (or would soon have) incredibly detailed information about past environments. All this made for a nice tidy package. But…I interjected: blaming aggregation on the local environment, on local conditions ignores the fact that aggregation was occurring at the very same time, over a very large region. Most notably, I said, around Zuni – handing my copy of Keith Kintigh's dissertation around the room. Huge sites around Zuni in PIII. And elsewhere, in the Rio Grande, Hopi, who-knows-where-else. Could all of these aggregations reflect local environmental hiccups, simultaneously across the Southwest? Somehow yielding equifinality? Nobody had (recently) looked at PIII on that scale; I suggested that Crow Canyon might want to do that, to provide context for their Mesa Verde region work. How? Ten years earlier, my San Juan Basin Conference had flopped; flopped but not forgotten, by me at least. The San Juan Basin Conference had failed because (1) the people didn't know what we wanted and (2) the people who came mostly wouldn't have given us what we wanted anyway. And (3) because I didn’t know what I was doing, of course. I learned that it was important to offer a simple, explicit research structure and it was critical to invite the Right People – scholars open to this kind of enterprise, who had deep personal knowledge for some part of the question, and who were willing to share that knowledge. I suggested a structure: divide the Southwest into districts that corresponded to various individuals' research careers. Recruit those individuals to Crow Canyon to pool information. Provide them with a fair amount of instruction well in advance of the conference, and ensure that everyone "got it" – understood the task, the process, and the product – and that everyone bought in to the enterprise. And invite people who could get along! Bill Lipe submitted a proposal (most of which I wrote) to Wenner-Gren, and we got it! (We made Bill the PI because he was a widely respected professor and I just barely had a PhD, and I was planning on hitting up Wenner-Gren that same cycle for an Apache History/Archaeology conference; Chapter 8). It wasn't a lot of money but, with some in-kind contributions from the Crow Canyon campus, it was enough. Bill and I worked on the guest list – critical! – and I honed the outlines/instructions/protocols. I walked everyone through the drills with mailings and phone calls. Everybody seemed to be OK with the plans – which actually were pretty simple. The "Pueblo III Conference" convened at Crow Canyon March 29-April 1, 1990 and was, in my opinion, an enormous success. The right people, a simple but solid structure, effective meeting management (I’d learned my lesson!), a topic amenable to the state-of-knowledge at that time. But mostly, the right people. Their rightness was demonstrated by the Cortez Root-Crop Games. The last evening of the conference, we retired to Crow Canyon's empty dining hall and enjoyed some adult beverages. Everyone was bushed, but also stimulated by what we'd done. Relaxing on cafeteria benches, our discussions became lively even, perhaps, a bit silly. Dr. Patricia Crown, a formidable and sagacious scholar, volunteered a table-trick. Pouring out a small mound of salt, she balanced the shaker at an impossible angle atop the pile. Onlookers were amazed and inspired by this feat – apparently an old Crown family staple. Vegetables emerged from the pantry, and were put to creative use. Carrots, potatoes, beets, and other tubers tottered on noses, stood on outstretched elbows, perched atop heads. Competitions began. The final victor was Bill Lipe, who walked (like an Egyptian) the length of the dining hall and back again with a beet balanced on his cranium. After that, the games collapsed; no one could best Bill. Lipe later admitted to a slight divot atop his head from a childhood accident-- but no matter, his triumph brought the conference to a happy ending. The conference's work was not concluded, however. We’d planned for a book, with chapters more-or-less adhering to outlines and data presentations hammered out in Cortez. All sites with 50+ rooms were plotted on maps and described in tables. This included sites that were known but poorly recorded; and for two districts which did not have sites larger than 50 rooms, the largest sites would do. This was essentially prior to GIS; GIS existed, but only cumbersome programs supported by mainframes. I had drafted, on mylar, 1:500,000 maps of the northern Southwest with rivers, boundaries, and lat/long ticks. In Cortez, we used blueprint copies (yes, children: blueprints!) to plot sites, with 3/8-inch red press-on drafting dots: an impressionist cartography of Where the Wild Sites Are. I still have 35mm slides of those maps, which we used in SAA presentations and other dog&pony shows. The intent, of course, was to draft nicer, slicker maps for the book. The red-dot maps hung for several years on the walls of the Crow Canyon lodge, fading and curling. The staff came to call them "measles maps." Someone finally took them down and, I hope, gave them a decent burial. I took the PIII book project with me to my new job at the Museum of New Mexico (Chapters 3, 11). It soon became clear that my curatorial duties precluded timely work with the various chapters and maps and appendices, and all the tangled apparatus which came from Cortez. I couldn’t let PIII languish: unfair to the authors, of course; and – more than that – it was a really dandy project, exciting and probably important. So I asked Mike Adler (who had not been at the Cortez conference) if he would do the honors. The result – after much work by Adler! – was The Prehistoric Pueblo World, A.D. 1150-1350, published by the University of Arizona Press in 1996. A landmark volume: there had been nothing like it before, no regional "atlas" of Pueblo III. Archaeologists being archaeologists, of course there was sniping and quibbling: you forgot this site, that site; you should have invited that person, you ignored my master's thesis, etc. Piffle: Prehistoric Pueblo World was a solid contribution with high-quality data and outstanding scholarship, produced very efficiently for not a heck of a lot of money. First to last, I'm very proud of it. It stood the test of time – almost 25 years – superseded only recently by the on-going "cyberSW" projects of Barbara Mills et alia, a multi-year GIS effort with, I imagine, considerably larger budget. And, I must add, a terrific project with enormous potential! Viva cyberSW! That way lies the future! But that’s now; this was then, back in the old paper-and-print world. Prehistoric Pueblo World inspired the structure, content, and formats for later PIV and BMIII-PI volumes: The Protohistoric Pueblo World, A.D. 1275-1600 (Adams and Duff 2004) and Southwestern Pithouse Communities, A.D. 200-900 (Young and Herr 2012) – similar in aim and organization, and identical in size and production. The three "atlas" volumes, all published by University of Arizona Press, covered 200-900, 1150-1350, and 1275-1600. All that was missing was Chaco, 900-1150 aka P II. But we already had the Outlier Hunts…the information was there, but in different formats and bindings. I had a chapter in Protohistoric but not in Pithouse; and I had something to do with Pueblo II outliers. I’ve given away many of my archaeology books, but I keep the three University of Arizona Press books – which look like matched volumes in a series – and the two outlier volumes (Outlier Survey and Anasazi Communities) where I can see them. I think they represent “something useful” for Anasazi/Ancestral Pueblo. And I had something to do with it. Check that one off the list? About those outliers... Before and after the failed 1978 San Juan Basin Conference, we assembled atlases of outliers. By "we" I mean the half-dozen original outlier hunters (Mike Marshall, John Stein, Rich Loose; Bob Powers, Bill Gillespie, me) quickly joined by a small cadre of enthused archaeologists. People collected outliers like baseball cards. By the mid-1980s, David Wilcox had his list, Steve LeBlanc had his list, we had our lists, etc. And the darned things kept popping up, a few new ones every year. As part of the Chaco Synthesis Project (described below), I asked John Kantner, Nancy Mahoney and Keith Kintigh to organize a working meeting on outliers (modelled loosely on the PIII conference), which was held at ASU in September 1999, from which came a thematic issue of Kiva (Kantner 2003) and an online GIS of outliers and Great Houses compiled and maintained by John. With the passage of time, that resource was passed on to Carrie Heitman and Ruth Van Dyke as part of the Chaco Landscapes Project (described below), one part of which was a Great Reconciliation of competing Chaco outlier dbases in 2015. The outlier cloud atlas now resides online, with the Chaco Research Archive, run by Carrie Heitman. Roads My contributions to Chaco road studies were modest, at best, and largely secondary to other programs. I went along for the ride… Neil Judd discussed roads with local Navajos, in the 1920s. He knew about roads. Decades later, Gwinn Vivian mistook roads for canals, but – admirable scholar! – realized his error, and promoted roads anew. The attention directed towards roads by the NPS Division of Remote Sensing (a sister entity to the Chaco Project) ramped up research and interest exponentially. In fact, we worked at Pueblo Alto (rather than Una Vida; see above) specifically because it was the end or beginning point of a spray of roads, including the "Great North Road," named I think by Park Archaeologist Randy Morrison after its Roman counterpart in England. Or perhaps by Pierre Morenon, who studied it with Cynthia’s San Juan Valley project, above. At Chaco Canyon, there were evident roads around Pueblo Alto and some real doozies out at Peñasco Blanco – which Peter and I saw but did not record while drawing its walls. (If you want to see a spectacular road, hike out to Peñasco Blanco and look south just before you get to the site: looks like a Civil War entrenchment.) During our Central Room Block excavations, we ran a trench up perpendicularly to the exterior north wall. The trench cut a narrow road about 2.3 m width, which ran parallel along the base of the long north wall. Similar roads, running along long exterior walls, have been posited for Pueblo Bonito. We actually saw one, in profile – but notably narrower than the roads excavated by Gwinn Vivian, the BLM projects, or one investigated by LouAnn Jacobson just outside the Pueblo Alto trash mound – which was a dandy! So, at Chaco, I saw a few roads, excavated or otherwise… On the NPS Outlier Survey, we worked at Pierre’s site – named for Prof. Morenon – and at Peach Springs, both of which were famously associated with roads. But we didn’t see them, apparently: we recorded feature by feature, not landscape-scale, and roads do not appear on our maps. I saw the Great North Road when I revisited Pierre’s, years later. I’ve only been back to Peach Springs once, in the dark with rain so heavy the modern road was hard to see – we will revisit that moment of operatic drama, below. Pierre's itself clearly was a road-side feature: a couple of small Great Houses – one atop a dramatic flat-topped butte, which someone of course named “The Acropolis” – and a fire-signal station perched on a conical hill. A half-dozen hardscrabble commoner houses attested to the area's pitiful farming potential (nil or nearly nil). One of the cool things about Pierre's (which is a very cool site indeed) was its wood; beams poked up out of the ruins. On our survey, Bob Powers noticed the first beam, in the Acropolis Great House; I insisted it must be modern – although there was no logical reason for a modern fence post or modern mining claim or a modern anything to be up on that butte. (I didn’t want to carry those stinking logs around; a hot day.) Bob took it back to lab, along with a half-dozen other nasty hunks of wood and, lo and behold, they produced dates. Once again, I was dead wrong. Oh well. The beams were weathered so all but one date were non-cutting (1106vv-1109vv), with the one cutting date coming in at 1124r. It looks like Pierre's was built about the time construction ended at Chaco, and a decade after construction began at Aztec Ruins. Hmmm … interesting. Does that date the Great North Road? I coughed up another date for a Chaco road, almost by accident at Talus Unit #1. When I was researching Chetro Ketl, I stumbled onto field notes for Talus Unit #1, a smaller ruin 100' off Chetro Ketl's northwest corner, at the base of the cliffs. Hewett & Co. excavated Talus Unit #1. (I was bemused: where were Talus Units #2 or #3? This very year, as I worked on this text, Joan Mathien published a fine paper on Talus Unit #1 which included a manuscript map from Hewett’s era with those missing numbers, attached to sites around the Rincon behind CK.) Most of the notes for Talus Unit #1 came from Margaret Woods, one of the wonderful Woods sisters of Chetro Ketl (above), so those records were pretty good. The Park Service had done some more work there, incidental to stabilization, and Chaco Canyon had those records. We had a photogrammetric map, but Peter McKenna and I had not drawn its walls – after all, Talus Unit #1 was just an odd whatever – a small Outlier-sized Great House – and a stop on the Chetro Ketl trail. I crawled all over it, measured things, amended existing maps, and looked closely. "The Architecture of Talus Unit" appeared in a 1985 New Mexico Archaeological Society volume in honor of Alden Hayes – obscure, but unlike my Dinwiddie Mimbres work in that same annual series (Chapter 2), a few people actually read it. Turns out Talus Unit was pretty interesting: a Great House like the larger Outliers (anywhere outside of Chaco Canyon, Talus Unit would have been a state park, or a historic site, or something). Plus a weird tangle of walls, tacked on to east end of the Great House. The weird walls surrounded an even weirder central structure, a room-sized ramp, which earlier scholars had (rather desperately) called a pyramid. It wasn't a pyramid; it was the lower end of a road which ran from Pueblo Alto to the edge of the cliff top above, plummeting over the edge 50' down to Talus Unit. Fifty feet is a big first step; surely there must have been something between the cliff edge and the canyon floor? Looking carefully in the right light, you could see a very worn, very steep set of bed rock steps came about half-way down the cliff face, but they stopped about 15' above the ramp (pyramid). Looking even more carefully, there were three adjacent (big) beam sockets in a fin of sandstone at the base of the stairs, and below a descending line of much small beam sockets beaten into the cliff face. Apparently there was some sort of wooden stairs or ladder that bridged the gap between the base of the bedrock stairs and the top of the room-ramp. The stairs only show up in the right sun angle, and the beam sockets are just holes in the cliff face. All this evidence is really hard to see. But it's there. There's a similar set-up around the corner, at the head of Chetro Ketl's rincon. A large masonry ramp on the canyon floor (one of the mystery Talus Units) points up to bedrock stairs which end at the cliff's edge – leaving a 60' gap that must have been spanned by wooden construction. Talus Unit #1 and the nearby rincon ramp convinced that there must have been an extensive and complex carpentry tradition, building large-scale wooden structures (scaffolds, bridges, stairs, etc) that no longer exist, gone to elements or camp-fires. Ditto the beam sockets beaten into the canyon wall, high above ground level, directly behind Chetro Ketl: a very elaborate wood ramp/stairs, long gone to the elements or to cooking fires. Getting back to the road date: some of the wood at Talus Unit ties into the road system. The ramp-room had a door; that door had wood lintels; those lintels offered up a half-dozen dates that clustered from 1024 to 1032. That is, early in Chaco's 1020-1120 building boom. Now the stairs and ramp might very well post-date that door, but any date in a storm. Pierre's was late, with dates in the 1120s. The Talus Unit road-ramp was earlier in the 1020s and early 1030s. The implications for dating Chaco's roads are…beyond the scope of this chapter. One thing seems clear: significant labor was invested in Pierre’s Acropolis – which clearly functioned as a road-side feature – at or after the end of heavy lifting at Chaco and after the beginning of major building at Aztec. So, therefore…what? I still haven’t figured out the North Road. The most significant "road" studies followed closely on the original Outlier Hunts. In the early- to mid-1980s, the Bureau of Land Management (taking its name seriously) proactively researched roads ahead of proposed energy development (Kincaid 1983; Nials, Stein and Roney 1987). Those projects were prescient, admirably forward-looking: knowing that an important but poorly-understood cultural resource would be threatened by future energy developments, 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". Significant resources were expended; excellent archaeologists were hired; innovative field techniques were developed. This was done well in advance of actual planning and permitting. Recall that the Anasazi Communities outlier survey was sponsored by the Public Service Company of New Mexico, well in advance of possible coal mining. Again, long before actual planning and permitting. Would that we were so wise today. The maps produced by these projects (and their predecessor, the NPS Remote Sensing office associated with the Chaco Project) represent a network of considerable range and ramifying complexity. Some 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 (famously in a Scientific American article; Lekson et alia 1988, map by John Stein). Reasonably, I think, and probably correctly; but the cause of much subsequent eye-rolling and teeth-gnashing. John Roney (1992) pared "roads" back to only those segments actually visible on the ground, which some took to represent all the real roads there were – an erroneous conclusion (and not John’s!). Much later, James Snead (2017) rightly complained that various "road" maps differed significantly – which should we believe? All and none, I’d say: 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." 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 studies to map them out. (Recent Lidar work by Rich Friedman has borne this out: there are a lot more roads out there than we ever dreamed…) Years later, when I was pushing the Chaco Meridian (shortly before Y2K), I found myself forced to advocate for the Great North Road. The North Road – the most-studied of all roads – was my smoking-gun link between Chaco and Aztec (via Salmon) but some people wished away parts of it – most critically, the northernmost segment. My view, and the view of Cynthia Irwin-William, Pierre Morenon, and everyone else in the 1970s and 1980s, was that the North Road left Pueblo Alto, streaked north to the edge of Kutz Canyon, and then pivoted slightly left down the bottom of Kutz to Salmon Ruin, which sits directly across the San Juan River from the mouth of Kutz Canyon. The road was no longer visible on the narrow canyon bottom, which is regularly (and violently) flooded. That was the Accepted Wisdom until 1989, when Anna Sofaer and Mike Marshall – who had just finished another study of the North Road – declared that the road ended at the rim of Kutz Canyon. They had a cosmological argument that turned the Great North Road into a road to nowhere. But, but, but: as part of their study, they discovered wooden stairs from the road's "end" at the canyon rim going down into Kutz Canyon! And a few miles beyond the canyon rim – past the road’s symbolically-charged “end” – sat Twin Angels' Pueblo, a small Chaco outlier excavated by Earl Morris in 1915 and reported by Roy Carlson in American Antiquity in 1966 – NOT an obscure reference! Twin Angels was like Pierre's: absolutely no reason for it to be there, in a badlands hopeless for farming. A later BLM survey discovered nothing – no unit pueblos, no Great Kiva, no nothing -- around Twin Angels. Twin Angels clearly was a road-side feature, just like Pierre’s site. The road didn’t go through the Acropolis at Pierre’s, rather it ran a few hundred meters to the west, far below it. Ditto Twin Angels. Exact same set-up. Anna and Mike wanted the North Road to end at Kutz Canyon because Kutz was (emphatically) "down" while the end of Chaco's south road was "up" at Hosta Butte – and they thought that tied, somehow, into Pueblo cosmology. Bah humbug! – I said – and balderdash, too! (I said all that to myself, in the shower.) In public, I tried to be polite while raising the inconvenient truth of Twin Angels (and Salmon, directly opposite the mouth of Kutz!). People enthusiastic about cosmology and ritual jumped on Anna's bandwagon, and waved off Twin Angels. (How? I remain flummoxed.) In any event, Twin Angels became the lynch pin of my argument for the North Road and the Chaco Meridian. Sure, Twin Angels…and what about Salmon Ruins? How can people wish away these massive piles of masonry? I'm not big on Southwestern archaeology's obsession with ritual, but Karma is Karma. A few years later, I visited Twin Angels with the late David Roberts, who was writing an article about Chaco Meridian for National Geographic Explorer. Roberts was a friend but, as befits an adventure journalist, also a provocateur. He repeatedly goaded me to visit Culiacán, the southern end of the Chaco Meridian, despite the fact that Culiacán was the headquarters of the Sinaloa Cartel. (Maybe not "despite the fact" but rather "because of the fact;" David liked to live on the edge.) More on Culiacán, below. Anyway…David and I squeezed through the BLM barb-wire fence which protects Twin Angels. On the gate post was a tin box containing a sign-in ledger. Opening the lid, we saw the last entry from a week or two before us. (Twin Angels does not get many visitors.) It was Mike Marshall, who after his signature added: "The North Road never came by here." Amusing, and a bit disturbing. Roberts urged me to respond on the record, on the ledger, for his article. I demurred. He persisted. Finally I scribbled something – I don't remember what. Probably something witty like, “Does so!” I slammed the lid on BLM's tin box, and raked my hand across BLM's barbed wire. Nothing serious, but a fair amount of blood. Roberts, an adventurer not alarmed by gore, laughed himself nearly to hiccups. I was not amused: Dogma ate my Karma. At least I didn't get tetanus. Paralleling the roads – metaphorically but sometimes also literally – was a network of line-of-sight signaling systems. We have no idea how extensive this communications link went. I first realized how important this was when we worked at Chimney Rock (below), which was one end of a relay chain back to Pueblo Alto. But my vision of line-of-sight was broader than that. I’ve told this story elsewhere, but I can’t remember where; it’s a good story, so I’ll retell it here, beginning with a few paragraphs lifted from my chapter in Greater Chaco Landscapes (2021): 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 (red safety 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.). Windes was a demon for line-of-sight “flare-ups.” (Tom liked flares and fireworks, to the chagrin of the NPS rangers.) He’d planned an elaborate “flare-up” – the mother of all flare-ups – across the San Juan Basin, from Kutz Canyon in the North to Kin Ka’a in the South. This required a cast of dozens, and Tom recruited a bus-load of Albuquerque school-teachers to help. A National Geographic photographer was coming out to Chaco to observe! (What would he see? Tiny pinpoints of red in the black night?) A huge logistical build-up, getting his volunteers out, apportioning our NPS vehicles to various crew members, instructing everyone in their duties. He must have fed and housed the school-teachers, too; I wasn’t involved in that. The weather, unfortunately, chose to not cooperate: it poured for three days before the Big Flare-up. Never mind, all the bodies and vehicles and supplies were in place – and that Nat Geo guy was coming! I was assigned the southern edge, from Kin Ya’a (about an hour’s drive south of Chaco, on a good day), thence west across a string of two or three outliers to Peach Springs, about 30 miles east-west. And, at a guess, about 30 miles straight-line southwest of Chaco. The Peach Springs Great House was the furthest-out station, at least on the south half of Tom’s Big Flare-up. I loaded my people and gear into a beat-up NPS carry-all (two-wheel drive), headed south out of the park on roads that were already iffy. It rained, and rained, and rained. No matter: neither rain nor sleet nor gloom of night (the sun was setting, somewhere behind the clouds) would stay me from my appointed rounds. I dropped off pairs of school-teachers in their appropriate spots with ponchos, truck flares, matches (maybe lighters?), and stern instructions to fire up at the specified times and to be there when I came back. And to look sharp for distant flares, and note the hour and direction. It was dark when we arrived at Peach Springs about a half hour prior before our appointed time. It wasn’t just dark: it was a dark and stormy night. The rain was not letting up. No lightening, though, which was good. Since we were the most distant post, Tom had cobbled together a six-foot tall T-shaped cross of 2x4s, supporting not one, not two, but THREE red flares. At the proper time, we were to light all three and hold that rugged cross atop the highest part of the Peach Springs Great House. Again, glad there was no lightning; but boy was there rain! Buckets. There was a hogan about 50 yards away, down below the mound. An old pick-up suggested that someone was home, but I didn’t really have time to knock and explain. Recall that many Navajos are not big fans of Anasazi ruins. An English-Navajo explanation might have … difficult, awkward, probably lengthy. At zero hour we fired the flares and hoisted the cross. Standing in the rain, propping up the cross, I heard a door slam. Not on the pick-up – it didn’t move – but from the hogan. I’m pretty sure the owner peeked out to see what on earth was going on, and saw what on earth was going on: two dark hooded, caped, ponchoed figures illuminated by an infernal device with three red-hot flames, burning through the downpour. And slammed the door. Hard, and probably shoved furniture behind it. I thought for a moment, again, about going down and … what? How to explain all this? Maybe they had a rifle and, if I were them, I’d shoot first and ask questions later if at all. Besides, we were busy scanning in the general direction(s) of our friends at other outliers and, of course, back at Chaco. I had a fair idea where those might be, but of course it was still pouring rain. After about a half hour, the flares burned out. We were soaked and glad to get back into the carry-all. Crank up the heater! I picked up all the school-teachers – didn’t lose anybody! – and headed back into Chaco. Nobody seen nothin’ No red lights in any direction. Despite that disappointment and despite the nasty weather, everyone was in good spirits. The south road into Chaco, after we got off the pavement, was … challenging. That part of the San Juan Basin is mostly shales and clays, no fun when wet. Really, really wet. I was doing pretty well; that is, we were still moving, slaloming down the road after a slip-and-slide scares. We could see the lights of the Chaco Visitor’s center – almost home! And then a long sweeping curve that was mostly mud, deep mud. I sunk the carry-all. Hopelessly. They had to come out with an old Army truck to haul it out, the next day. The mood darkened. Looked like a foul walk back to camp until Cory Breternitz drove by, high on the drier shoulders of the road, and stopped just beyond the muck to pick us up. A crowded vehicle but there wasn’t a long way to go. That was the only time I got completely stuck in the Basin. To be fair, I should note that some of the people working the north edges of the Basin had it worse: one party got cut off by a flash flood and had to overnight in their truck. But they can tell that story themselves. Landscapes, Part 1: Ritual and Secular The idea of "landscape" – if not the term itself – was applied to Chaco long ago; several early archaeologists recognized that Bonito, Chetro Ketl, et alia constituted a cluster or complex or congeries of sites. “Site” is merely an administrative term. Chetro Ketl and Talus Unit have two different site numbers, but they’re 100’apart. The whole canyon was a “site.” A ceremonial center? A city? In neutral terms, a landscape. My public engagement with that term came in 1990 (several years after I'd left the NPS; Chapter 3) at Society for American Archaeology meetings at Las Vegas, Nevada, where John R. Stein and I presented a paper on "Chaco 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 probably had the first copies of those British books between Philadelphia and Berkeley, imported directly from the publishers; I liked Bradley, but I was unimpressed with Tilley's "phenomenology" – a far cry from Husserl's. I wrote a mostly negative review of British landscape studies for Current Anthropology in 1996.) And "Chaco Ritual Landscapes" (I hope coincidently) appeared just before the remarkable rise of ritual to interpretive dominance in Southwestern archaeology (Charles Adams's 1991 Kachina Cult and Patricia Crown's 1994 Salado volume opened those flood gates). "Chaco Ritual Landscapes" was published in 1992 in a Chaco volume edited by Dave Doyel (who had organized the SAA session). "Ritual landscape" of 1990/1992 was Stein's, mostly; I contributed my bit, mostly about intra-canyon stuff. Perhaps more important was my nagging John to just write it down, please. (John requires prodding: we did this dance again years later when I edited Architecture of Chaco Canyon; below.) John and I bounced ideas around long before the Vegas gig. In 1983 and part of 1984 – a few years after the Great Outlier Hunts – I rented a room at chez Stein, John's Albuquerque abode. Stein, disgusted with Southwestern archaeology, had decided to become an architect; he was in his first year of architectural school at the University of New Mexico. I was in the midst of graduate classes at UNM (Chapter 1), taking every class I could with Binford but staying out of his (and harm's) way. John came back from his evening design studios grumbling about how they wouldn't teach basic drafting or structural engineering. I came back from evening Binford seminars muttering about how useless I found philosophy of science. Many evenings for many weeks, Stein and I convened at his pot-bellied stove (the house's principal heat source) and groused about our respective discontents. More than once, we groused simultaneously and independently – not even hearing each other -- until one of us laughed and popped open another can of beer. Between ventings, we discussed architecture and landscape. My primary inspirations were not New Archaeologists or Brits (who I had not yet met), 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 whom. 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. And it was; my thinking owed much to John Randall Stein. My principal contribution to "Chacoan Ritual Landscapes" was the argument, following John Fritz, that the “settlement” in Chaco Canyon was formally and intentionally laid out, consisting, following Gordon Vivian, of at least three different building types – Great Houses (elite residences/palaces), “McElmo” structures (massive storage facilities/warehouses), and Unit Pueblos (commoner houses) – and all on my own, more like a city than not. And the demonstration that earthen architecture was real at Chaco Canyon – the two platforms mounds at Pueblo Bonito being prime examples – thereby legitimizing the less emphatic earthen architecture – berms, etc – 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 ancient roads, particularly where roads arrived, circled, and departed from outlier Great Houses. These, today, have become part of the standard archaeological field-kit; but back then, berms were controversial. The existence of earthen architecture inside the Canyon gave credence to something similar at outliers; and we both held the Bonito platform mounds (e.g., Lekson 1984:74-77) to be such rock-ribbed, unassailable, lead-pipe certainties that no one could possibly doubt them. So, of course, contrarian archaeologists doubt them: I saw my old friend Chip Wills, in a conference presentation, make them vanish with a wave of his hand. Quite remarkable. (Wills seems in the end to have come around, sort of, maybe.) Ritual landscape: there was also an important secular landscape of the "Chacoan community." The term "community,” peculiar (in this usage) to Chaco, came from the outlier hunts. Recall the work of Marshall, Stein, Loose and Novotny (1979): Anasazi Communities of the San Juan Basin. "Community" 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, Great House, "big bump") with its attendant features (berms, roads, Great Kivas, "ritual landscape") – an ensemble, an assemblage seen scores and scores of times at outliers from Blanding UT to Magdalena NM. While it seemed safe to assume that the residents of such a unit were part of a daily face-to-face "community" (that is, a social unit), Nancy Mahoney (2000) pointed out that Chacoan "communities" were all too small to constitute a reproductive unit; that is, "communities" must have been part of a larger actual 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 – 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. Beats me… Three decades later I returned to Chaco landscapes in the "Chaco Landscapes Project," below. But first I lived large on the longitude with Chaco Meridian, distracting myself from dilemmas of Crow Canyon Archaeological Center 1994-5 (Chapter 3). I pondered and composed and wrote from 1996 to 1998, and finally published the blasted book in 1999, also below. After the Meridian, we boxed the compass with the "Chaco Synthesis Project" 1996-2006, even further below. In and around all that, I had Chaco-related field projects at the Bluff Great House during the summers of 1995-1998; a very short project at Aztec North in 2004; and excavations at Chimney Rock in 2009, way far below. We will thread our way through that maze before returning to the "Chaco Landscapes Project" in 2014, far far below. Chaco Meridian In 1981, I presented a paper, "Chacoan Architecture in Continental Context", at the First Anasazi Symposium, held at Mesa Verde. Actually, I didn't "present" the paper: I wasn't there – can’t remember why – so Jim Judge read it for me. Actually, Jim didn't "read" the paper, either: I was new to conference papers, and mine was about three times too long. So he summarized it. The paper thereafter had a slightly twisted history. Jack Smith edited a conference volume and he told me it was too long, so he cut out a lengthy section about the chronology of Casas Grandes – Paquimé wasn't "Anasazi," after all, so why had I dragged Casas Grandes into his Anasazi conference? That really pissed me off so I wrote a silly, nasty letter to his boss, who (I sincerely hope) tossed it straight into his trash bin. (As recounted in Chapter 12, I was profoundly naive about scholarly matters like conferences and publications; for the latter, my model was the quick-production and immediate publication of the mimeographed Southwestern New Mexico Research Reports, Chapter 2.) Jack brought out the conference volume with my mangled paper in 1983. I published the Casas Grandes chronology bit separately in Kiva in 1984, and that was that. Jack did his job, quite well, while I yapped at his heels. I was young and stupid. "Chacoan Architecture in Continental Context" was my response to Charlie Di Peso's 1974 claim that Chaco was a Casas Grandes outlier – my words, not his. Nobody wants to work in a periphery … despite my exhortations to others to suck up your NIMBY and embrace peripherality, I was no different. As established elsewhere, I was young, foolish, and I bristled at the suggestion that Chaco owed anything to anybody. "Chacoan Architecture in Continental Context" ranged far beyond Paquimé, but at its core it was a response to Di Peso – who never read it, since he died in 1982. Di Peso argued that Paquimé and Chaco were contemporary. He was wrong: Chaco was two centuries earlier. Chaco was much earlier, so Chaco couldn't be a Paquimé outlier! He also provided a long list of architectural similarities between the two. He was wrong about most of them – or so I argued. He was right about a few of them – and they were peculiar or, rather, particular things. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't make them go away. In my busy mid-1980s, I shelved the matter and moved on to other things. But I didn't forget those awkward residuals from Di Peso’s list. In the years that followed, I learned more about the Southwest and Mexico, visiting sites, reading books, chatting with people (Chapter 7). And my notions about archaeology evolved. My hand was slapped for unseemly historicity in 1978 (Chapter 3), but I remained a closet historian, dubious of American anthropological archaeology – at that time, offensively scientific. I couldn't say anything in public of course, but by the mid-1990s (after gigs at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe and Crow Canyon Archaeological Center; Chapters 3 and 11) I was pretty sure that American Anthropological Archaeology was on a road to nowhere (a theme revisited briefly, below, in Study of Southwester Archaeology; and in Chapter 13). If we couldn't discover new things that were actually interesting, the Indians would (and maybe should) push us off our shaky pedestals. I wanted to do something that was pure undiluted archaeology that might restore my confidence in what, after all, had been my chosen life's work. There were several options, but most required time and money. What about that old unresolved problem of Di Peso's residuals – odd things that linked Chaco and Paquimé, but shouldn't? I thought about that for a while and brought in some additional things I hadn't known in 1981. New dates from Paquimé, from Chaco, and from Aztec Ruins. My unpublished field study of Aztec. The Great North Road. John Stein's "roads through time." Put 'em all together and you got Chaco Meridian. That book was published in 1999, but it started years before (below and Chapter 12). My "ah-ha" moment came in late January 1995. I was adding Paquimé and Las Trincheras to the white border of the National Atlas Arizona-New Mexico sheet – one of my all-time favorite maps, alongside Brown and Lowes biotic communities map — measuring latitudes and longitudes. (I still have that map, with its carefully calibrated cartographic marginalia.) First I noticed that Paquimé and Las Trincheras were pretty much on the same latitude; an odd coincidence. Looking further, it looked like Chaco and Paquimé were on the same longitude...? North-south. Jeez, what's up with that? Turns out, Al Hayes noticed this odd fact at a Pecos Conference in the 1980s. I didn't know that. (Al died in 1998, before he could see what I did with his odd fact.) I ramble through twisted history of the book Chaco Meridian in Chapter 12, but there was a run-up, a gestation, a lag-time between infection and presentation. I will only summarize the argument here. The original Chaco Meridian was a four-point problem: Chaco, Aztec, Paquimé and North. (Part of) Chaco moved north to become Aztec, and then Aztec moved south to become (part of) Paquimé. That was HISTORY, and I actually used that word in the Meridian's coming-out party – but not in the subsequent book. “History” was still a touchy subject in American Anthropological archaeology. I thought it through, and convinced myself that the Meridian was real and, better still, really historical. Now, how to spring this on my unsuspecting colleagues? It had no chance – at that time – of peer-reviewed publication and it was way too complicated for a 15-minute lecture presentation. A poster! (My enthusiasm for posters, and my production methods are discussed in Chapter 12.) I started, in 1996, with a poster titled "Chaco + Casas." First at the Southwest Symposium in Tempe (January); then at the Society for American Archaeology meetings at New Orleans (May); and finally at Oxford V in Santa Fe (an international gathering of archaeoastronomers; August). The poster then retired to a wall at the Chaco Canyon Visitors Center, where it hung for years. I don't know its final fate: perhaps some seasonal, annoyed by visitors' meridian questions, tossed the thing in the dumpster. I like to think of it buried deep in the South Gap landfill. My Measle Maps and my Meridian, crunched in the stratigraphy. I was, and remain, particularly proud of that poster (described in Chapter 12). It was, as they say, a piece of work. 1996 was an inflexion point for PPt and Photoshop; only a few of us had access to either. It was also early days for posters at SAAs. Many departments did not consider posters to be presentations meriting travel funds; most archaeologists considered posters second-class scholarship. I thought posters had enormous potential: instead of machine-gun-sessions of 15-minute papers sprayed out to a variably-interested audience, you could present a lot of material on a poster and then interact with a self-selected, genuinely interested people for hours at a time! What's not to like? Most passers-by hated the poster: muttered, sputtered, walked away. A few people – the smart ones? – asked questions, probed logics, offered comments. The last laugh was mine: "Chaco + Casas" won 1996 SAA Professional Poster Prize (or rather co-Prize, shared with Clinton Hoffman’s poster). They gave me a plaque with a gold medal/star/sticker thing! It was like winning the Science Fair – which I'd never done. I was proud of that award – and of that poster! It certainly got noticed. Thereafter followed more talks and lectures. I worked out my argument in public over the next year and a half, in posters and at conferences. I presented ideas and then trimmed and shimmed them in response to people's comments and questions. Consequently, the Meridian was in the newspapers and in Archaeology magazine long before the book was actually written. Crow Canyon ran a Meridian trip from Aztec, to Chaco, to Casas Grandes in October 1997. I was the leader alongside Peter Pino of Zia Pueblo; and Roger Kennedy (then head of the National Park Service, later author of Hidden Cities) was among a really bright group of participants. I spent an intense week on a moving seminar focused on the Meridian, fleshing out arguments, rethinking data, jiggling logic, and otherwise getting my ducks in a north-south line. At the end of the trip, Peter Pino composed a song about the Meridian, which he sang to us in Keresan. I don't speak Keresan so I'll have to take Peter's word for it that he approved. For many years thereafter, I’ve had a picture on my desk of me, Roger, and Peter at Casas Grandes, thinking big. That was a great trip. The book came out in 1999, after favorable (if skeptical) peer review by two past-SAA-presidents and a Famous World Archaeologist (who later disavowed it). I was reliably informed that the buzz around New Mexico's academic institutions was the book was not peer reviewed. That, my friends, was a lie – and not the last time my work would encounter dismissive lies (Chapter 13). Chaco Meridian ran smack into a shit-storm, but in the end it mostly prevailed. Today every sensible archaeologist accepts that Chaco moved north to Aztec Ruins. Recall the four-point problem: Chaco, Aztec, Paquimé and North. So there's three of my four points. Considerable resistance remains to any role for Chaco/Anasazi in Paquimé's history – exactly parallel to Mimbres resistance to Chaco (Chapter 2) – but that may diminish as old archaeologists fade away. Archaeology, like science, advances one funeral at a time. Max Planck said something like that. Even as I dealt with the lynch mobs and tar-and-feathers, it dawned on me that I my reach had not extended far enough. Chaco was PII; Aztec PIII; and Paquimé PIV – that is, a span of about 900 to 1450. What came before? What came after? Chaco was famously weird in BMIII: the biggest BMIII sites anywhere sat at either end of the canyon, and in fact the whole place was a big sprawling BMIII site. What about PI? Rich Wilshusen, who knew a lot about PI, said the biggest PI site was Blue Mesa, just south of Durango, CO. In 2004, I visited Ridges Basin, literally just over the hill from Blue Mesa, to see the final throes of the big Animas-La Plata project. Jim Potter took me around, ending up at a knob called "Sacred Ridge" because it was loaded with very strange, very big PI structures. I asked him where we were, exactly, and he replied: hoping you wouldn't ask. Sacred Ridge was pretty much due north of Chaco, on the longitude of Hungo Pavi. The whole complex of Blue Mesa and Ridges Basin was one big PI site, the biggest by far anywhere – and it was on the Meridian. That was the missing link, from BMIII at Chaco up to PIV at Paquimé, 500 to 1450. And after? Well, Culiacán (the northernmost Mesoamerican city, according to the conquistadors) was due south of Paquimé, and its heyday was from about 1450 to the arrival of the Spanish – according to J. Charles Kelley, who knew it well. A thousand years on the Meridian! I grabbed Culiacán on J. Charles Kelley’s say-so – he died two years before the first edition of Chaco Meridian, so he didn’t really have a say-so on my use of his say-so. Subsequently, I noted Alexander von Humboldt’s early 19th century map of New Mexico, which stated that the “Aztecs” left Paquime and travelled over the Sierra Madre to Culiacán (Chapter 2). Von Humboldt died a century and a half before the second edition of Chaco Meridian, so he could neither confirm nor deny my use of his information – unambiguous, in my opinion, on his map. I presented an abbreviated version of this new Meridian in October 2007 to a fair-sized audience at a Santa Fe Institute SW-SW-Mesoamerica cosmology session (Chapter 7). A young Mexican colleague who works in Chihuahua came up to me later, during a break, and said, "You know, when you published that book [Chaco Meridian 1999] the field wasn't ready for it." Nobody was ready for the long-haul Meridian, including me. I backed off and worked on other things; but I kept learning more about BM III in Chaco and PV (my reconning of “PIV” is a little different than others’) at Culiacán, particularly from colonial Spanish accounts (above). The four-part problem became a six-point problem; the history grew from a 500-year span to a full 1000 years. Of which, more below. When I wrote A History of the Ancient Southwest (2009; in which I embraced my inner periphery and made Chaco an outer dwarf-planet of Mesoamerica, discussed in Chapter 7), I fragmented the revised, elongated Meridian story into a series of footnotes, one per chapter. It was there, the whole enchilada, but you had to pay attention. In each of the pertinent footnotes, I used variations on this sentence: “That’s right, kids, the [site under consideration] was due [north/south] of the [previous site under consideration]. One reader emailed me to complain about repetition – “you say the same thing four times!” – leading me to question the reading comprehension of my colleagues. I actually said the same thing five times; and there were (I thought) obvious reasons why. In Chapter 7, I recount the remarkable year of 2012: a Crow Canyon Chaco-Cahokia trip and an NEH traveling seminar on Southwest-Mesoamerica, and other, lesser epiphanies. On the NEH trip, we traveled from Aztec Ruins National Monument in New Mexico to the Aztec Templo Mayor in Mexico City. It was a great experience, and not the least of it was the people: no archaeologists (beyond one grad student), all professors of history and art history and ethnic studies. After beating my head against the brick wall of professional Southwestern archaeology, that crowd was a tonic. Like the 1997 Meridian trip with Peter Pino and Roger Kennedy with a crew of open-minded, rigorously skeptical, young & old, very smart people, the NEH trip really honed my chops. So, after a decade-plus recess, I cranked out a second edition of Chaco Meridian in 2015, covering the full range from BMIII to PV, from Chaco to Culiacán. The most recent chapter of the Meridian story came in 2019. Crow Canyon organized a trip up into Chihuahua to visit cliff dwellings. I was the leader (along with Mike Mathiowetz) – despite not knowing a heck of a lot about the subject. I'd visited cliff dwellings in Cave Valley, about 25 miles southwest of Casas Grandes, but I'd never been to the rest of the sites on Crow Canyon's list, around the mountain town of Madera. I'd read about them, but the chance to actually see them convinced me to lead a dozen rich Americans into the cartel-infested Sierra Madres – I mean, what could go wrong? I studied up; Robert Lister from University of Colorado had excavated some of the cliff-dwellings in the 1950s, and we had his collections at my museum. And the more I learned, the more I became intrigued with "T"-shaped doors, of which more below. No major problems marred the November trip (although cartel gunman shot up two extended Mormon families about 60 miles from where we were). The people were great: beyond me and Mike, we had three more US archaeologists on the trip plus, for several days, Eduardo Gamboa, the INAH expert on Sierra Madre cliff dwellings. Like the two earlier Crow Canyon "Chaco Meridian" trips, the travelling seminar was enormously useful. We saw lots of "T"-shaped doors; hereafter, T-doors. I'd seen T-doors on my many trips to Paquimé, where more than half of all doors had that shape. And I'd devoted an appendix to T-shaped doors at Chaco, Aztec and Paquimé in Chaco Meridian (picked up by Craig Childs, but not many others) but I didn't know what to do with them. Chaco's T-doors were only in Great Houses, but Aztec's and Paquimé's T-doors spanned their respective regions. So unlike my other architectural clues, those doors were not found only at those three original Meridian sites. But they certainly were iconic: big T-doors were almost always conspicuous in external walls, whatever the site, Great House or not. I came to call these “mega-Ts.” At cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, mega-Ts were visible from across the canyon. So too, I found, with Sierra Madre T-doors. From the grainy old black-and-white photos in Lister's report (and Lumholtz and other early explorers), it wasn't really clear, and many "T" shapes were fragmentary, with one or the other side wall tumbled down. So it was great to actually visit the sites, to see for myself. And, once again, to hone my arguments sparking off a focused, smart, skeptical crew. So here's what I think: T-doors map the (political) history of the ancient Southwest, migrating up and down the Meridian. They start at Chaco, exclusively in Great Houses. Then they appear at Aztec Ruins, but democratized: everybody had ‘em, (almost) every cliff dwelling at Mesa Verde has big T-doors in its front wall. And then, after 1300, T-doors vanish entirely from the Four Corners and the Pueblo region, and re-appear 500 miles to the south, in the Casas Grandes region – and at a very few places along the Mogollon Rim, like Gila Cliff Dwellings and Montezuma's Castle. (There are a few claims for post 1300 T-doors among the Pueblos, but the ones I've been able to check are wishful thinking.) Paquimé and its cliff dwellings have plenty of small interior T-doors, but seeing the sites convinced me that big, bold T-doors in readily visible exterior walls were indeed iconic, symbols of a group identity that residents proclaimed proudly: we are the T-door people – whatever than meant. I'm pretty sure that part of what "T" meant was polity, or could be interpreted by us as political: Chaco's polity and its historical heirs, Aztec and Paquimé. T-doors at Culiacán? Beats me. What little research has been reported from there does not mention doors. My old friend David Roberts, of course, urged me to visit Culiacán, to see for myself; he'd write an article about it. I declined: Culiacán was and remains the headquarters of the Sinaloa Cartel, once Chapo’s and now his sons’. I didn’t fancy my chances, an Old Gringo speaking very broken Spanish, snooping around Culiacán's mean streets and milpas? Robert's story, if we'd done that trip, might have ended on an Ambrose Bierce note – perhaps a fitting end to my Meridian saga, but still too soon for me. Not yet, not yet... I’d heard about T-shaped openings at the Maya site of Palenque. When I finally got to visit that remarkable site (Chapter 7), the T-shaped openings proved to be … rather small. Not doors in any practical sense. But still, undeniably T-shaped. I tend to discount them as a happy coincidence, but others (notably Marc Callis) have developed this theme. Chaco Synthesis The NPS scraped me off in February 1986, one month after Great Pueblo Architecture was published by UNM Press. I’d worked for NPS for almost exactly ten years; they strung out me (and my colleagues) on a series of temporary appointments, student programs, and other dodges (above, and Chapter 3). I was glad to go: the Chaco Project ended badly (as noted above, and Chapters 3 and 13). Judge bailed out August 1984, at which point NPS and UNM ganged up to evict the remaining hangers-on. A few stayed on with new NPS jobs in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. The rest of us scattered, and UNM moved into our empty offices. Lobos prowled our halls. We'd dug a lot of sites and flipped a lot of sherds and cranked out almost three linear feet of technical reports; but there were no Conclusions. No finish, no finale, no final report. No scholarly justification for why we had done all that work – the reports were excellent, but very much comparable to CRM products. Since you are tired of my gripes and whines, I'll turn the mic over to Bob Powers – one of the few Chaco Project alums who transitioned into a permanent NPS job: Unfortunately, the Chaco Project ended prematurely in 1986, a victim of the ballooning federal deficit, an inflexible civil service system, and the waning support of National Park Service and university [of New Mexico] officials. … for those of us who had lived and breathed Chaco for more than a decade, its end was a heartbreaking and sobering experience. (Powers 2006:xiii) That was from the "Foreword" Bob wrote to The Archaeology of Chaco Canyon, the 540-page culmination of the "Chaco Synthesis Project" which Bob had asked me to devise and direct. Bob sprung that on me in 1995; caught me on the rebound after I escaped Crow Canyon (Chapters 3 and 11). We haggled and planned and plotted. The Synthesis finally took off in 1996, ten years after the Chaco Project crashed and burned. Thanks, Bob! I think… (A Senior Scholar in my Field announced from the podium at a major meeting, that I got the job because I was "the last man standing," which was a little annoying. Reading Bob's "Foreword," I'm pretty sure there was more to my selection than that.) In addition to Bob, two other Chaco Project staff wound up with permanent NPS jobs: Tom Windes and Joan Mathien. During the span from 1986 to 1996, Tom and Joan soldiered on, without much support from NPS, working through our long back-catalog of unpublished technical reports. Of our 22 book-length "NPS Publications in Archaeology" and "Reports of the Chaco Center" – site reports, artifact analyses, environmental studies – one-third (7) appeared after 1986. Thanks, Tom and Joan! Back to the Synthesis: Bob originally thought that I'd write a book, a single-authored summary of the Chaco Project. Joan Mathien was already doing that – and she'd certainly earned that job! Her Culture and Ecology of Chaco Canyon and the San Juan Basin (NPS Publication in Archaeology 18H) came out in 2005, a year before my Archaeology of Chaco Canyon – a book with many authors and a complex backstory. The "Chaco Synthesis Project" which I organized was, in a word, baroque. Or perhaps, beyond baroque, byzantine. Many, many moving parts; and myriad people and personalities. (The whole thing is described in my introduction to Archaeology of Chaco Canyon, and in a detailed appendix in Joan's Culture and Ecology). I spread the synthesis out over most of the Southwest's major archaeological institutions (or at least their hometowns) and invited every Major Chaco Player to one or more conferences. Only three declined. Not sure why. Of course, my list of Major Chaco Players may not have coincided with the self-evaluations of every Southwesternist, and I expect feelings were bruised. But over 65 archaeologists were involved in one way or another, not to mention platoons of graduate students, NPS staff, and other observers. There were six working conferences (1999-2000), each with a different cast of participants (plus a few people – myself, an excellent graduate student, and an NPS cadre – who went to ‘em all). Each of the meetings was organized by a different scholar, with my input. These focused on various themes: Ecology & Economy (University of Arizona, Tucson AZ), Architecture (University of New Mexico, Albuquerque NM and Chaco Canyon), Organization of Production (University of Colorado, Boulder CO), Chaco World (ASU, Tempe AZ), Society and Polity (Fort Lewis College, Durango CO), Chaco in Art (University of Colorado, again). Followed by a mega-summation Captone Conference, and a smaller (and more useful) working session at School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe. In all, eight events. The workings conferences were supposed to be small – a half dozen people, including one distinguished “outsider” (an archaeologist/expert from [far] beyond the Southwest). As it happened, they averaged about 15 people; not a huge group, but twice what I’d hoped. All but one produced a scholarly product: edited volumes, thematic issues of professional journals (for example, American Antiquity; and I was delighted to subvent color plates, for the first time in that journal in living memory!), and other outlets. I had two hopes for my distinguished “outsiders”: fresh eyes and marketing Chaco. Fresh eyes might break us out of seemingly endless cycles in which archaeologist looking at the same data reached conclusions that made Chaco complex, then simple, then complex again, then simple again. Marketing Chaco to outsiders also sought to break us out of Southwestern provincialism; I was hoping that professors from beyond our region might recommend our collections to their graduate students. Neither thing happened. The fresh eyes brought with them or were quickly supplied with Southwest's rose-colored glasses – sucked into the black hole of “Pueblo Space.” To my knowledge, only a few extra-regional graduate students have grappled with Chaco, none under the direction of our "outsiders." Oh well. It was fun hanging out with the “outsiders” and they certainly upped the intellectual antes. Thanks! I embedded popular writers with better success: Bryan Fagan's Chaco Canyon (2005) was a direct result of the Synthesis Project; and David Grant Noble's In Search of Chaco (2004) was also related, but not directly. I engaged Fagan to write his book; it's a good book, despite the fact that I come off poorly in it. We invited Dave Noble to sit in on the final SAR seminar in May 2004, and he convinced most of the participants to write "popular" versions of their sometimes-ponderous scholarly chapters in my Archaeology of Chaco Canyon – and added a few other authors, most notably Indians. Indians – who I could not include in the synthesis – got their say in Noble's excellent book. Why no Indians? As recounted in Chapter 9, Chaco was in the midst of a sticky NAGPRA situation, with Pueblos and Navajos raising Cain with NPS and with each other, and National NAGPRA railing at NPS for perceived improprieties. As I explain in Chapter 9, Indian participation was rendered impossible by the politics of the moment and by NPS directives. NPS wanted Navajos at the table; Pueblos didn’t, emphatically. To flip the question on its head: why no Biological Archaeology? Burials and skeletons add greatly to Chaco's story. Well, the same NAGPRA crisis and NPS strategies that scuttled Indian authors also precluded chapters on bones and remains. NPS said: no bones. And it was, after all, their money. (For Indians’ important influence on and [at least partial] confirmation of my archaeology, see Chapter 9; for my conclusions about Chaco, see the last section of this chapter.) The six working conferences were followed by a cast-of-thousands "Capstone" conference, run by Lynn Sebastian (2002, at the University of New Mexico), which itself was followed by a much smaller final planning seminar at the School of American Research (2003, Santa Fe, NM). At SAR we organized the book which became Archaeology of Chaco Canyon. I added a few more authors/themes I thought we'd missed, for a total of 12 chapters (most with multiple authors), and then began the herding-cats rigmarole attendant on most “edited volumes” – a task wisely avoided by Lynn as a condition of her leadership role at the “Capstone” meeting. With that many people involved, word got around about the Chaco Synthesis. We “reported out” on its progress: a session at a Southwest Symposium, and an article in Anthropology News. All this cost a bit of money: $216,000 in NPS funding, which I doubled with various matching funds, conference support, travel grants, etc. Even at $400K, the Chaco Synthesis was peanuts compared to the original Chaco Project's six million dollars, by my guess. Six million in 1980s dollars! Adjusted for inflation, our project was about 3% of the original project budget. More-or-less: I pretty much know what the Synthesis cost, but I’m far less sure about the Chaco Project bottom line. The Chaco Synthesis project came along at an awkward time for me (Chapter 3). In 1995 I'd escaped Crow Canyon (which was good) and I was out of work (which was bad). The original idea was that a slug of the NPS money would be my salary (which might have been very good), pay for me to Write a Book. But I used that money for the broader, elaborate Chaco Synthesis, for two reasons: first, I didn’t want to Write a Book, my book, my sole view; second, I was no longer out of a job. In 1996 I was hired as Acting Curator of Archaeology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History; part-time gig, so I could do contracts (such as Chaco Synthesis and Natural Bridges [of which, more below]) on the side. But in 1997, CU took me on as an Assistant Professor and director of the University's Museum Studies Program, full-time and then some. Being a brand-new prof and running a (small) department kept me busy (a tale told in Chapter 10); adding on all the plotting and pleading required to get Chaco collaborators, plan meetings, budget stuff, and so forth was a bit … much. When the actual meetings kicked off, 1999-2000, I attended each and every one and (with great help from grad student Karin Burd, who got [part of] the salary that was originally intended for me) I fussed endlessly with logistics, personalities, and other disasters. And then the fun continued into the Capstone Conference, the SAR Seminar, and editing the book. I brought the Chaco Synthesis with me to CU. It was a bit of work -- along with Museum Studies, acting as Curator of Archaeology, and the standard academic chores (teaching classes, attending committee meetings, cheering on the football team). As Jack Torrance observed, All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. At the end of the Chaco Synthesis, I was so dull that I couldn’t cut mustard any more. And, at the same time, I was co-PI with Prof. Cameron at the Bluff Great House, to which we now turn. And starting up an ill-fated project at Natural Bridges, to which we turn after Bluff. Chaco fieldwork: Bluff, Natural Bridges(?), Aztec North, Chimney Rock The Bluff Great House first came to my attention during a Crow Canyon “research retreat” at the Recapture Lodge in Bluff, UT, the first week of January 1989 -- a few years after the outlier hunts (above) and a few years before I was recruited to run the place (Chapters 3 and 11). I was invited to join with Crow Canyon’s archaeology staff as Designated Provocateur. Several dots on our outlier maps fell in southwestern Colorado (Lowry, Escalante, Wallace) but Chaco had yet to impact Crow Canyon's thinking. I was trying to convince a rather skeptical audience that there were almost certainly many more outlier Great Houses in the area. They kept throwing laundry lists at me: core-and-veneer walls, "blocked-in" kivas, and so forth. I countered that laundry lists were the wrong way to think about all this: "big bumps, little bumps, and great holes-in-the-ground" was the way to go. Blank stares; frustration. During a long lunch break, I decided to walk through the New Year's snow and burn off some heat. There was a site marked "Kiva Ruin" on the paper placemat of the local diner; it was supposedly right up behind Bluff, next to the old Pioneer Cemetery. Less than half of a mile from the Recapture? The cemetery rated a paved access road, so I trudged up that. And I saw the Bluff Great House rising out of the snow like Moby Dick: a big white bump next to a great white hole-in-the-ground (the kiva of "Kiva Ruin"). Racing back to the Recapture, I dragged the Crow Canyon boys and girls up to the site and said, See? That's what I'm talking about. Being good at their jobs, they saw what I was talking about; and our discussions moved on to aggregation in PIII – which led to the Pueblo III Conference (discussed below). I put the Bluff Great House out of my mind. I mean: seen one Big Bump, seen ‘em all. Bluff’s Great House returned years later in the person of Skip Lange, an Indianapolis businessman who summered in Bluff and Cortez. Some years after sighting Moby the Great White House, I was working at Crow Canyon (Chapters 3 and 11). Skip made an appointment to see me at my offices in Denver in 1994 (I think). He explained: an ambitious Mormon family from Blanding had proposed a new hotel on the terrace just above town, currently occupied by the Bluff Great House and the Pioneer Cemetery. They would, of course, avoid the LDS cemetery and the wrath of their church; but residents feared that the Great House might be reduced from a Big Bump to a parking lot. In any event, the Bluffoons (as they called themselves) did not want a big hotel marring their skyline, and they seized on the Great House as a way to stop it. Using mostly Skip's money, they bought the Great House as the Anasazi Heritage Foundation, with the notion that someone could excavate it and turn it into a historical roadside attraction. Skip wanted Crow Canyon to do the job. I was intrigued. But I could read a map. The Bluff Great House might be a short walk from the Recapture Lodge, but it was an hour-and-a-half drive from Crow Canyon. That was way beyond a reasonable radius for Crow Canyon projects, which ferried civilians from Crow Canyon out and back to local digs—half hour, max. I told Skip I'd think about it and get back to him, but I knew it was impossible. I was friendly with Ben Nelson and I knew Ben wanted to dig a Chaco outlier. I put two and two together, and then Ben and Skip together. They got along well, and I thought they'd sealed the deal. But then Ben got a job at ASU as a Mesoamerican archaeologist and had to turn his head south. Bluff was not going to happen. I left Crow Canyon in 1995 and, after several months cooling my heals (licking wounds, de-toxifying, recovering; Chapter 3), I followed my wife Cathy Cameron to Boulder CO, where she landed a job as a professor in the Anthropology Department. The catch? They wanted her to run a field-school. She'd never done that, nor did she have a site readily at hand on which to do it. Bluff? I put Skip and Cathy together; and thus began the Bluff Great House project. This was Cathy's project, from 1995 to 2004 (with a three-year hiatus, 1999-2001), which she reports at length in Chaco and After in the Northern San Juan (2009). I was involved (co-PI) in the first half of the project, from 1995 to 1998. In September 1995, we spent one week on the site. My recollection is that the entire population of Bluff turned out to help, armed with garden hoes, railroad picks, short-handled spades, post-hole diggers. No damage was done: all we did was set the site up for a photogrammetric map (courtesy of Crow Canyon, I think); we met with the local CRM archaeologists from Abajo Archaeology; we dug two small test units; and we scoped out living quarters, dining possibilities, etc. My memory of the 1995 Bluff Volunteers is probably not 100% accurate, but much of that very small, very quirky town supported Cathy's work. Bluff was founded by Mormons sent out from Salt Lake City to colonize the San Juan River valley – the Hole-in-the-Rock pioneers, named for a crazy crevice into Glenn Canyon, down which they roped their wagons. The Hole-in-the-Rockers made it to Bluff, which proved they were tough, but they couldn't stick; the San Juan River flooded them out. (Not much could be done with the San Juan prior to Navajo Dam, many decades later.) So the pioneers petitioned their church for permission to move north to Blanding. Bluff remained an important place: the Pioneer Cemetery next to the Bluff Great House, and a big LDS church (congregants mostly from Blanding), and a half-dozen old Mormon Victorians in various states of disrepair or renovation. Long after the Mormons left, Bluff attracted an interesting hodge-podge of retired geologists, writers, would-be artists, and a large contingent of young river kids: Bluff was headquarters for Wild Rivers, a legendary rafting outfit. I knew Wild Rivers from my Crow Canyon days; my Crow Canyon duties involved many, many day-trips with potential donners down the San Juan from Bluff to Mexican Hat, always in Wild Rivers boats. I got to know that run pretty well. We hired several archaeologists from Abajo Archaeology, Bill Davis's CRM firm in Bluff, as field foreman and crew chiefs, alongside CU grad-student crew chiefs. This was not only good politics, but good archaeology and good education: the CRM guys knew the local dirt, and they told the students about CRM careers. (I did the same at Pinnacle Ruin, Chapter 2.) Mark Bond (Foreman), Jonathan Till, and Winston Hurst worked on the Great House, while I was there; several others, thereafter. (Till later earned an MA at the University of Colorado with Cathy and a Museum Studies certificate with me, after which he designed signage for the Anasazi Heritage Foundation at the site; and he is today the Curator of Collections at Edge of the Cedars ruin in Blanding.) Cathy had to weave her way through the small-town politics and the agendas of the Anasazi Heritage Foundation, who wanted the entire Great House opened up for the public, versus the archaeology/heritage contingent, which emphasized less-is-more, do-no-harm. We were solidly with the latter, but the site was owned by the former. She did her often-difficult job very well, and she may or may not tell that tale; it is certainly hers, not mine, to tell. See her book Chaco and After in the Northern San Juan (2009). I recount here a few things that happened on my watch. I was co-PI/PD during the summer field schools in 1996, 1997, and 1998. Actually, in 1997 I was the sole PD: CU gave Cathy a summer salary to polish up her dissertation and other publications for tenure, and she wisely spent most of the summer doing that. In the first field seasons, we were trying to get an accurate map of the place, get some sense of the Great House (how many stories, how many kivas, and so forth), ditto for the Great Kiva 100' off to the southwest of the Great House. We wanted to stick a few units in the berms and middens (were they berms? were they middens?) which ringed the Great House, and separated Great House and Great Kiva. We started, in 1996, much the way I'd gone into the central roomblock at Pueblo Alto: a small, pot-hunted room ("Room Feature 2") at the highest point of the rubble mound. We trenched down along the north wall over 2 meters (7 feet) to the base of the wall, and a bit beyond. We didn't find the south wall – we excavated to where it should have been, but it wasn't. The room was two stories tall: we saw beam sockets with a foot or more of wall stub above them. (In later seasons, Phil Geib would discover that the Great Houses rear wall was at least three and possibly four stories tall: on the relatively modest Great Houses footprint, that much vertical must have looked like a tower.) We put a dozen small shallow trenches across projected wall lines, and happily found those walls – fleshing out the map. At the end of the 1996 season (and every season thereafter), we backfilled our excavations with clean sand, procured from a gravel company. After some discussion, the local lads convinced us to backfill Room Feature 2 – which we intended to revisit – with straw bales: line the pit with black plastic tarps, jam it full of straw bales, cap it off with a black plastic tarp and a few inches of sand. A dozen straw-bales would be much easier to remove than a room-full of loose sand … right? We revisited Room Feature 2 two years later, in 1998. I couldn't ask students to do it, so I was the guy who mucked out the soggy, stinky remnants of those straw bales: the tarp-lined pit held water, the water soaked the straw, and the resulting rotten silage looked bad and smelled worse. It only took a day, but what a day! I've forgotten much about Bluff, but not jack-knifing myself into that black hole under the beating sun, raking out its reeking compost. (It smelled really bad.) After cleaning out Room Feature 2, I was trimming up the trench walls when the south wall collapsed on me. I thought I was dead – getting in and out of that pit wasn't easy – but it wasn't a total cave-in: a thin veneer of fill slid off from the elusive south wall, the one we couldn’t find in 1996. When the rubble-fill shaved off into the pit, out from the avalanche popped a fine plastered wall and one side of a dandy door. Dramatic accidents exposing missing walls was an experience I enjoyed (?) years earlier at Saige-McFarland and would again at Pinnacle Ruin, years later (both events in Chapter 2). Somehow I/we repeatedly stopped inches short of actual walls, and found ‘em later in the clean-up. Sort of embarrassing. In the Great Kiva, we dropped trenches where the east and west arcs of the wall should have been, and found them. The west wall was nicer than the east, so we followed it down 2 meters (6.6 feet) to a clay surface which I thought was the top of the bench. We quit there, and – before we get to berms – and I'll tell you why. The Bluff Great House was on private land, owned by the Anasazi Heritage Foundation. The Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 was still new and a little scary. Members of the AHF were dubious about NAGPRA – even the most enlightened citizens of southeastern Utah citizens were wary of anything originating with the Federal Government. (Something in the water?) But we – our academic contingent from the Peoples Republic of Boulder – thought the Bluff Great House project should, somehow, engage Indians. In 1995 the NAGPRA structures and customs and etiquettes were not yet worked out. I had some notions of how to approach Indians from my experiences at MIAC and Crow Canyon (below; and Chapter 9 and 11), so the first move was mine: in 1995, I visited Hopi, Zuni and Acoma, informing their cultural preservation people about Bluff. They were perplexed: why was I there? (A tale told in Chapter 9, but relevant here.) Bluff was not Federal land. We weren't asking permission, I was simply informing and asking for comment. After they understood the (rather diffuse) nature of my mission, the Pueblos treated me courteously. Acoma said that they'd prefer we didn't dig in kivas. I replied that digging was non-negotiable (or words to that effect) but could we somehow mitigate the problem? The "compromise" I offered, which satisfied no one, was this: we would expose kiva walls to observe and record the masonry and obtain dates from roof beams, but we would not excavate kiva floors. The Pueblos sniffed; the archaeologists scoffed. Still, we followed that policy for the first three seasons – not digging to the floor of the Great Kiva, for example – but when I was absent at Cañada Alamosa in 2003-2004, my strictures were voted down. And, in retrospect, quite reasonably. The Indians didn't want us digging kivas at all. The archaeologists needed to see the floors. My bogus "compromise" was just a sop to make us (me?) feel better. Cameron arranged visits from tribal and Pueblo delegations every year, a different tribe each year: Acoma, Zuni, Hopi, Zia, Navajo, Ute. The Hopi arrived in 1997 (I think), with four elders and a young staffer, Clay Hamilton, who I knew slightly. (Again, I will re-tell this story in Chapter 9; it belongs in both places.) They visited the site and charmed the students, with the older gentlemen working the room, so to speak, thanking the kids for their interest in Hopi history and answering questions. Clay stood apart, frowning, arms across his chest. They wanted to see petroglyphs so I took them to Sand Island, a nearby easy-access rock-art site. The older guys were quite enthusiastic about the petroglyphs, with many conversations in Hopi about this figure and that figure. When we gathered under a cottonwood to eat lunch, they were smiling and (apparently) happy. Clay wasn't smiling. About two bites into my sandwich, Clay opened up on me and reamed me up one side and down the other about archaeology's many evils. The older guys nodded and smiled silently, enjoying their lunch and the show. I had been through the good-cop-bad-cop wringer before, and I'd learned to listen. After Clay finished, I asked him why he hadn't done that on the site; I said the students would have learned a valuable lesson. He thought about that. That afternoon, I drove them a few miles up the creek to visit an ASU project at Cottonwood Falls Great House, about 20 miles north of Bluff. Nancy Mahoney, a young PhD graduate student, was running that project; she had asked the Hopi to stop by if they had time. When we arrived, she had her crew lined up in their Sunday best, ready in the parking area. She stepped forward to greet the Hopis and the first one out of the van was Clay Hamilton, who proceeded to ream her up one side and down the other about archaeology's many evils. It was awful: I'd set her up. Later I explained things to her – not her fault, etc – but it must have been a searing experience, first time out with angry Indians, in front of her students. Very smart person; she later bailed out of archaeology to make an honest living. Back to Bluff’s berms: John Stein had brought berms to everyone's attention in our "Chaco Ritual Landscapes" paper (above). There were spectacular berms and roads and earthen architecture at southeastern Utah Great Houses, for example at Cottonwood Springs, 20 miles north of Bluff. And the Bluff Great House had 'em: even in the January snow of 1989, I could see low berms encircling the Great House, with a couple of noticeable gaps, one to the southeast and one to the north. Winston Hurst, the dean of southeastern Utah archaeology and Bluff Great House collaborator, pointed out a Chaco road running southeast away from the site. It was a massive cut in the face of terrace which I had seen – it was so obvious that I assumed was modern; but no, Winston found pioneer accounts of that road. It was ancient or, at least, pre-pioneer. Winston's road lined up with the southeastern gap in the berm, which in modern times, had been used for vehicle access to a flat dirt parking area, on the terrace's edge. We put a unit in the berm just next to that gap, and several others, with mixed results: some seemed to be middens (trashy fill) while others seemed to be earthen structure, cut-and-filled with natural sediments. We knew from Chaco that mounds and berms could combine honest midden with clean fill and construction debris. Another apparent road cut through the berm/earthworks heading north or northwest. Winston Hurst, Jonathan Till, and others later chased Chaco roads up and down the canyons above Bluff. They found a really impressive road cutting straight across the mesa top northwest of the Great House – probably a continuation of the road segment in the northern berm. I was particularly interested in Winston's southeastern road, so very evident on the terrace face. It pointed across the river to a peculiar site the locals called "Dance Plaza'" which sure looked like a road-side feature to me (and to Winston and Jonathan, too). A line from Winston's road at the Great House through the Dance Plaza points, more-or-less, 35 miles to the Great House at Teec Nos Pos AZ. Extending that line another 100 miles reaches Chaco Canyon. People had noticed this alignment, but to my knowledge no one has looked seriously. (I spent a day trashing around on Navajo lands south of the San Juan, looking at high points etc more or less on that line, with no results.) All the territory south of the San Juan is Navajo Nation, so it's a little more complicated to do "casual" surveys. Lidar might help. One survey we did, on both sides of the river, was delightfully casual. At the end of the 1998 season, I asked for and received BLM funding for a boat survey of the San Juan, floating from Aneth to Bluff – about 30 river miles – hopping off at likely spots. "Boat survey" had worked pretty well at Elephant Butte Reservoir near T-or-C NM (Chapter 2); and the San Juan promised to be fun. The Wild Rivers people joined in with real enthusiasm: the river guides knew sites unknown to archaeology. Two boat-loads of us spent several days drifting down the San Juan in the late summer sun, mapping ruins by day and camping by night. Nice work if you can get it. One of my main jobs at the field school was to teach archaeological surveying: finding sites, locating them on a map, mapping features, etc. (Real field survey, not some floating river boondoggle.) I'd take four or five students at a time and show them how to line up and walk transects, flagging artifacts (and more than a few innocent rocks). We surveyed the flat terrace top on which sat the Great House, and found earlier Pueblo I materials between the Great House and the sandstone bluffs (there was also a sizable Pueblo I site at the foot of the terrace one-half mile east of the Great House). Finishing there, I took a crew to a small unit pueblo I knew about at the mouth of Cottonwood Wash, about a half-mile west of the Great House. Reportedly, Alfred Vincent Kidder had excavated that unit pueblo; I gravely told the kids about Kidder, and they looked confused. Who was Kidder? Pete Jalbert took on an actual survey of the area around the Great House (and under the town of Bluff) for a masters project at the University of Colorado, so my "survey" shifted from mapping new sites to creating a controlled exercise. I settled on another very nice unit pueblo, which was an easy walk off the highway about a ten-minute drive east of Bluff – right above the Swinging Bridge over the San Juan. The Swinging Bridge was a rickety 250'-long pedestrian cable bridge across the river. Navajo kids on the south side walked across the bridge to catch the school bus. It did, indeed, swing. No one maintained the bridge; slats cracked and fell down into the river, and sometimes people did too. The unit pueblo above the bridge was pretty easy to see, and easy to map. I'd take a crew out and we'd walk transects until they "discovered" the site. I'd show them how to map it: marking walls and corners and features with pinflags; using compass-and-pace mapping; using triangulation off a baseline; and other tricks of the trade (now rendered obsolete by new technology). Then I'd sit down on a rock and let 'em loose – available to assist, if requested; but seldom requested. When they were done, I'd review their efforts and point out the problems. Over the several years, we must have mapped that one site twenty times. I kept the maps, and compared them. Most maps shared Rorschach-level similarities and, compiled together, offered a sort of Impressionist plan of the site; but a few were real doozies. The Swinging Bridge played into one final drama, at least during my tenure. 1998 was my last year at Bluff. On May 29 we were gathering supplies and materials and trucks in Boulder when news came in about a shooting in Cortez, CO. Three crazy anti-government militiamen had stolen a truck and shot three cops who gave chase. They killed one policeman (Dale Claxton of Cortez) and wounded two others before disappearing into the canyons southwest of the town. You don't kill cops in the Old West. In came State Police, Colorado SWAT teams, Navajo police and area sheriffs. They tracked the desperados deep into the maze of canyons west of Cortez – without success. In Boulder, we watched the news and wondered. All this was happening at Cortez, 55 airline miles from Bluff. Alarming, but not really our problem! We packed up our convey, picked up the students, and headed south. The first few days at the site were always a little disorienting for Boulder kids: Bluff was on another planet, archaeology was pretty strange, bugs and snakes were everywhere. Things calmed down quickly, in large part thanks to their accommodations in a tidy "bunk house" built by Vaughn Haddenfeld (intended for clients of his wilderness guide business), and in large part thanks to the excellent "camp cooking" of Mr. Haddenfeld himself. (Vaughn and his wife Marcia were great people, two of the best of the many great Bluffoons.) The kids settled in, we got into a routine, and by week's end things were running if not like clockwork, then at least like a functioning mechanical toy. Until one morning… About 11:00 AM on June 4, a big black helicopter boomed out of Cottonwood Canyon at tree-top level, and started circling upstream from Bluff. Weird. Then Vaugh, usually unflappable, careened up to the site in his truck and jumped out. He was packing a pistol. "The Cortez guys are here, there's a gun fight at the Swinging Bridge. They're in town and we've all been ordered to leave, evacuate!" An hour earlier, a government worker in a government car – with a government logo on its door – pulled off at the Swinging Bridge to park and eat an early lunch. Somebody across the river took a shot at her, and she beat it back to Bluff. A State Trooper happened to be in town. When he reached the Swinging Bridge, more bullets came from the south bank. The Trooper went down, badly wounded. (And the shooter shot himself – although no one knew that, right then.) The fracas began. Lots of cops blazed away across the river, into the bushes over in Navajoland. When Vaughn reached us, the skinny was that the Cortez desperados had surfaced, at last, by the Swinging Bridge. After the gun fight, the police found only one dead desperado. The other two, they thought, snuck into Bluff to hide. The local law enforcement wanted everyone out so they could search, house by house, and shed by shed, without civilians in their way – or in harm’s way. They ordered us to evacuate ASAP. We piled into our university carry-alls and rolled back into town (a few hundred feet). The kids were staying at Vaughn's “dorm”, and Cathy and I were staying nearby. The graduate students, however, were at the old Moqui Motel all the way across town (a couple of miles). They couldn't return to their rooms to gather up clothes. At Vaughn's bunk house, I told the students: one set of clean clothes, two changes of underwear, shower stuff, sleeping bag, and a jacket – and hurry up! We loaded in about a half hour, probably less. Taft Blackhorse, a "non-traditional" (i.e. older) field-school student was an unexpected asset. I didn't know him well, then, but clearly he'd been through sticky situations in the past, and he knew how to keep things moving. Taft was a huge help. Taft worked with John Stein on the Chaco Protection Sites Program – NPS funds administered by the Navajo Nation – and he and I crossed paths many times in the future; on the Chaco Synthesis Architecture conference, for example. Most of the kids brought a back-pack and their sleeping bag; a few kids hauled everything they'd brought (and they'd brought a lot). Never mind. Into the vehicles and off to Blanding, a half-hour to the north. Blanding was the closest town, the designated refuge. All Bluff was on the road, headed Blanding-ward. We checked the High School gym, opened for Bluff refugees. It was a madhouse. So we cruised around and found the last three motel rooms in town: one for us, one for the girls, and one for the boys – stacked like cordwood. Fast food for dinner. Turned on the TV: Bluff was on the national news! (You don’t kill cops.) The kids lined up for pay-phones – this was before cell phones – and reassured their horrified parents. The next day, Bluff remained locked down, closed to residents and to outsiders. We took the students to a few archaeological sites, and along the way I called Crow Canyon. I explained our situation, and asked for rooms and a meal. Our luck was in: the campus was empty and they'd be happy to accommodate. It was perfect: Crow Canyon was set up for crowds of young people, with dorm-style sleeping and a cafeteria with a great cook, Jim Martin, stolen from one of the best hotels in Durango. A long porch with a line of rockers looked out over a grassy meadow to Mesa Verde. A perfect place to decompress. After an evening of peace and quiet, we got word that Bluff residents could return. The next morning, we mounted up and headed back south. But we were in University of Colorado vehicles, with Colorado plates; and none of us had Utah driver's licenses. At a roadblock a few miles out of town, the police turned us away. We pointed out that we were one of the bigger payrolls in Bluff, and that our Bluff employees would vouch for us. A couple of radio calls back to Bluff did the trick, and they eventually let us pass. Back in Bluff, things were lively. Almost 500 law officers doubled the population. They came from all over: California SWAT teams, Colorado Springs police, Feds, cops from over 40 different agencies. They put them up at the Bluff public school and fed them in the school cafeteria. Our crew volunteered to unload trucks full of food. A nearby field became a helipad, and day and night big black helicopters flew in and out. That lasted about 18 hours, and then someone pulled the plug; in a half-day, they were gone. The desperados had vanished; housing and feeding 500 big beefy lawmen and flying non-stop helicopter sorties was costing somebody too much money. After a day or two, we re-established our routine, and took up where we left off. The rest of the season passed with only the usual excitements: archaeology issues, kids with bad gnat reactions, vehicle problems, and so forth. We pushed along to the last weekend, and some of the Bluffoons threw us a farewell barbeque. Chicken and burgers smoking on the grill. People looked east, out toward the Swinging Bridge: plumes of smoke! Was the bosque on fire? Yes, it was. Someone had reported the long-gone desperados down by the river. The local sheriff, with his much-diminished forces, looked into the riparian thickets and megaphoned an ultimatum: come out or we burn you out. No one came out, so they set fire to the woods. While we grilled hot-dogs, the sheriff grilled cop-killers. Or so he thought. Whoever had been in the bosque – if anyone – the two missing desperados were found, eventually, far to the north, not far from the original Cortez gun battle. Those two killed themselves as had the third, weeks later, at the Swinging Bridge. The Battle of Bluff was over. But not forgotten: each year the students designed a commemorative T shirt, which we printed up and shipped out after the season ended. That year's model showed a worried student peeking out from a test-trench, over the phrase "I survived Bluff, 1998." I survived Bluff, 1995-1998. Then we had three years off, and I got lured away to Cañada Alamosa (Chapter 2). When Cathy fired Bluff up again, in 2002, I didn't want to go back; I wanted to keep working at Cañada Alamosa. So we split the field school. Half went with me to the Mogollon Uplands, half went with Cathy to Canyon Country, and half-way through the field-school we met at Chaco Canyon and swapped students (Chapter 2). I've been back to Bluff many times, staying at the old Recapture Lodge and at the new Desert Rose Inn – the hotel originally planned atop the Bluff Great House, landed instead on the canyon bottom at the west end of town. And it's a very nice hotel! Natural Bridges(?) Fall 1995 I got an offer from the NPS at Natural Bridges National Monument, about 35 miles northwest of Bluff. Is Natural Bridges really “Chaco”? Well, sort of: the furthest northwest Great House I know of is “Owen’s site” (named for Owen Severance, who we will meet, below). It’s on the divide between Natural Bridges on the north and the uppermost reaches of Grand Gulch on the south. Close enough. NPS heard that CU (Prof. Cameron) was starting a project at Bluff and they wanted me to do an inventory (100%) survey of their 7,600-acre monument, using CU students. (There must have been a pocket of NPS money available for student-related projects?) I replied that using students was not a good way to inventory cultural resources – which was true; consider the enigma variations of the unit pueblo at the Swinging Bridge, above – but they persisted/insisted. Their timing was good: my wife had just landed a job as a professor at CU. I could run the multi-year project through CU, with her as PI and me as PD. A big-bucks project would be a feather in her cap, and a penny in my pocket. So, what the heck, I'd look at it. I was also dealing with the Chaco Synthesis, above; but I figured I could juggle two sizable projects, booking hours to each, as side-gigs to my part-time job as Acting Curator at the CU Museum of Natural History (Chapter 11). NPS paid me to write the "Research Plan" for the survey. That initial step was about $19,000, of which a bit less than half wound up in my pocket, with most of the rest going to CU for overhead. I budgeted far too little for travel; we blew up that line of the budget and had to scramble to cover it. I made a half-dozen trips to Moab (six-hours each way in my old Dodge truck) to meet with NPS archaeologists and to visit Natural Bridges (another two hours beyond Moab). From late October through early December, it seemed like I was commuting to from Boulder to Moab. Way too much time on I-70. Moab – wanting more mountain-bikes – advertised on Boulder radio that it's "just a gas-tank away;" Moab's ad agency was more gas-efficient than my Dodge: three tanks round trip. And an additional trip to Salt Lake City, to consult with their Historic Preservation people and their site files. Natural Bridges is a network of sandstone canyons cut deep into sage-brush plains. Owen Severance, a "character" in southeastern Utah archaeology, took me around to some of his favorite cliff-dwellings in Natural Bridges – somehow, he had carte blanche on NPS lands – and, on my own, I walked a dozen 4-km transects across the broad, flat uplands, from canyon edge to canyon edge. Just to get a feel for it. In the first few weeks of December, I wrote a long and detailed proposal for the survey – the “research plan,” 70 single-spaced pages. I budgeted for a heavy staff-to-student ratio, upping the payroll, and (with the help of some climber friends) figured how to use specialized teams for the canyon walls and cliff dwellings. It was a good proposal that fit within the money guidelines I'd been given. I fired it off on Dec 18 and…nothing. Not even a Christmas card. Time passed. Things seemed squirrelly; NPS wasn't returning my calls. Finally, they asked me over in January 1996 for a meeting at National Bridges, at which the NPS archaeologist casually announced: oh, and you understand you can't step on any cryptogamic soil, don't you? I was speechless – an unusual condition for me. Cryptogamic soils covered much of Natural Bridges National Monument. Cryptogamic soil is a black crusty desert surface formed by microbes. It takes a long time to heal after someone steps on it, and there was a lot of talk at that time about its conservation. But a third – maybe half – of the flats at Natural Bridges was cryptogamic soil. How were we supposed to survey if we couldn't walk on black crusty stuff? Jet-packs? (Today I'd say drones and robots, but this was pre-drones.) When I recovered my voice, I replied that I'd consider that and headed back to Boulder. I could see that all was not well with NPS. Several weeks later, they jilted me or, more likely, they jilted CU: NPS decided to not sole-source the job to CU with student-project money, but instead to put it out for bids. My guess is that local CRM firms got wind of the CU deal and cried foul. I backed out – CU no longer did CRM work – but I followed further developments with great interest. Several CRM firms asked for my research design, and I was happy to share it: it had taken a lot of work, paid for with tax money, and it might as well be useful for someone. I decided it was Public Domain. Those firms each spent a lot of up-front money writing their own proposals – cannibalizing mine, I hope – which they duly submitted to NPS. Only to learn, a month later, that NPS changed course yet again. NPS would do the survey themselves, in-house. The CRM firms were, understandably, steamed. Hooker Dam all over again (Chapter 2): a Federal bait-and-switch. But I wasn’t really anxious to survey Natural Bridges. As the poet said, Seen one ruin, seen 'em all. I'm sure all Four Corners canyons have their charms, but after fifty or a hundred, they reach a certain…redundancy. And things were heating up at CU. I had the Chaco Synthesis already on the platter and the Bluff Great House on the horizon. So Natural Bridges vanishing up the flue was actually a relief. But in the run-up, I did get to see some very interesting back-country sites. In particular, I got to look closely at the doors on many canyon-wall granaries. Back in the early '80s I'd figured out small Chaco doors with secondary jambs and secondary lintels: storage room doors. The doors on Utah granaries – mad-mud-dauber nests jammed into tiny cracks high, high up canyon walls – confirmed my identification of storage room doors, if confirmation was needed. Thanks to NPS and Owen Severance, I got to spend quality time with many granary doors at Natural Bridges, without rappelling or technical climbing or even finger-and-toe scrambling – the archaeological default for access to impossible places. Those doors had perfectly preserved secondary jambs and lintels and, often, closing planks or slabs lying alongside. There was no question about their function: nobody lived in those half-pint bee-hives, the size of a bread oven. They were storage caches, closets, pantries, granaries. The same doors on big rooms at Chaco indicated that they, too – big as those rooms were – almost certainly were storage rooms. So it was really fun to see Utah granaries, up close. Recognizing storage-room doors was key to understanding Chaco Canyon Great Houses. I figured that out back in the early ’80s. That’s why I asked UNM Press to use a collage of a half-dozen doors for the cover of Great Pueblo Architecture of Chaco Canyon. I’d seem more than a few of those granary doors before, in person or in pictures; but it was nice to confirm things at Natural Bridges. I am not aware of any Great Houses on Natural Bridges National Monument. But then, I didn’t survey it. “Owen’s Site” is a Great House just a few miles south of the park boundary. So…who knows? Aztec West & North I'm not particularly fond of Chaco Canyon, but I really like Aztec Ruins! It's where they should have built Chaco in the first place: lovely river, shady cottonwoods, easy 45-minute drive to Durango (which used to be an interesting town). Chaco Canyon…what were they thinking? I have ideas: see A Study of Southwest Archaeology. I dragged Aztec into my historical machinations, much to the annoyance of “Middle San Juan archaeologists” – their term, not mine. The first edition of Chaco Meridian, in 1999, elicited howls of protest and rage. One MSJ partisan (now deceased) insisted Aztec Ruins was a profoundly local site, with a small enclave of Chacoans over in one corner. Over the years, those cries faded and even the most turf-proud MSJ archaeologists seem to accept that Chaco moved north to Aztec. But still, somehow, they want Aztec to be "local" – whatever that means. Chaco's society spanned 300 miles north-south and 150 miles east-west. Where in that vastness does one locate "local"? All politics is local, according to Tip O'Neill (Speaker of a kinder, gentler House). Until it isn't. The politics of archaeology, now, remains discouragingly local; the politics of ancient Chaco and ancient Aztec, then, were decidedly regional. But these arguments failed to persuade Middle San Juan archaeologists. And it looks like they won: Aztec and Salmon are reduced, in some recent authoritative essays, to farming villages with “Chacoan influences.” My personal archaeological follies at Aztec comprised two mis-fires and one hang-fire: an vanishingly obscure architectural study of Aztec West, a remote-sensing boondoggle at Aztec North, and an attempt to get Earl Morris's notes and images online. As noted above, while I was researching Great Pueblo Architecture of Chaco Canyon in the late 1970s, I did a field and archive study of Aztec West. I crawled all over the ruin taking notes, sketching details, measuring this-and-that, and shooting photos. I consulted the stabilizations records – but not Earl Morris’s notes back at AMNH (NPS declined to send me to NYC). I didn't draw elevations of the walls, as we'd done at Chaco, but I thought I got a pretty good handle on the building and its dendrochronology. Aztec didn't fit, logically, in the GPACC book, so the manuscript of that study went to the files and, I presume, the Chaco Archives. In retrospect, I think Aztec would have been a good Appendix, or maybe a separate paper. (Like “The Architecture of Talus Unit”, which I published in a 1986 New Mexico Archaeological Society volume.) What I learned at Aztec, of course, informed by thinking about Chaco buildings; but I didn't get to share that with whoever might have wanted to know. So my field work at Aztec Ruins, while not for naught, was removed from public consumption. My work, in any case, has been superseded by more recent studies by Gary Brown, Paul Reed, and Tom Windes. Round 2 at Aztec came in 2004, at Aztec North. Some back-story: John Roney and John Stein discovered the large complex of sites atop the high terraces behind and 100' above Aztec Ruins. I say "discovered" because among archaeologists there was essentially no knowledge of this complex, only a quarter-mile from one of the region's most famous ruins, prior to their work. Earl Morris, who excavated Aztec Ruins, surely knew the sites were there; but he made no mention of the Aztec North complex in any of his published works. Morris's silence is, as John Stein and Peter McKenna wrote, "one of the great mysteries of Southwestern archaeology." Stein surveyed the upper terrace in January 1987 and again, with McKenna and Jim Bradford in April 1987. I joined them for a few days to help. And to see the sites; I'd heard about Aztec North but I wanted to see it myself: an adobe Great House, about the size of Tzin Kletsin! A rickety old power line ran over the site, with one pole planted right in the ruin, like a stake through its heart. The thing was adobe, hardly any visible stone masonry! Six years earlier, I'd grappled with Chaco and Casas Grandes – the latter, a magnificent adobe monument. And six years after that, I began to parse out the argument that became Chaco Meridian – taking Chaco's iconic sandstone masonry and transmogrifying it into the Casas Grandes' adobe. So Aztec North interested me strangely. I visited it repeatedly over the years. In August 2004, I used a small grant from the University of Colorado to do a geophysical study of Aztec North. Could we see walls in that massive glob of melted adobe? With students from the University of Colorado and the University of Denver, we proposed applying ground penetrating radar, electrical conductivity, and magnetometry. Maybe one or some combination of those magic tricks would show us walls; maybe they would show us a multi-cornered "butterfly" room, as at Casas Grandes! My hopes were high. I had enough money to pay for three days' room (a cheap motel in Aztec) and board (greasy spoon meals) and transportation for a gang of eight from CU, DU, BIA (Peter McKenna), plus three stalwarts from Navajo Nation (including John Stein) and several NPS resident archaeologists. McKenna and I got there first and spent a late afternoon into evening laying out a grid of 50 cm (1.5') wide lanes for students to drag their infernal devices: we needed their three sets of readings to correspond closely in space. (This, youngsters, was before geolocation.) Our lanes, crossing the ruin like swaths of a lawnmower, were marked by cheap bright orange twine (the color came off, like Cheetos). That garish twine was strung along lines of equally cheap bamboo tomato stakes, cut to about 2' length, to lift the line over innumerable low shrubs (mostly sage) dotting the ruin's surface. The lanes covered the western half of the site, catching a possible Great Kiva just to the west of the ruin and avoiding a powerline over the east half of the ruin. Peter and I did the work with an old brass engineer's transit and tapes; when the site was later mapped by Richard Friedman with modern equipment, I was chuffed beyond measure to see how well we'd done, stumbling over shrubs in the near-dark, turning angles with our antique instrument. But my real joy came early the next morning, when the entire crew gathered at the site. The dew-specked orange lines glowed in dawn's early light, floating in endless sub-parallels – each line a little differently off horizontal – a foot above the brushy ground. The thing looked like Fine Art of some modern outdoor genre, a landscape installation. It really was lovely, if a bit weird; but I failed to take any pictures because we were, as the cowboys say, burning daylight. The kids got to it, dragging or pushing their instruments back-and-forth along lanes of orange twine. The GPR guys complained that sage bounced their gadget off the ground, breaking contact with the surface. I explained that our permit specified no visible impact on the site. At which point the on-site NPS staff started stomping bushes into oblivion. In a moment, all were jumping up and down on the scrubby sage – not my favorite plant – but we failed to achieve the bare, flat surface GPR really needs. We labored late into the evening and started again early, the next day. The students worked hard: their instruments were awkward and heavy, and the August days were hot. The scene was bizarre: strange machines raising small dust clouds among surreal orange crop-marks. But, alas, all to no purpose. The several teams went back to their respective labs and massaged their data. We piled data-layer atop data-layer. But no patterns, no walls. All were disappointed, and we looked for something to blame. Sage brush? Yes, in part; but the real culprit, we decided, was the POWER LINE! Not only had it scrambled our personal auras, that antique wire had (they thought) disrupted our radar and negated our electrical impulses. My project, while great fun, was a failure. Years later, in 2016 Michelle Turner from SUNY Binghamton convinced NPS to let her put a few test pits into Aztec North (hurrah!). She found walls galore – some adobe, some at least part stone – but no "butterfly" rooms. Her 2019 dissertation is available online. (I had hoped, in keeping with the Meridian narrative, that Aztec North would be the last gasp of Aztec before the Great Leap Forward and Southward to adobe Casas Grandes. Alas, Aztec North was earlier than the big stone Great Houses, below. It was the Starter Home.) My third and final effort at Aztec involved Earl Morris, who excavated Aztec around the time of World War I, and who wrote five very useful volumes on the site. But his departure from the site was unhappy (his funder cut him off, abruptly) and consequently those reports were not as complete as they might have been. When Earl died in 1956, his ashes were scattered at Aztec. But he left behind more than a quart calcined bone-bits. He left notes and photos and maps. The photos, especially: I'm not sure what the going exchange rate is for words and pictures; in my youth it was a thousand to one, but there's been some volatility in that market, with graphic novels and all. In any event, Morris was an excellent and enthusiastic photographer, and the CU Museum has hundreds of his prints and negatives. And quite a few of his field notes. Other museums and archives also have a great deal of Morris's materials, most notably at AMNH, a sponsor of his Aztec work. I thought a systematic study of Morris's notes and photos might produce useful new information. A graduate student looking for a dissertation topic took it on, con brio, visiting archives at CU Museum of Natural History, American Museum of Natural History (New York), AZRU Aztec Ruins National Monument, Western Archaeological Conservation Center (Tucson), and Harper's Ferry National Park Service Conservation Center. Everything relevant was scanned, and a dissertation was completed in 2016. The dissertation demonstrated dramatically through several case-studies that much could be learned about Aztec Ruins from the old notes and (especially) the photos. But for now, there things sit: no more has appeared, nor have the scanned materials been shared with the online Chaco Research Archive, as I’d hoped. Perhaps those things will happen in the fullness of time, and my third Aztec interlude will emerge if not victorious, at least useful. That would be a success. Chimney Rock [Parts of this section were re-used April 2024 for a Foreword requested for Chaco Culture at Chimney Rock, by Susan Fischer & Howard Rowe.] I saw Chimney Rock for the first time in the early 1990s. Like everyone – I hope – who visits the site, I was smitten by its setting: 1,000' above the Piedra River, on a knife-edge ridge running out to towering twin pillars, Chimney Rock and Companion Rock. Amazing. The ruin was pretty neat, too: a fair-sized Great House, up in the pines, up in the mountains, up in the air. What's up with Chimney Rock? J.A. Jeancon (Colorado Historical Society) excavated about half of the Great House in the early 1920s. More properly, Jean Allard Jeançon – his family was French but, I’m told, the Americanized name was pronounced “Johnson.” (We drop the “ç” hereafter.) Trained as a musician, Jean Allard trapsed the primrose path to archaeology via a month at Santa Clara Pueblo. Despite a short stint at Manitou Cliff Dwellings, Jeancon/Johnson did good work, and was subsequently employed by BAE, Colorado State Museum, University of Denver, and other institutions. Chimney Rock, when Jeancon worked there, was really in the middle of nowhere, difficult to reach; not a good candidate for tourism. Jeancon did his job and trucked back to Denver, leaving the ruin to the elements. And that's how things sat for fifty years, a spot of no particular importance on the San Juan National Forest, notable more for its sandstone spires than its archaeology. US 160 now links Durango and Pagosa Springs and continues on, over Wolf Creek Pass into the San Luis Valley and points east. The highway runs just north of Chimney Rock: now easy on, easy off. When car tourism took off in the 1950s, a foresighted forester (unknown alas to me) decided to open the site for visitors. The Forest Service spent a lot of money getting Chimney Rock ready for prime time. They built a fine access road, twisting and winding but easy to drive; they put in a parking lot; and they built toilets. In the early 1970s, just to spice up the mix, they hired CU to do some archaeology, fifty years after Jeancon. Frank Eddy dug a room and a kiva (and assorted odds and ends) at the Great House while I was learning my craft on the Upper Gila, happily innocent of Chaco and its tribulations. Frank's crews also excavated several structures in the surrounding community and a Great Kiva, about 1/3 mile down from the Great House. More on those, below. Eddy's sites were stabilized by men hired temporarily from Chaco's stabilization crew, supervised by a Forest Service boss. Up at the Great House, a half-century of rain and snow had taken a toll; the place was a fixer-upper. The Chaco boys took care of things – one reason Chimney Rock Great House today looks so very, very, very Chacoan. More on that, also, below. Chimney Rock was all dressed up and ready to go. But then, in 1973, in flew some peregrine falcons. They nested on Companion Rock, and raised a family of vicious young raptors. The problem was, peregrine falcons had been listed as Endangered in 1970. So Chimney Rock shut down. After they banned DDT, the falcons bounced back. They weren't officially delisted until 1998, but the Forest Service decided in 1985 to finally re-open Chimney Rock. After a decade of peregrine-induced neglect, the Great House needed another round of repairs. The stabilization crew noticed that Room 8, excavated by Eddy in 1971, was causing trouble: the room had been left open for visitors to view its floor, 7 feet below. Unexcavated rooms around Room 8 were full to their scuppers with rubble and sediments, which soaked up precipitation like very heavy, very dirty sponges. That moisture, doing what comes naturally, wicked through the walls into Eddy's empty Room 8, causing no end of grief to its sandstone masonry. Late in 2008, Julie Coleman of the Forest Service called me from Durango and asked: did we want to dig at Chimney Rock? Well, sure, yes; what do you have in mind? "Fill reduction" in Rooms 5 and 7, next to Eddy's Room 8. The Forest Service wanted us to shovel out the top several feet of fill in those rooms to reduce the differences between full Rooms 5 and 7 and their empty neighbor, Room 8. I've dug through the fill of a number of Great House rooms and, while it's good exercise for the upper torso and lower back, it isn't wonderfully interesting, archaeologically: a jumble of rubble from collapsed walls. My counterproposal: we'd "reduce fill" … if we could continue down in one-quarter of each room to floor and bedrock. Accepted. Julie was amazing, getting funds from a half-dozen agencies. Our archaeology was only a part of the larger project to re-stabilize the Great House. Ruins stabilization is an on-going process, not a one-time permanent fix, and it had been almost two decades since the last round of wall-work. Most of the funding went, quite rightly, to stabilization. But we had more than enough resources to do the archaeology – aside from the NPS Chaco Project work (at least in its early days) and a few big Tennessee CRM contracts (Chapter 4), Chimney Rock was one of my few adequately-funded field projects. (Most of my other projects were shoe-string affairs, and I took pride in getting much bang for few bucks.) With Chimney Rock, in the end, we came in on time and under budget; and the nature of the contract allowed CU to keep the remainder, which I used for a few Chaco-related things. Coleman ran the funds not through the Forest Service, but through the Chimney Rock Interpretive Association. CRIA provided volunteer labor for care and maintenance of the site, manned the small visitors center, and guided the tours (required for the somewhat perilous hike out to the Great House). But they also served as a parallel non-profit which could administer grants. CRIA was based in Pagosa Springs. I was very impressed with the energy and enthusiasm of CRIA, and by their numbers: for a small town, CRIA was a big organization, a couple of hundred people. And, impressively, of all ages. At a time when local archaeological societies were graying up and dying out, with aging Boomers and even pre-Boomers, CRIA had plenty of middle-aged people and young families. Pagosa Springs seemed proud, even proprietary of Chimney Rock. CRIA ran the tours of the Great House. To jump ahead in the narrative: when the tours came by, one of the crew gave a quick review of the day’s finds and discoveries. The CRIA people worked hard to keep track of what we were doing. They were a great group to work with. We had, at the Forest Service's invitation, the site and the permits. We had, thanks to Julie Coleman, plenty of money. I asked about Indians – had FS done the requisite consultations? I got vague responses; but I was assured that all was well on that front. That was FS responsibility, and if they were happy, I was happy. I was working with a graduate student, Brenda Todd, from a ranching family in Paonia on Colorado's Western Slope. (Paonia was headquarters for Chaco Sandals: I once asked Chaco Sandals to fund the Chaco Synthesis; they declined, claiming no knowledge of Chaco Canyon.) Todd had worked with Jim Judge at Fort Lewis College, and Judge (my old boss from Chaco) recommended her to CU. She was looking for a dissertation project, and there was Chimney Rock! So I'd be the Principal Investigator and Brenda Todd was the Project Director. She lined up an all-star crew, all CU graduate students and all (but one) known quantities: Jason Chuipka (then with Woods Canyon Archaeological Consultants), Jason Sedig, Erin Baxter, and Alison Bredthauer, who were at various stages of CU's graduate program. An incoming graduate student came highly recommended, but personally unknown: Kellam Throgmorton. Kellam worked out very well indeed. But that was in the future. In the months running up to the project, the bureaucracy at the University of Colorado thought of reasons after reasons why we could not accept CRIA's money. I tamped them down, one after the other (with help from Linda Cordell, when needed). It finally came down to the fine print. CU's bean-counters listed a series of objections to the CRIA contract which, again, we worked through one by one. I thought things were nailed when a fellow at Contracts and Grants raised a new objection: CRIA's "indemnification" clause was a non-starter, the university could not possibly accept it, the contract would have to be rejected and re-negotiated. This was awkward; we got his carping memo less than a week before the project was supposed to start. We'd already signed leases, hired staff, rented vehicles, etc. A phone call to CRIA – who, at this point, were perplexed and annoyed – got an unsympathetic response: they reminded me that CU wasn't the only university in Colorado. Back on campus, I pleaded, I beseeched, I entreated. (And raged in the privacy of my office; I’d been down this road before, Chapter 4.) Like a tree down by the water, the jack-in-office would not be moved. Two days before I'd have to pull the plug and cancel the project, I called his boss. I don't remember the details of that conversation, but my exposition must have been persuasive because the next day CU inked the contract. Chimney Rock was on. I do not exaggerate: CU pushed us right to the limit, and I'm still pissed off, all these years later. The jerk at Contracts and Grants may have thought he was doing his job, but I hope he came down with a nasty occupational disease – whatever accountants pick up from spreadsheets. Death by a thousand papercuts? A nasty burn from LCD/LED/TFT radiation? Prior to the administrative brinksmanship, Todd had travelled down to Pagosa Springs to check out housing. The town had many vacation homes for rent and Todd found one she liked. I first saw the place when we moved in, and I liked it too: a big two-story log-cabin on a lake, with a broad porch and rocking chairs. I was testing the rockers and picturing peaceful evenings by the lake when Kellam Throgmorton – the New Kid – walked out on the porch and asked, is it OK if I practice my violin? My dream deflated: some would-be Vassar Clements sawing scales on a squeaky fiddle? Of course I said "OK, sure, fine", dreading the outcome; but when Kellam retired to his practice space (I never learned where; it was a big house), out came beautiful music. Thorgmorton was a first-rate Celtic fiddler. I'm told he had to decide between turning pro as a musician or training to be an archaeologist. So there I was, in the rocker, with a beer from the local brew pub, looking across a pretty lake, with lovely music. And remarkably few mosquitos. People got per diem, and everyone fed themselves. They took turns in the kitchen. I mostly walked to nearby restaurants – a good noveau américain restaurant and one of Pagosa's better brew pubs were twenty-minute-walk away; and there were plenty of other places a ten-minute-drive into town. Or I ate solitary salads at the cabin alfresco, sipping wine and reading Proust (well, maybe it was Wodehouse). Despite my lavish boulevardier lifestyle, I still came out ahead on per diem. Summertime and the livin' was easy. There was also, of course, archaeology to do. A 20-minute drive from the cabin to the Chimney Rock gate, then a 10-minute drive up the steep, winding dirt road to the top. Washboard hairpins woke everyone up, careening around curves with the van bouncing close and closer to the edge. A good jolt of adrenalin just when it was needed for the final hike up the hill. The trail to the Great House was about ¼ mile long and gained 200', mostly in the final few hundred feet. It was steep and narrow – knife-edge narrow, in spots, with shear, deep slopes on either side. I favored early starts. Leave the cabin a half-hour before sunrise and reach the site as the sun came up. Early starts avoided the heat of the afternoon and – more importantly – thunderstorms. The storms formed in late morning over the surrounding mountains, building and building through the early afternoon. Then, fully charged and looking for mischief, they swirled around Chimney Rock. Most storms hit after we'd left, but a few got us. When things got loud and crackly, an old fire tower next to site was sturdy, dry, and well-grounded. It had been hit repeatedly and shrugged it off. Old photos from Jeancon's excavations showed a truck up at the site; 1920s trucks were smaller, but still… I would not want to drive anything up the narrow ridge trail, even an ATV. We didn't use a truck. We carried what we needed. The first day we lugged equipment, endless rounds back and forth on that trail with picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, screens, toolboxes, and a ten-gallon Igloo. Most of us had been more-or-less idle prior to Chimney Rock, and most of us had been living at least two thousand feet lower than the Great House's 7,600' elevation. So that first day was interesting. (When the stabilization crew took over after our work, they used horses to haul equipment and supplies. Of course, they had heavier requirements: cement mixers, 50-gallon drums of water, etc. The first round of stabilization, many years earlier, brought in supplies by helicopter.) We stored our gear on-site in the basement of the old fire tower, but still every morning there were things to haul: the transit, cameras, lumber, house-jacks, whatever. At the start, we brought down the Igloo daily, and back up the next morning, refilled. A major pain. Then we realized (1) we weren't using ten gallons of water each day and (2) none of us minded three- or four- or five-day old water, as long as it didn't sport pond scum or floating rodents. We all carried water bottles anyway. Thereafter, the Igloo came down once a week. The fire tower was interesting. After the twin stone pillars, the tower was by far the most prominent feature on the site. It was a historic structure, CCC I think, with a handsome stone masonry first floor topped by a nifty wooden second story: 360° windows and a wrap-around balcony. The tower hadn't been used for fire-spotting for decades, but that wooden second story was in really good shape. It seemed almost new. It was new, I was told: the Forest Service had pulled down the original, aging second story, a dangerous eye-sore, without pushing the correct Historic Preservation buttons. Hands were slapped, and the San Juan National Forest was told to restore the tower to its former glory. We didn't spend much time in the new/old observation floor, but we used the stone first floor for storage and refuge from the elements. Years later, the Forest Service razed the whole tower right down to the ground. Or to its concrete slab foundation, actually. Which was a pity for two reasons. It was a cool old tower; and the remaining concrete slab still covered the original ground surface. A third reason: the big stone doorsill of the first floor had been my vertical datum. It looked like it was in place forever. But it wasn’t: they hauled away my datum, or chucked it over the side. Reportedly, the fire tower had been built directly atop a large, rectangular fire-pit, briefly described by Jeancon (who thought it was a crematorium). A local high-school kid figured out that it was for fire-signaling. Looking down the Piedra River Valley from the Great House, you could just barely see a corner of Huerfano Mesa; and from Huerfano Mesa it was a straight shot to Pueblo Alto at Chaco Canyon. There was no Great House at or community around Huerfano, just a few big fire boxes and shrines atop the mesa. So the signaling system really was a system: somebody had to man the repeater station at Huerfano for everything to work. And it factored into why the Chimney Rock Great House was where it was. It was the only spot on the ridge from which you could see Huerfano. That wasn't the only reason, of course. Two others, really big ones: it was the only wide spot at the end of the ridge, and it overlooked the two pillars of Chimney Rock and Companion Rock. A spectacular sight from the Great House's front porch, but why would that matter? Years before we worked at Chimney Rock, Kim Malville (a professor of astrophysics at CU and an archaeoastronomer) had predicted and confirmed in 1988 that, from the Great House, the full moon at its northern standstill rose between the two giant pillars. The standstill happens only every 18 years (plus change). Kim calculated that the next one would come in June 2006. In June 2006, I was down in the town of Ignacio, capital of the Southern Ute Reservation, getting yelled at by Utes. I can't remember their problem, probably NAGPRA; but I do remember being really bushed by day's end. By coincidence, my museum was running a Standstill Tour to Chimney Rock led by Malville; I thought I'd crash the party and then continue on to Pagosa Spring for the night. I was (and still am) skeptical of much archaeoastronomy (citizen-semi-science run amok), and at that time I doubted very much all that lunar stuff that was coming out of the Solstice Project and of course Chimney Rock. I was not alone: most of my go-to astronomers also questioned the pervasive appeal to lunar alignments, which are only a few degrees off solstice alignments. (You can establish the solstice yearly; lunar standstills required several generations. Might posited lunar alignments in fact be inaccurate solstice observations?) So I was battered, weary, and cynical when I joined Kim Malville's party that evening, at the ridge's end on the then-still-standing fire tower. The sun went down and we stood on the prow of an enormous sandstone boat with tropical pin-prick lights of cars passing, port and starboard, far below. Then the moon rose. Came up like thunder. Spectacular! To misquote Dean Martin, "When the moon hits your eye/ like a big pizza pie/ that's a standstill…" I believed. ("Who's Dean Martin?" OK, youngsters: he's no one you need to know – a pal of Frank Sinatra’s – and the song wasn't all that great, anyway. "But, who's Frank Sinatra?"…) One of the three reasons the Great House is where it is: seeing that big pizza pie every 18 years. More than a few people assumed that the Great House was a viewing platform, with terraced roof space for crowds to share in the event – much like modern Pueblo roofs allow people to watch plaza ceremonies and dances. Our work, mapping the ruin, suggested that indeed the Great House was terraced, but away from the pillars, the wrong way for viewing moonrise. The underlying ridge rises up toward the pillars, and so did the Great House. Chaco knew how to site sites, how to use terrain to enhance the greatness of Great Houses: coming up the ridge to the Great House, the rear (easternmost) rooms (only one or two stories tall) would look four stories tall, with each block of rooms terraced down from there to the west. A very impressive building, built on the cheap because it was built on the slope. But … the Great House blocked the view. Only the uppermost roofs – those closest to the pillars – would have worked as viewing platforms. I think that the Great House was built not to facilitate, but to restrict access to the site/sight. The standstill moonrise must, literally, have been known for many generations before Chaco flexed its muscles – remember, it was an 18+ year cycle. Chaco plunked down a Great House and claimed or confiscated a well-known standstill event. When did they do that, exactly? The smart money's on 1093. The roof of Frank Eddy's room (8) dated to 1093, and each of the two rooms we dug had many, many beams with 1093 cutting and near-cutting dates – the latest dates among the beams. Here's the punch-line: 1093 was a major lunar standstill. We found plenty of 1093 beams. But, unlike Eddy's room, also among our 1093 roof-fall we had four (and only four) earlier cutting dates: 1011, 1018, 1070, and 1076. All but 1070 represent major and minor lunar standstill years. That is, of the five years represented by cutting dates, four out of five years were lunar events. Coincidence? I think not. The earlier cutting dates were not "old wood", casually picked up from bracken or the woodpile. All of these specimens had been bark-peeled and smoothed/polished, creating a "patina" readily recognized by Tree-Ring Laboratory staff, characteristic of Great House construction. There's a fair chance, I think, that wood from earlier Chacoan structures was intentionally reused in 1093. That is, parts of preceding buildings were re-incorporated in the current construction. That happened a lot with Chaco building. Perhaps with every lunar standstill, they razed-and-rebuilt or expanded earlier buildings. If that's true, the Chaco presence at Chimney Rock might go back to about 1010, if not earlier. The walls we saw in our excavations weren't nearly as spiffy as the standing, stabilized and re-stabilized walls that made Chimney Rock "the ultimate outlier." Those stabilized walls really look like the best of Chaco Canyon. Perhaps that's because they were stabilized by the best of Chaco Canyon's Stabilization Crew, supervised by Forest Service staff. This is only my conjecture – sorry: my nasty innuendo – but I suspect Chimney Rock got a little Chaco-fied in the process. The walls we saw in our excavations (and Jeancon's photos) looked much more like Chaco Style II than the nicely-coursed masonry in today’s standing walls. Style II fits better with the early tree-ring dates, too. In addition to hourly CRIA tours, we had many archaeological visitors. The site is famous and spectacular and fun to visit on its high ridge. Among these many pilgrims was Marcia Truell, an old friend from the Chaco Project, who came up from Albuquerque for a few days. Marcia excavated some of the sites in the cluster down-ridge from the Great House, working for Frank Eddy in 1970, and had helped dig Room 8. Back in the day, I learned, she and Frank did not always get along. As luck would have it, Frank chose that same week to visit. Surprise! The crew was dreading (or joyfully anticipating) the dinner we'd have when Frank and Marcia came to town. Times were tense around our rustic homestead. Frank arrived; I picked him up at his motel. We sat on the front porch, rocking and knocking back adult beverages; and the evening passed peacefully. I'd go so far to say that a good time was had by all. At evening's end Frank needed a ride back to his motel; Marcia volunteered to take him. She said they had a nice chat. Time heals wounds… We were also joined by a video crew who were working on a National Geographic version of Jared Diamond's Collapse. Earlier that year, they contacted me about going to Chaco, and I told them about our up-coming Chimney Rock project. Why film a talking head in front of silent walls when you could catch kids digging? That got 'em excited. At the agreed-upon time, I met them out at Chaco and pontificated for a day out in the canyon. Then they followed me back to Pagosa Springs and spent the next two days filming the site. Before I'd left to meet them in Chaco Canyon, the rim of a whole pot appeared in the floor of one of our rooms; in, not on: the pot was set into the floor. The crew, of course, was eager to excavate ASAP, but I made them promise to hold off until the Nat Geo crew arrived. All went well: the pot came out of the ground, documented in detail on high-end video. They filmed me around the site shuffling, pointing randomly, muttering nonsense; they filmed others actually working. Undoubtedly some excellent footage: alas, all of it wound up on the cutting room floor – or its digital equivalent – when Collapse collapsed from three hours to one. Chaco disappeared and Hohokam took center stage – and I'm not sure that the City of Phoenix was all that thrilled to see themselves portrayed as history's lessons ignored. Mostly, of course, we worked. What a place to work! Starting out early, we sometimes drove up through valley fog to reach open air at the site: for an hour – sometimes more – we worked above the clouds. When the fog burned off, the view was amazing, surrounded by mountains. The archaeology was sometimes complicated, but just enough to be interesting, almost never irksome. We noticed a door in peril of collapse, and back in Pagosa, bought a couple of house jacks for a quick fix. Logistical problems were largely resolvable. No biting insects, nor poisonous reptiles. And then, the cabin by the lake and lovely fiddle music. It was a treat – really a privilege – to work at Chimney Rock. And, for the students, to get well paid for it. Chimney Rock was very nearly idyllic, and I do not exaggerate. At the end of the project, I asked the crew (all of whom had considerable experience in the field) where Chimney Rock rated among their past projects. It was unanimous: Number 1. The only somber note came on June 25, when the radio announced Michael Jackson's death. His passage to a higher Neverland flavored the last week of the project. We were not all MJ fans, but thereafter his music played on-site at high volume, muted only for CRIA tours. His reputation, at that time, was lurching toward dicey, but – as a non-fan, I admit – his music was pretty good. Attempts to moon-walk wheelbarrows failed. Erin Baxter produced a video set to an MJ tune, "Bad," that captured the daily ascent of Chimney Rock's trail; the excavation of the two rooms; the National Geographic episode; and back-filling. I wanted to compact our back-fill, but people were not enthusiastic about hauling a 150-pound rented rammer up that blasted trail. So seven pairs of sturdy work boots jumped up-and-down on each layer of fill; inevitably, to MJ tunes. The video was pretty funny – a bunny-hop/conga-line – but I worried about Indians watching a half-dozen young archaeologists and one old guy dancing on their graves (metaphorically; we encountered no human remains, nor did we expect to). I forbade posting the video, but of course my edict was ignored. It came to an end, as all good things must; and Todd did a fine job on her dissertation – available online from the University of Colorado library. If you want the details, read her report. The Forest Service dangled another project on Peterson Ridge, the dramatic escarpment on the opposite side of the Piedra River. There was another, smaller Great House on the ridge crest, due west of Chimney Rock; and I was tempted. But after Chimney Rock, Peterson Ridge would almost certainly be something … less. Maybe Number 2 or Number 3 but… Landscapes, Part 2: "Chaco Landscapes" John Stein's (and, to some extent, yrs trly's) 1992 notions of Chaco landscapes (above) took off. Not immediately: initially, everybody thought we were both bat-shit crazy. (A familiar experience.) The late arrival in the Southwest of British landscape theories – some better than others – made it possible and even fashionable for archaeological taste-makers to accept theoretically what was evident empirically: roads, berms, mounds, Great House communities, viewsheds, line-of-sight alignments, and so forth. Those had been recognized and systematized by uncredentialed NPS and CRM archaeologists; by the mid-'90s – blessed by the Brits – they began to surface in credentialed academic work. (I wrote an unfriendly review of the sillier British landscape books for Current Anthropology in 1996, urging readers to seek out American comparative scholars over experiential [aka “phenomenological”] British flights of fancy.) Much remains to be learned about Chaco landscapes. And roads: Chaco's regional "system" preserved directly on the ground. The roads mapped, directly, the vague "interactions" and "social networks" which archaeologists struggle to extrapolate from pottery types, NAA, obsidian, and other secondary evidence. Roads are primary solid physical evidence: if a road leaves Chaco and arrives at some distant outlier, we can be fairly confident that the two "interacted" in a "social network." There are not many regional archaeologies around the globe as clear as Chaco's: roads are potentially Chaco's greatest contribution to Bigger Questions. "Potentially" because we don't know where all the roads are; we don't have a road map. Roads continued to be studied at and around Great Houses, but more modestly than the wide-ranging BLM's road projects of the 1980s. Because there is a long history of road studies, many archaeologists (and agency 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 the nature of archaeological sites to hide – often, to disappear. Roads typically are hard to see. Coy. Neil Judd, in the 1920s, heard Navajos complaining that Chaco's roads had been far more visible in earlier times. Living people remember when roads were much easier to see than they are today. Time waits for no one, as the poet said; but I can't help but think that the pace of disappearance picked up in the 20th century, for reasons unknown. Recently, hi-res Lidar has become available online; and roads are jumping off the screen! There are a LOT more roads/possible-roads out there than we ever imagined. My take-away from these new developments is that road-minimizers reacting, in the 1990s, to possible excesses of early “spaghetti maps” were wrong: the road networks were far more expansive than we thought. That’s a problem. Chaco's region – defined in large part by roads – is threatened again with extensive energy development; but today we are not as wise and proactive as BLM in the 1980s. No one is spending money to find roads ahead of development. Roads – and Chaco's landscape -- will have to take their chances. Concern for Chaco landscapes and Chaco's region prompted Thomas Lincoln (then of the National Park Service) to approach me about Chaco landscapes, sometime in 2005. (I knew Tom from BOR projects in Arizona; Chapter 6.) As the head archaeologist of the NPS's Intermontane Region (Assistant Director for Cultural Resources), Tom's remit 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 yet another project: Chaco landscapes were certainly interesting, but at that time not a front-burner issue for me. Several other wheels squeaked, loudly. 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 – not unlike the pro-active BLM roads projects of the 1980s. But for the nonce, the Chaco landscape project was sidelined. Time passed. In 2013, Tom contacted me again about Chaco landscapes, and shortly thereafter the University of Colorado agreed to organize and administer a "planning meeting for a seminar to identify, define, and characterize the Chaco Landscape and World Heritage values." This was a relatively small grant, to plan a larger, longer effort; which the NPS generously funded in 2014. Even in the bubble of the Peoples' Republic of Boulder, I was aware of the impending leases of federal, state, and tribal allotted lands around Chaco for fracking and drilling. Other organizations were already marshalling data and arguments against this development – of which, more below. The Park itself was safe, but drilling was creeping closer, threatening to turn stretches of the 20-mile dirt-road from high desert to industrial park. And the rest of the San Juan Basin – Chaco's regional landscape – had no effective protection at all: BLM was leasing drilling rights as fast as it could, in the then-current administration's quest not merely for energy independence, but "energy dominance" – whatever that means (it means: good quarterlies for energy companies). I agreed with Tom 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 (Chapter 10). Retirement means different things to different people, but one common factor for most is: you are old and, in my case, tired. Younger, 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 Chacoan 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. I played dual roles as Daddy Warbucks signing checks, and a shadowy éminence grise floating in-and-out of meetings. The specter at the table? Boulder administered the project, but intellectual and operational leadership came from Binghamton and Lincoln. And, of course, NPS. Early planning involved many online meetings with me, Ruth, Carrie, and Tom. Pre-Zoom; Skype, I think. Like the earlier Chaco Synthesis, the “landscapes” project advanced through a series of stages. First, a planning/listening meeting at San Juan College in Farmington, New Mexico in August 2014. This meeting brought together several dozen Federal agency archaeologists and managers, local CRM 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 management themes and options for Chaco landscapes. There was much posturing and some small drama: the Navajo Tribal Historic Preservation Office took the occasion to announce that, henceforth, no one who used the term "Ancestral Pueblo" would be issued archaeological permits for Navajo lands; their required term was "Anasazi." Bit of an eye-opener, but not sharply relevant to the issue at hand. No Pueblo officials were present; a couple of Pueblo archaeologists remained commendably silent. (For my history with "Ancestral Pueblo" – I was present at the creation! – see Chapter 9.) The second step was a meeting at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, Nebraska in July 2015, to reconcile several independent GIS data sets of Chaco "outliers" and features, with the final product supported on the online Chaco Research Archive (http://www.chacoarchive.org/cra/). Carrie had "inherited" John Kantner's outlier GIS (a product of the old Chaco Synthesis, above). Barbara Mills had extended her Southwest Social Networks back in time and out in space to include Chaco and its region; Matt Peeples, a major player in that program, attended via Skype (or some other teleconference app) due to family matters. I understand a good time was had by all, and much that was murky was made light: the databases were reconciled. I wouldn't know about the good times; I wasn't there. I just signed the checks. In April and August 2015 and again in April 2016, we presented progress reports to the Chaco’s Native American Advisory Board, and we learned that there were turf issues, foretold at Farmington: the cultural resources were of great interest to the various Pueblos, but Navajo families and clans also had deep ties. Indeed, much of the lands involved were Navajo allotments, not quite reservation and not quite private. Energy companies – we heard, in rumors – had already obtained permission to develop on many allotments, directly from individual allottees. It would be hard to deny that income to Navajo families, who were very far from wealthy. But there was resistance from some Navajo residents, who were concerned about the effects of fracking on water and health. We learned about Federal arrangements: the Bureau of Indian Affairs was the agency most directly implicated, but BIA delegated authority for sub-surface management (that is, oil and gas) to the Bureau of Land Management, which had more experience with that sort of thing. And, alongside BIA and BLM, the Navajo Nation insisted on a role in developments, even on or perhaps especially on allotment lands. Some of the land was 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 we gathered in Farmington NM, Lincoln NE, and Chaco 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, the British landscape maven, who toured Chaco with Van Dyke in September 2015. (I briefly joined that tour in Durango, base-camp for an attempt on Chimney Rock; but, despite truly valiant efforts, acrophobia denied us the summit.) The 90-page 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 my section offered management considerations for Section 106 and National Register of Historic Places management. That was my main substantive contribution: Cultural Resource Management. One of the main complaints from agency archaeologists, heard at Farmington and later in Cortez (below), was this: how to manage a "landscape?" The agencies were comfortable with "sites" – things you could draw a tight circle around. But "landscape" was too diffuse. Or so they said. My argument, in reply, was this: there is a National Register category for "historic landscapes," which seems to be restricted to Euroamerican properties – farms, plantations, city parks, battlefields; places with real history, you know? I insisted that there was, indeed, A History of the Ancient Southwest; and I argued that "historic landscapes" provided a management tool for Chaco landscapes. To my knowledge, no agency heeded my advice, and the rap on Chaco Landscapes remains: we can't manage 'em. With NPS permission, we sent and emailed the "White Paper" to agencies, Tribes, and several environmental organizations concerned with energy development and Chaco landscapes. And there things sat, for a several months. We had originally budgeted for a demonstration Lidar project. Lidar works well for roads, landscape features peculiarly suited for remote sensing. Tom Sever, then of NASA, figured out in the early 1980s how to find roads by massaging multi-spectral, low altitude imagery. Roads are almost impossible to see on conventional engineering-grade aerial photographs; Tom twisted his dials and made 'em jump out, in bright colors, on his multi-spectral images. But flying over the whole San Juan Basin was prohibitively expensive; that early project was shelved. Decades later, I tried to re-engage NASA. I went to Huntsville to pitch the project (I was already in Alabama on other business): NASA gave it to student interns who used low-resolution satellite data, with no useful results. I wrote a series of emails to Sarah Parcak, the Space Archaeologist; struck out again. By the time of our Chaco Landscape Project, Lidar had emerged as the technique of choice for road studies, especially through the work of Richard Friedman and the Solstice Project. So we set aside a chunk of money for Rich to work with Ruth and Carrie on a small Lidar road project. Of course, ours were not the only efforts to protect Chaco's region, nor perhaps the most important. Archaeology Southwest (non-profit in Tucson) did a lot of work on the ground and inside the Beltway, and the Solstice Project lobbied state and federal officials with the aid of John Roney, retired BLM archaeologist and a well-known road scholar, and Archaeology Southwest’s Paul Reed (of whom, more below). Everyone wanted Lidar. In the end, BLM freed up a large sum of money (I never learned how much) to run Lidar over a 10-mile band around Chaco Canyon, and some areas along the Middle San Juan which were already slated for mineral development. That much Lidar made our demonstration project unnecessary. Our Lidar funds, with NPS's blessings, were redirected to video work that arose from our "capstone" meeting, to which we now turn. The "capstone" meeting for the project was a symposium of invited archaeologists, tribal representatives, and agency archaeologists held at Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, Cortez, Colorado over two and one-half days 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. The meeting resulted in a book, The Greater Chaco Landscape:  Ancestors, Scholarship, and Advocacy (Van Dyke and Heitman 2020) published by University Press of Colorado – which won awards, below! And in video products of tribal members (hosted online UPC's web page), shot at Crow Canyon and (at their request) in Chaco Canyon in October 2017. The Hopis and the Zunis heard about this, and requested equal representation. We had the money from our unused Lidar line. With conflicting schedules and many moving parts, the Hopi and Zuni shoots happened in August 23-25, 2019. Larry Ruiz, a fine fellow from Durango (Cloudy Ridge Productions; of which, more in Chapter 10), was the videographer and he labored long and hard over the videos, which had to be approved/edited by the Tribes and individual Indians. Again, many moving parts. This late-in-the-day video work came under the gun: the NPS agreement expired Dec 31, 2019, and there was no way Larry could complete the post-production by that date. We had already been granted several extensions of the contract, so the December 31 date was absolute and un-extendable. Dire warnings came from NPS about the final $25K we still had in the till: use it or lose it. I couldn't pay Larry for work-to-be-done or products not-yet-seen. An administrative quandary. By this time, I was fully retired from CU; but I was still PI on this project, so I had to figure something out, fast. After barking up several fruitless trees, I hit on a possible scam: transfer the funds as subvention to the University Press of Colorado, and let the press pay for the final video costs. It was, after all, part of book production. Darren Pratt, head of the Press, was (very graciously) amenable; my queries up and down the CU financial hierarchy raised no red flags. Besides, our original budget included a substantial subvention for UCP; but not that substantial. I broached the scheme to NPS. They were also (very graciously) amenable. So at the 11th hour we secured the soon-to-vanish funds and finished the project, thanks to Darren and his Press. A small victory, but still one pleasing to me, as a retired administrator. Not quite up there with my Yellow Jacket dodges (Chapter 11), but still: I hadn't lost all my chops… Our instructions from NPS, initially, were to not advocate against (or for) energy development, but rather to provide management considerations for NPS to use commenting on BLM management plans; but those instructions changed as the extent of the proposed leasing and development became clear. When you look at already-leased and yet-to-be-leased parcels in the San Juan Basin, it's a disaster. 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 operated on the landscape level. The complex land and political situations were difficult to engage from Boulder, Colorado; Binghamton, New York; or Lincoln, Nebraska. All politics is local, 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 Paul and Archaeology Southwest and other organizations insofar as possible, but beyond writing letters and comments etc. our participation in on-the-ground politicking was limited mainly to meetings with Tribes and agencies. My final, long personal "comment" on BLM's plans returned only a BLM form letter (sent Certified Mail, $7.45! You listening, taxpayer?) telling me I had used the wrong format, therefore my "protest was dismissed and denied." No need to be complainin’, my objections overruled. Things looked grim for Chaco landscapes, and they still look grim in 2024. Swiftly changing news of court cases apparently won, then lost; and last-second postponements by the Secretary of the Interior for 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-foot-print 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 “Chaco Landscapes” book and its videos are the result of Tom Lincoln's archaeological vision, his commitment to historic preservation, and his professional expertise. Tom wanted tools and products for the NPS to use in its comments on the drilling around Chaco. We hoped that our "White Paper" would prove tactically useful in the trenches, and we hope that The Greater Chaco Landscape: Ancestors, Scholarship, and Advocacy will be strategically helpful in presenting the broader issues to larger audiences. Chaco and its landscape are World Heritage: whoever you are, wherever you are on our big round world, this is your heritage under threat. New Mexico's congressional delegation developed bi-partisan legislation creating a 10-mile "buffer zone" around Chaco. The oil and gas guys got to the Navajo Chapters involved, those chapters got to Window Rock, and now the Navajo Nation is protesting that 10-miles is too much. We may yet see well pads across the boundary fences of Chaco Culture National Historical Park. With the Biden administration and Deb Haaland, things are looking up. Or not; the Supreme Court is pulling rugs from under the agencies. That fraught story is on-going and beyond my current portfolio. When I started at the University of Colorado, I brought with me the Chaco Synthesis Project. As I left the University of Colorado, I took with me the Chaco Landscapes Project. My Boulder career was bookended by large, complicated, multi-year NPS projects. A nice coincidence. Maybe not so "nice"… A pleasant footnote: Ruth Van Dyke and Carrie Heitman’s The Greater Chaco Landscape:  Ancestors, Scholarship, and Advocacy (University Press of Colorado, 2020) won awards: 2021 American Anthropology Association “Engaged Anthropology Award” and in 2022 Society for American Archaeology “Popular Book Award.” A Study of Southwestern Archaeology Most readers understand that A Study of Southwestern Archaeology (2018) is NOT a Chaco book. (It's right there on page xiv: "this is NOT a Chaco book.") A discouraging number of my colleagues apparently think it is a Chaco book – a sad indication of the state of Southwestern archaeology’s reading comprehension. A Study of Southwestern Archaeology is a meditation and methodology on biases and how to circumvent them. I used Chaco as an example, an illustration of Southwestern archaeology's biases. OK: that blasted book says a few things about Chaco, and Southwestern archaeology's mis-reading of Chaco. Chaco archaeology is obvious; Chaco archaeologists, alas, are oblivious. Obvious to the unbiased eye, oblivious to many Southwesternists fogged by mystic insistence that an imagined Pueblo present defines all possible Pueblo pasts. They have eyes, yet cannot see. Pueblo Bonito, f’instance. It's astonishing to me that so many Southwesternists can look at Pueblo Bonito … and not see it! Or more accurately, as Sherlock told Watson, they see but they do not observe. Holmes’s snark offended Watson, but neither Holmes nor I expect our work to win friends; we both hope to influence people. Towards the truth – whatever that might be. A subject that will probably arise again in Chapter 13. For A Study of Southwest Archaeology, I could just as readily have used Casas Grandes as my example; the same light-bending biases distort its archaeology. It's (also) astonishing to me that so many Southwesternists can look at Paquimé … and not see it! But the number of players at Paquimé is quite small, and it would be hard indeed to discuss these issues, there, without engaging with personalities, without ad hominem, however inadvertent. I pick on plenty of people – or rather, I pick on peoples' ideas -- in A Study of Southwestern Archaeology but that is Chaco's perverse charm: there are plenty of people with seemingly disparate ideas about Chaco, to use in the aggregate as an index of our biases. Their ideas and their many different angles, alas, all fold down to fit in the same small box: Pueblo Space. So I went with Chaco. As I said in the book: "This is NOT a Chaco book, although (perhaps) you can (maybe) learn a bit about the place here. Or not." Almost certainly my last extended academic discourse on that canyon and its archaeology. Chaco in the Rear-view Mirror A bit of venting here, perhaps developing into a full-scale fumarole in Chapter 13. Chaco is famously mysterious, unique, an enigma archaeology cannot solve, etc I find that bullshit annoying, even offensive. For over a century, we’ve dug the bejeezus out of Chaco – "we" being AMNH, NGS, Smithsonian, MNM, UNM et alia. I have no idea how many millions of dollars all that cost, but the answer surely is "many." The projects I knew best were pretty expensive: Salmon was a famous black hole for money; the NPS Chaco Project spent over $5.5 million; my various smaller-scale endeavors (Synthesis, Bluff, etc) totaled up well over $500,000. And that’s just stuff I was involved with, personally. Add to that Richard Wetherill, Edgar Hewett, Neil Judd, and so forth…and we are talking about a LOT of money. If, after all that toil and trouble and treasure, we can't make sense of Chaco, we should hang up our trowels and admit that Southwestern archaeology is a con, a grift. We’ll spend your money, have some fun, dig up sites, and conclude that we just can’t say, we just don’t know. More money, please. Well, sports fans: I know a bit about Chaco. I've looked at it at from trowel’s edge and from NASA platforms. I've analyzed and compared and contrasted and considered; and – I'm pretty sure – I've discovered some stuff, I've figured out a few things. As have others, of course! I pooled this accumulation of knowledge into "Ten Fun Facts About Chaco" in A Study of Southwestern Archaeology. To save you the bother of running to your bookshelf (that’s a joke), I list the abbreviated Fun Facts here: 1. Great Houses are real, and really different. 2. Great Houses were houses, but not many people lived in them. 3. People living in Great Houses were … special. 4. Chaco was a stratified class society. 5. Outlier Great Houses are real and define Chaco's region. 6. Road networks and line-of-sight communication: Chaco was a system. 7. Chaco's region encompassed 60,000 people, and perhaps as many as 100,000 people. 8. Chaco had bulk and prestige economies. 9. Chaco was not a great place to grow corn. 10. Chaco was cosmopolitan. Each of these statements is backed up layers and layers of data. Not so much, "backed up" as based upon, because each of these statements is an argument from data, not a tested hypothesis (I never pretended to “do science” and neither should you). I made those arguments in a cumulative series of publications over many years. You have to read them and their footnotes; then follow up citations, and the arguments therein. And think it all through: my writing is accessible, but that does not excuse readers of the requirement to think. Together and individually, these Ten Fun Facts are very uncomfortable for Southwestern archaeologists, who were trained from the cradle that the region never played host to a polity, a government, a state. But that's what Chaco was. When I present Chaco to world archaeologists (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, English, Irish, Mexican) free of Santa Fe's doleful influence, they recognize it immediately as some sort of low-grade, garden-variety secondary state. Consequently, I was asked to contribute chapters on Chaco for books on Palaces and Power in the Americas (2006), Ritual in Archaic States (2016), and a volume of the Cambridge World History, A World of States and Empires (2015). (Elsewhere, in Chaco Meridian 2nd edition [2015] I offered a model drawn from Chaco’s time and place, the Mesoamerican city-state: in Nahua, altepetl. And repeated myself in Study of Southwest Archaeology. I did not say Chaco was an altepetl; I said it looked like an altepetl; big difference.) Deep-dyed Southwesternists are uncomfortable – scared, perhaps? – by where my archaeology is going so they (1) shoot the messenger and (2) devise all sorts of unlikely alternatives. Rituality, pilgrimage center, locus of high devotional expression … whatever. Nothing is too bizarre as long as it keeps Chaco safe for theocracy, looking like a Pueblo – or rather, our stereotype of a Pueblo. Pueblo Space. Or stranger still, a valley full of farming villages. A theme championed by the late Gwinn Vivian (a very smart man) which lives on at UNM. Great Houses become villages; with a wave of the hand, platform mounds are wished away; an arid forbidding canyon emerges as an oasis – under some very specific (and unlikely) conditions. Farming lies at the heart of the current recidivism. Recall Fun Fact #9: Chaco was not a great place to grow corn. Almost everyone, including the Navajo farmers who lived there, agrees that Chaco was not a great place to grow corn. The Navajo families, before NPS ran 'em out, had second farms in places with more reliable water; and at most there were only a few hundred Navajos at Chaco – not the much higher populations we estimate for 11th century Chaco. I walked around Chaco with a Hopi farmer and asked him what he would do at Chaco. He replied: “Move.” Indians told me a lot about Chaco. Navajos speak about the place at length, and they have nothing good to say about it: “The events at Chaco are as traumatic a memory for the Navajo people as the Long Walk.” Pueblo people are more hesitant, but they too have no fond memories of Chaco: “We know all about Chaco but we don’t talk about it. Bad things happened there.” And: “We hate the place…” Amen to that.