A History of the Ancient Southwest (review)

This study weaves together two parallel narratives into a very provocative and highly original tour de force, a big-picture political history of the pre-Hispanic American Southwest and a critical intellectual history of southwestern archaeology. Writing in an engaging, literate, and humorous style, Steve Lekson casts the ancient Southwest as the revolving scene of dramatic events played out by elites and commoners, locals and foreigners, imitators and innovators. The strikingly communal, democratic, and settled nature of historic Pueblo peoples is seen as a deliberate cultural reaction to a far darker past when kings ruled. Likewise, the author reacts to archaeology's preoccupation with being scientific and explaining cultural processes at the expense of understanding history; he sees the Southwest as a place where "things happened."

The prehistory of the American Southwest is regarded as quite well known, the outlines of the "big three" cultural patterns—Anasazi, Hohokam, and Mogollon—told in familiar fashion in countless textbooks and popular accounts. Yet the region's early human history has remained faceless and seemingly ecologically ordained to result in just the sort of communally governed, small-scale societies encountered by the Spanish. Even the largest prehistoric ruins are said to reflect "intermediate societies," big enough to create towns, trade networks, and elaborate ritual life, but strangely lacking in central hierarchy and socio-political complexity.

Lekson tells it quite differently. His multilayered book is organized into eight chapters followed by extensive endnotes. Each of the first seven chapters relates chronological segments of the parallel narratives termed "archaeologies," the intellectual history of southwestern archaeology, and "histories," the political (pre-) history. In the last half of the final chapter Lekson achieves the book's goal and sets forth an eventful history of the ancient Southwest.

Whereas traditional interpretations see southwestern prehistory as unfolding unto itself, albeit abetted by the introduction of agriculture from Mesoamerica some 3,000 years ago, Lekson argues that what happened in the Southwest reflects interregional patterns of migration, interaction, and political awareness. Throughout he connects the history of the region to developments in Mesoamerica and the Mississippian world of eastern North America and argues that the Southwest had ongoing interactions with western Mesoamerica over thousands of years.

Building on his 1999 book The Chaco Meredian, Lekson sees the unique accumulation of monumental architecture at Chaco Canyon as representing the first and greatest city of the American Southwest, the capital of a small state that controlled the Four Corners from roughly A.D. 1020-1125. He thinks it no coincidence that Chaco and Cahokia, the "paramount chiefdom" of the Mississippi valley, rose and fell at about the same time. Both he argues must have been secondary states ruled by kings inspired by early states in distant Mesoamerica, a notion that drives both southwestern and southeastern archaeologists astir. Chaco in turn was succeeded by a short-lived state centered on the Aztec Ruins followed by Paquimé (Casas Grandes), the last and largest city-state in the ancient Southwest.

Serious readers are likely to spend as much or more time reading the extensive end notes (almost 100 pages in small font) as the main text, which contain lengthy discussions of critical and arcane points, ready acknowledgments of alternative interpretations, and pointed rejoinders to anticipated (and well-known) critics. Lekson does not mince words or wit as he demonstrates an extraordinary command of anthropological, historical, philosophical and, of course, archaeological literature.

This book is a groundbreaking study of the sort that comes along too seldom. Although some archaeologists will take umbrage at Lekson's audacious inferences and unsparing criticisms, few will deny being challenged to look anew at orthodoxy. Historians and anthropologists may find cause to reconsider the historical context of the region's written and oral histories. This book matters.