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“Chaco” after Chaco with Dr. Steve Lekson - S1E4
204 Plays3 years ago
For this episode, the two co-hosts sit down with Dr. Steve Lekson to discuss the legacy and impact of Chaco after the peak of its influence in the Southwest around A.D./C.E. 1050. We hear about the famed “Chaco Meridian” and the role of archaeology as part of the “Colonial Package”. We explore interpretations regarding where Chacoan peoples moved to after Chaco and where they went after that too. Dr. Lekson stresses the importance of inter-regional archaeological investigation and thinking about the big picture when it comes to archaeological research. Finally, Dr. Lekson makes a prediction on the future of Southwest archaeology and the legacy of his research.
Links
- Lekson, Stephen H.
- 2009 A History of the Ancient Southwest. School for Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe, NM.
- 2015 The Chaco Meridian:One Thousand Years of Political and Religious Power in the Ancient Southwest. 2nd ed. Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MD.
- 2018 A Study of Southwestern Archaeology. The University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
- Lekson, Stephen H., and Catherine M. Cameron
- 1995 The Abandonment of Chaco Canyon, the Mesa Verde Migrations, and the Reorganization of the Pueblo World. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 14(2):184-202.
- Lekson, Stephen H., and Peter N. Peregrine
- 2004 A Continental Perspective for North American Archaeology. SAA Archaeological Record 4(1):15-19.
- Contact For Guest:
- Dr. Steve Lekson
- Email: [email protected]
Carlton Shield Chief Gover
- Email: [email protected]
- instagram: @pawnee_archaeologist
- Twitter: @PaniArchaeology
- Website: https://www.colorado.edu/anthropology/carlton-gover
Robert Weiner
- [email protected]
- Instagram: @chacoroadsproject
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Site Bites Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome to season one, episode four of the site bites podcast Canyon of contention, where we go in depth on prominent archeological landscapes.
Interview with Dr. Steven Lexington
00:00:22
Speaker
I am your host Carlton Gover, and I am joined by this season's featured co-host Robert Weiner. For the topic of this episode, Choco after Choco, we have the pleasure of having Dr. Steven Lexington with us as our guest. Dr. Lexington, thank you so much for joining us today. And how are you doing?
00:00:38
Speaker
I'm doing fine and thank you for having me. Well, we are just so happy to have you here and look forward to a great discussion. We wanted to start off just by asking about your both your personal and your professional connections to Chaco Canyon. So what drew you there in the first place and how did you start working on Chaco? Once I decided to be a southwestern archaeologist, which I made that decision based on landscape and skies,
00:01:04
Speaker
and aridity and not so much on knowing anything about the archaeology because I didn't. But in the early 70s, I decided I'd work in the southwest and in some ways I was pushed this way. I'm not kicking particularly, I liked it, but I decided to educate myself about it and read and talked for a few years. I read what I could get my hands on. It became fairly clear there's three areas in the southwest in the old terminology, Anasazi up north, it's now ancestral Pueblo.
00:01:31
Speaker
Maggion down south in southern New Mexico and Oecombe in Arizona. I want to do something in each of those areas that would be useful and I might as well have fun. In the early 1970s, the three most glamorous places, I suppose, were Chagua up north and Membrus down south.
00:01:53
Speaker
and in classic period hoakum in the Phoenix area. So, reading up on Chaco in the early 70s, a textbook of the time was Paul Martin and Fred Plogg's Archaeology of Arizona said that, you know, it's obvious that Chaco is really important. It's too bad we don't know much about it. This is in 73, all right. Also reprinted in 73 was Gordon Vivian's Conclutsal Report, which included a really outstanding synthesis of Chaco work.
00:02:19
Speaker
up to that point, up to 64 when he first wrote it. So I got hold of both of those. I can't remember where they bought them or borrowed them or whatever. Read up on chocolate and said, yeah, I'd like to work
Journey to Chaco Canyon
00:02:28
Speaker
there. That's easier said than done. Because, you know, at this point I'm still, I think, an undergraduate. And so I had to kind of sneak up on it.
00:02:35
Speaker
First, I guess this would be in 74, I took a job with Cynthia Williams working at Salmon Ruins, which isn't Chaco, but it was Chaco site, flipping shirts being a ceramic analyst, which was not my metier. I was a field guy at that time. But I had to take the job that was available. I did that for a couple of years and then got hired on for the Chaco project, National Park Service Chaco project, which is a big multi-year project.
00:03:01
Speaker
that I worked on from 76 to 86 and had snuck up on that one too and had some inside help getting hired there. You don't need to go into that and involve some nepotism. So yeah, I wanted to work at Chaco because it was pretty obvious that it was important. I mean, people sometimes accuse me of promoting Chaco as important because I work there. No, I work there because it's obviously important. If you had half a brain, even in the early 70s and all the work that's been done since, yeah, I mean, Chaco is a central
00:03:29
Speaker
to the prehistory of the northern half of the Southwest, the ancestral public area. Excellent. So you recognize the importance of Chaco early on. What inspired you to become an archaeologist, Dr. Lexington? Can you talk to us about like, you know, why did you want to become an archaeologist? Where did you go to school and where did you end up after obtaining your PhD? Well, my father's in the army. High school age, I spent three years in Naples, Italy, and we went to Pompeii a lot and Herculaneum and
00:03:57
Speaker
and faced them in all those kinds of places and of course traveled around Rome and got to Greece and saw ruins there. And I wanted to be a classical archaeologist. So a couple of years later when I made it to college, I told the guy that sort of triage advisor who met, you know, incoming freshmen, I wanted to be a classical archaeologist and he said, no, you couldn't do that. I think he looked at where I graduated from high school, which is Biloxi, Mississippi.
00:04:24
Speaker
I was only there one year, but I think you probably looked at that and said, no, this is a yokel. You can't do that. I said, well, I'd like to be an archaeologist. I said, well, why don't you go over to anthropology? They dig Indian mounds. And anthropology? I didn't know nothing about that. And Indian mounds? Why would you want to do that? But I got shunted over into anthropological archaeology. And yeah, they were trying to train me up to be an archaeologist in the southeast, which is a very, very interesting area in lower Mississippi Valley.
00:04:49
Speaker
But that's where I'd grown up. When we were in the United States, I was mostly in the southeast, and it was extremely hot and humid and buggy, and the snakes that you had to worry about didn't all rattle. High density of rednecks. So I got to come out to the New Mexico, where I'd never been, for one January on a university quick field season with some professor. And I liked it. It was arid. At night, you could see the Milky Way. Plenty interesting rednecks, but much lower densities. And decided I'd be a southwestern archaeologist.
00:05:20
Speaker
not knowing anything about the Southwest.
00:05:22
Speaker
That's great. We've heard it from a few people today, just how, you know, compelling the landscape of Chaco is. And of course the clear skies as well. So cool to hear that and what brought you to this area. Chaco archaeology is, of course, I wasn't around in the 70s, but it was very different then
Chaco's Regional Influence
00:05:41
Speaker
than it is now. What would you say throughout your career has been the biggest change in understandings of Chaco and its larger region?
00:05:52
Speaker
recognizing it had a region. In the 70s, people were aware of sites that had, you know, putting air quotes here that you can't see, you know, choco and characteristics, you know, some hundreds of miles away from, from choco. And that was noted as sort of an interesting anomaly. But really the work during the great outlier hunts in the mid 70s and the Bureau of Land Management Road Studies,
00:06:18
Speaker
really established that chocolate was the center of a region and a sizable region with a whole lot of people in it. That certainly was not there. That understanding was not there when I started off in the 70s. And I honestly don't believe that there were many archaeologists who had an inkling of that, you know, how big it was going to be. And over the years, it's just been, yeah, sort of piled on and piled on and piled on. Yeah, there's a big chocolate region.
00:06:45
Speaker
And Jock was the center of it. And you were involved in some early work with the outliers, like, for example, at Pierre's complex. Tell us what that was like, your personal experience of being on the ground and looking at these sites beyond the canyon and and recognizing that, wow, this is something big. There are two concurrent projects looking at outliers and looking at the larger landscape. I was working on one with the National Park Service with Bob Powers and Bill Gillespie.
00:07:15
Speaker
At almost the same time, there was a very forward-looking project being sponsored by the Public Service Company of New Mexico, the state's power company, where there was some thought that there was going to be extensive coal mining, strippable coal out in Chaco. And they had a staff archaeologist who got him rich loose, who convinced them to field a crew to see what's out there before these large-scale landscape modifications might happen.
00:07:45
Speaker
subsequently followed up with fracking and stuff today. So there are two teams who are out there, each of about three guys. The other group is John Stein and Mike Marshall and Rich Luce. We shared information and visited each other's sites and stuff, but we put a lot of dots on the map. Some dots we already knew about, like Pierre's site
00:08:07
Speaker
which had been discovered by, well, you know, the local Navajo people knew about it, but archaeologically, it was discovered by Pierre Morandon, who had been an archaeologist working with Cynthia R. Williams, just like I did in Salmon Roads, who was studying the roads. And so we got, you know, it was Pierre's site. So we targeted that, we targeted Peach Springs, we being the national parks service people, targeted Pierre's, Peach Springs, and one other I've forgotten right now to do some fairly detailed work on. And then we just, we had an old government carry-all
00:08:37
Speaker
And we beat the crap out of it driving back and forth across the San Juan Basin. At the same time that the other group, the PNM group, were feeding up their vehicles driving back and forth across the San Juan Basin and beyond. Part of what we were doing and part of what they were doing too is looking at the literature. Once you had been on a number of these things, there's certain commonalities where you have a big bump and usually a great big hole in the ground for a great key, but the big bump is a great house.
00:09:04
Speaker
and usually berms and roads and, you know, those kinds of earthwork features and then a surrounding community of little unit pueblos. Once you start reading the literature, oh, that pattern kept popping up, but even back into the 19th century literature for Southwest Colorado, for example.
00:09:22
Speaker
And we didn't get to visit all those sites, but we put more dots on the map of places where people might look. And over the years, people have gone and looked. You know, the work continued. You know, we were running out there for a year, as was P&M, but people like Stein and Marshall and other organizations and other individuals kept going to those dots on the map and documenting what was out there.
00:09:42
Speaker
I was still involved in this. I actually looked this up, so I thought you might ask. I worked on this sort of northwesternmost Chaco sites when I was working at Bluff Great House and the northeasternmost at Chimney Rock in 2009. In 2007, I got to go to what, as far as I know, is the southeasternmost, the southernmost and southeasternmost, which is a site that was named years ago, not by the Camelot on
Social Structure of Chaco
00:10:11
Speaker
the San Augustine.
00:10:13
Speaker
a great house right on the edges of the plane just in August. So anyway, yeah, it was an interesting line of research because you could do a lot of it without sticking shovels in the ground or disturbing anything. You just go up and look at these things and you could see the big bump and the big hole in the ground and the berms and all that kind of stuff and go, oh yeah, there's another one. Yeah, absolutely. Now, any of these experiences that you just reflected on, were these at any point part of your graduate work and where'd you go to grad school? My graduate work was
00:10:42
Speaker
broken up by real work. I got a master's degree from Eastern New Mexico University while I was working for Cynthia R. Williams at Salmond Ruins because that project was running out of Eastern. And I realized that I had a bunch of graduate credits from my undergraduate days that were transferable. And I could basically take a few classes and write a thesis on a project I'd done before in November, in Southern New Mexico. So I got a master's there. And then when I was working at the Chaco Center for the Park Service,
00:11:11
Speaker
We were on the second floor of the anthropology department at the University of New Mexico. And I had the same realization that, hey, technically, I'm UNM staff. I can take free courses. I can transfer a bunch of this graduate credit here. So I got my PhD at UNM while I was working for the Park Service, which is helpful for the Park Service, too, in some ways, because they could pay me out of a different set of monies that would help them on their bottom line in terms of
00:11:40
Speaker
project dealt with financially. So I would guess most of the outlier work was done before I jumped on board for the PhD program. But we kept going out and looking right through when I was in the PhD program because I was still working for the Park Service. I was still going out to Chaco and doing this and that.
00:12:01
Speaker
I want to return back to the discussion of that characteristic signature of outliers where you talked about a big bump or a great house surrounded by a smaller community of sites. I would say one of the major impacts of your work within Chaco Research and Southwestern archaeology has been discussions of inequality and
00:12:22
Speaker
the idea that Chaco was so connected that there were elites, which for a long time people were very resistant to and some people still would certainly question those ideas. So what led you, seeing that pattern of the small sites next to the great houses, what led you to develop your views on inequality and complexity in the Chacoan past? I was actually back in the canyon.
00:12:50
Speaker
I did a lot of work on the architecture of the Great Houses at Chaco Canyon Park, because nobody else was doing it in the Chaco project. And I said, hey, we need to do this. And my boss is very, very supportive. So I got to crawl all over the Great Houses out there and do a lot of tender chronological work and architectural analysis, stuff like that. Okay, so you spend a lot of time at Pueblo Bonito or Chetra Kettle. I did a lot of work at Chetra Kettle and the other big
00:13:19
Speaker
really big bumps at Chaco. And then you just walk across the canyon from Benito and there's what they call the BC sites, which has nothing to do with Before Christ. It's just a geographic record keeping and their quadrangle B, you know, C stands for Chaco and 50 and 51 are the 50th and the 51st sites in a sequence. They had been excavated years prior to that by the University of New Mexico.
00:13:47
Speaker
And you look at those little guys and that's what 90% of the people were living in in the 11th century were these little, they call them unit pueblos. And they're exactly contemporary and they were contemporary with the Pueblo Bonito and these great big buildings. I mean the differences in scale are not subtle. They're real obvious when you could take the whole floor area of a regular family house and put it in one room of Pueblo Bonito and you know the differences in the
00:14:15
Speaker
the labor invested in the architecture and all that kind of stuff. It's not a subtle thing. It's beside the head obvious. And it's the basic question of Chaco Keynes, what the hell is going on with these great houses? Because the rest of the archaeology at Chaco looks like everywhere else in the southwest, in northern southwest at that time, 11th century, 12th century. In the past, that had been explained as two different ethnicities. One ethnicity in the great houses and another ethnicity in these small sites and these unit bubbles.
00:14:43
Speaker
And that kind of got it right. It is two different kinds of people, but the really obvious explanation is two different classes of people, is the rest of the artifactual repertoires and the two sites are using the same pottery. They're using the same chipstone in different quantities, different qualities, but there's nothing really obviously different about what's going on with the people on those levels, except that they're living in these enormous houses, these palaces, and everybody else isn't.
00:15:12
Speaker
So yeah, the inequality part is really obvious in Chaco when people ask me, you know, it's an archaeologist last me, where's your evidence? I said, well, you know, walk around Pueblo Benito for half an hour, walk across the bridge and look at the BC sites. And if you don't see it, you probably should turn in your archaeology badge.
00:15:27
Speaker
Well, all right. Well, I think I'm not going to turn in my archaeology badge quite yet, but we will turn in segment one of episode four with Dr. Steve Lexin. Stay tuned after these messages as we return to today's content. Welcome back to episode four, season one of SiteBites podcast. We are here with Dr. Steve Lexin. And yeah, Rob, why don't you go ahead and take it from here?
00:15:48
Speaker
Great, Carlton. We've learned a lot about Chaco so far. I just wanted to recap some of the main points that have been hit. We've talked about Chaco's geographical setting, the harsh environment there. We've heard different perspectives about how agriculturally productive Chaco may have been, how many people may have lived there, whether great houses were large residential units or something more like palaces or
Chaco's Decline and Legacy
00:16:14
Speaker
temples. We've talked about
00:16:17
Speaker
Mesoamerican influence in Chaco with these striking imported goods such as macaws and cacao and the impact those must have had within Chaco in society as prestige goods or ritual objects. Furthermore, we've talked about this surrounding region of sites tied to Chaco Canyon with the very characteristic iconic great house architecture, roads, earthworks that suggest to many archaeologists some kind of a unified region.
00:16:46
Speaker
So now that we've established all of that, we're going to look at what was Chaco's lasting impact in the southwest. So what happened after its heyday as the center of influence throughout this ancient Four Corners world? So
00:17:04
Speaker
Steve, what we want to ask next is what, you know, for a long time there was this narrative of the disappearing Anasazi or the sort of end of Chaco Canyon. Tell us about when Chaco's influence waned and how we can see its impact continuing at sites after the end of construction in Chaco Canyon.
00:17:28
Speaker
Well, the last major construction at Chaco is about 1120, 1125, something like that from the Shearing dates. And actually in the early 12th century, in the early 1100s, they're building like crazy. They're building all these buildings that don't even seem to be used, sort of warehouse-like things. So, you know, it's rolling along. It doesn't end. I mean, it does end in terms of construction, but what happens is it moves and it moves before 1125. They decide to relocate to the north.
00:17:58
Speaker
about 60 miles, first at Salmon Ruins in the 1070s. This is the height of Chocco. They're starting to think about this. They build buildings up there to check it out, up there being on the San Juan River. And Salmon doesn't work out very well because San Juan River is kind of a rough river. You couldn't do much with it until Navajo Dam got built and it floods. So they moved north a few more miles to the Animus River, Animus Perditos, which is a nice little creek that they could handle.
00:18:28
Speaker
And starting about 1100, they're beginning to build small grade houses, starter kit grade houses at Aztec. And Aztec ruins is a national monument that you have to always put the disclaimer in there that the Aztec is a misnomer from early settlers, although actually the Mexican authorities and the Spanish authorities called it that too. And the whole thing really gets going. About 1110, they start really building big buildings
00:18:58
Speaker
at Aztec. And this is before the end of construction of Chaco. There's no building in Chaco in the early 1120s. So this is going well. Chaco is still going strong. It's not a watered down Chaco. It may be a reduced Chaco in terms of scale. But the first building they build at Aztec ruins is the single biggest construction event I'm aware of in Chaco. It's called Westruen in
00:19:23
Speaker
It isn't as big as Pueblo Bonito, but it took them a few centuries to build Pueblo Bonito. They put Westruun up in about 10 years, probably significantly less than 10 years. So this is Chaco, and it can still really organize labor, organize logistics, get all these beams, you know, thousands and thousands of beams. They need to get all this stuff together and then get the damn thing built. So the capital appears to shift, and they quit using the great houses in Chaco. They quit adding to them.
00:19:50
Speaker
And the energy and the activity, and I think the people, especially the nobles, the elites, moved north and moved the capital to where they should have built it in the first place, which is on the animus. So you have this nice supply of water, wood, and trees, and game, and all that kind of stuff that they didn't have a chuckle. And then that gets rolling. That gets rolling, and they're building up speed here. This starts about 1100, right?
00:20:14
Speaker
and you're building up speed and doing all this construction and stuff and then they get hit with a great big drought. I think that's about 1130, a really nasty one that lasts for decades. And that really affects the economy and the societies in Aztec's region because it's the center of a region too. It inherits the region from Chaco, for some of it at least. But they don't stop building at the capital.
00:20:38
Speaker
This drought, which is devastating everywhere else, they keep building new buildings, adding on and adding on. There's about three really major great houses up there and some pretty significant secondary, minor great houses. So yeah, Chaco continues as Aztec. And when I talk about Chaco, I'm talking about the Chacoan polity, which was based in Chaco for a while, but then moved north to Aztec. And when Aztec finally goes down,
00:21:04
Speaker
it does go down. You know, Chaco didn't collapse, Chaco shifted, but the subsequent capital, the successor capital, when it ends is when tens of thousands of people leave its region and leave the four corners. And this really is a collapse in the sense that a certain kind of civilization ends, very particular political system ends.
00:21:26
Speaker
you know, the people don't disappear. It's not like they beam them up into starships or something, but they move down where they vote with their feet and they leave that region and they reinvent themselves as Pueblo people. There are already Pueblo people on the Rio Grande and Hopi and Zuni and Acoma, places like that. And most of these people join them or go even further south, actually, and, you know, eventually settle back in with what are the modern Pueblos of today.
00:21:52
Speaker
And in doing this, they reject the nobles. They turn their backs on that. Public people remember this in their stories. So do Navajo people who live out there today. But in one of the public stories about this, they have a ceremony of forgetting. They're just not going to do that anymore. They had the nobles. They've been through that. It was great for a while. And then the wheels fell off. There's a drought. There's violence, nasty violence. And everybody leaves the four corners.
00:22:23
Speaker
The continuing political system of Chaco moved south, I think, into Chihuahua. The nobles probably say, okay, fine, we're nobles. That's what we do. You guys don't want us anymore. We'll go south where there's people like us, there's other noble families. But in the Pueblos, and I'm getting this from talking to lots of Pueblo people, I think Chaco is remembered as something that went terribly wrong, and it's not something they want to do anymore. So it continues to have an effect. It's part of their history, it's part of their heritage, but they don't do that anymore.
00:22:52
Speaker
Well, it's a fascinating story and I agree with you. The archaeological signature is just so clear that after that 1300s depopulation of the Four Corners,
00:23:03
Speaker
there was a complete societal transformation.
Cultural Connections and Chaco Meridian
00:23:06
Speaker
And there's a big story there, and I really appreciate the way that you've brought it out in print and in your writings. So one aspect of it I want to follow up on is you talked about Aztec following Chaco as a political capital and then things shifting down to Pakime in Chihuahua. All three of those sites are on a single north-south line. Tell us about
00:23:31
Speaker
how that dawned on you and what you think the significance is. The relocation of the capital from Chaco to Aztec did proceed pretty much straight north with a couple of dog legs where terrain got in the way. And it's not any mystery as to how they could do that. You can do that with a piece of string in a rock and just to question how much time you want to put into it. You can find north fairly easily. It just take a little while
00:24:02
Speaker
It's not like they knew what longitude they were on when they got to Aztec and said, oh, we're doing north of Chaco. Nobody had tools to do that until the late 18th century. So you have to start off at Chaco and move north.
00:24:16
Speaker
to Aztec, and we know they did that because they left the Great North Road, which is a complicated monument, linear monument. We call it a road. And it was certainly traveled on, but there's more to it than that. It links Chaco to Aztec, I'm pretty sure. I mean, there's some parts of it that are missing and parts of it that have been erased by well pads and pipelines and stuff like that. But they were linking the second capital back to the first capital, and it was a lesson in history, right? History on the ground. That B is connected back to A.
00:24:45
Speaker
Aztec is legitimate because it physically is linked back to Chaco and lots of people had to build that road and learn that lesson. It's a monumental construction and obviously monumental construction. So there's a lot of people involved in building it, maintaining it, and knowing what it meant. In terms of what it meant to them, you'd have to ask them. I'm big on the Ouija board, but I think it was at least part
00:25:09
Speaker
going north, because north's the only direction you really got. Their leadership at Chaco is sort of taking north and making it theirs. So yeah, Chaco moves north to Aztec and there's really strong evidence on the ground, literally, the north road. And then, right, it goes bing, bang, boom, or, you know, Chaco, this is from the tree ring dates, it goes Chaco, Aztec,
00:25:31
Speaker
the end, the collapse of that political system. And then it pops up again due south at Pocky Main, which is a long way. That's a long poll over a little bit of a rough country. But you could do it if you wanted to. The question is, why would you want to? It's just a question of time. And knowing how to do it, again, there's nothing mysterious about it. It's pretty easy to do. It's a question of time and repeated shots. I think, again, they're using North
00:25:58
Speaker
North and its opposite South as access Monday is the wrong term because that goes vertically, but a horizontal linchpin for their longitude for showing the continuity of their political systems. And this happens in other parts of the world, not necessarily directionally, but where you link political systems on the ground with monuments. For what it's worth, in the Southwest, the archeologists use a chronological system the way breaking up time.
00:26:25
Speaker
was developed in the 20s in, oh, I don't know, six different periods, and they work. We still use them because those time periods are sufficiently different in terms of their architecture, the pottery, stuff like that. For every one of those time periods, going back to 500 AD, you know, going back to 500 AD, long before Chaco, every one of those periods, the biggest, strangest, that's a value judgment, but I can defend it. Most important, same thing, I can defend that. Certainly most impressive
00:26:55
Speaker
sites of each one of those periods is on that north-south line. So I think it has deep antiquity and it really meant something. By the time Chaco finally used it, it really, really meant something. Now, this orientation that you've been describing between Aztec Chaco and that other one in Chihuahua, Mexico, is it? Pacime. Pacime, yeah. This is what you've described as the Chaco meridian, correct?
00:27:18
Speaker
Yeah, because it's roughly on a meridian. I mean, a meridian is an infinitely narrow line. And all this is happening in, say, a zone. It's a couple of kilometers wide. But I mean, these guys are doing their surveying, again, with a piece of string in a rock. So we shouldn't expect better natural precision.
00:27:37
Speaker
Absolutely. And just kind of like tying back into your descriptions before about how, you know, capitals change and there's relations in architecture and just like what comes to mind is thinking about like Rome and then Constantinople in which there is that shift in political power. And that's just background as we see this all over the world through time and space, not just Rome and Constantinople and Aztec and Chaco. The Chinese do it a lot. They move their capitals around. Unfairly esoteric principles.
00:28:06
Speaker
And I think it's, you know, part of what I love so much about your work and has had a big impact on me is what we were just discussing. Looking beyond the Southwest to try and understand Chaco better, the vision you've described and laid out compelling evidence for about different capitals and nobles and commoners and big histories, I would say
00:28:31
Speaker
is very different from the way Southwestern archaeology is often written, where people are moving because of rainfall and you hear much more about manos and metates than you do about individuals or political systems. So why do you think visions of the ancient Southwest that involve things like political history and capitals like we see elsewhere in the world, why have those been so rarely conducted in the
Critique of Southwestern Archaeology
00:29:01
Speaker
Southwest?
00:29:01
Speaker
Southwestern archeology was gravely impacted by its anthropological roots. In the 19th century, the ethnologists ruled the roots. They thought that they were in charge of things intellectually. And that what they were studying in what they called the ethnographic present, which was a sort of a glorified, what they thought the Iroquois would be like or what they thought the Pueblo would be like prior to colonization.
00:29:29
Speaker
that that was the end point of a sort of ahistorical progression from sort of ruder beginnings right up to whatever the ethnologists thought, that there wasn't really any history. I mean, this is anthropology. It's a natural history discipline, natural science discipline, and the colonial people, and by this, I mean, 19th century intellectuals in New York and Boston.
00:29:53
Speaker
didn't think that Indians had any particular history. All these stories that Indians told about migrations and this and that, they dismissed those as fables. And all the change in the past that Indians talked about dismissed those as fables. So the archaeologists come to the Southwest for the notion that their job was to make the archaeology suit the ethnography, the later ethnography of what we thought Pueblos, what white guys thought Pueblos were like in 1700 or something.
00:30:21
Speaker
which doesn't lead the past a whole lot of wiggle room to do anything different. Again, we're saying they didn't have a history. And that was the assumptions and it fed and it was fed by the Pueblo Mystique that is a marketing tool for Santa Fe. And this is actually, there's many historical accounts of this, you know, popular cultural history accounts of how Santa Fe
00:30:45
Speaker
manipulated this vision of the Pueblos so they could get people on the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad and the Fred Harvey people and stuff like that to bring tourism to the Southwest. And it worked. Their work is still working. I mean, Santa Fe is a Pueblo theme park. But this had a recursive effect on the archaeology where things in the past had to be kind of like Pueblos or congruent with Pueblos or leading logically to Pueblos.
00:31:11
Speaker
And it doesn't leave any room for nobles and cometers, which is interesting because every agricultural society north of Panama in the 11th century had nobles and cometers. It would be exceptional if the Southwest didn't, which it's held out as Southwest exceptionalism, again, as part of this marketing strategy, that, oh, yeah, they never had nobles and cometers. Well, yeah, they did. The archaeology is pretty clear on that.
00:31:33
Speaker
Well, it's a fascinating story and a very compelling one, I think. If our listeners are interested to read a fuller account of some of the ideas Steve just shared, I would highly recommend his newest book, A Study of Southwestern Archaeology, published by University of Utah Press. And you can take some time to Google that title during this break, and we'll be right back.
00:31:57
Speaker
And welcome back to Site Bites, episode four of season one. We are here with Dr. Steve Lexin talking about Chacoan influences after the peak of Chaco itself in terms of what happened after it stopped new construction. So Dr. Lexin, your ideas on Chaco differ than many people. And so I wanted to know, you know, what inspired you to think about Chaco outside of the southwestern norm?
00:32:25
Speaker
I got into the Southwest without knowing much about the Southwest, which might seem like a negative, but I think it's a positive. I didn't acquire a lot of biases. When I decided to be a Southwest archaeologist, I'd never been to Santa Fe, which probably saved my soul. So I didn't come with a lot of biases because I didn't know much about the place. And working at Chaco, I mean, I worked a lot of the members' country and I worked at Chaco and backed the members and whole kind of stuff like that.
00:32:50
Speaker
Working at Chaco, it is fairly clear what was being learned by the Chaco project and Cynthia and William's projects and some other projects in the late 70s that Chaco didn't fit the mold of the ethnological notion of how pueblos work, which may or may not be how pueblos actually work. It's just how white ethnologists think they work. You know, Chaco wasn't comfortable in that.
00:33:18
Speaker
The first thing that got me thinking about this was the archaeology itself. You look at the stuff, and again, I did the architecture, and you have these clear differences between how the upper half and the upper 1% and the other 99% lived architecturally, and this is very clear. In the region, discovering the region and documenting the region, and Chaco's centrality to it, and how it was city-like. In cross-cultural studies of cities, Chaco would be a city, a small one, but a lot of cities are small.
00:33:47
Speaker
None of that fit with the prevailing models that archaeologists had in their heads of the Southwest past. So I tried that at a couple of conferences and stuff. I don't even have a PhD at this point. And people just rolled their eyes and whatever. And the second thing was the Indians, talking to Indians. Working at Chaco worked with a lot of Navajo guys. That was the local labor force. And by work, I mean, we took turns on wheelbarrows and pick and shovel and stuff like that. But then we talked too.
00:34:17
Speaker
And the Navajos have some very detailed stories about Chaco. I think, in part, because they live on that landscape, and the landscape is demonic. You remember what happened at this place and what happened at that place. I think they have a lot of knowledge, direct or indirect, about Chaco.
00:34:33
Speaker
And they didn't remember it as a very happy place at all. In one discussion with a Navajo man who was from a clan there, a very well-educated guy, he talked about how they had a king at Chaco who enslaved everybody. And I said, well, that's interesting. Is there really a Navajo worker king? He said, no, but that's what this guy was. And then I was working at a museum in arts and culture in the 1990s, early 1990s. And I worked a lot of Pueblo people, artists and poets and, you know,
00:35:02
Speaker
historians and writers and folks like that. And we were working on the exhibit there and I had worked in members and I worked at Chaco and those are the two big ticket items for New Mexico, the New Mexico Museum. So as the archaeologist on the design team, I wanted to have a lot of members and a lot of Chaco because that's what people who visited the museum wanted to see. And the Rio Grande Pueblo guys that we worked with and many, many different Pueblos again and again would say, yeah, we know all about Chaco. We don't talk about it. Bad things happened out there.
00:35:31
Speaker
And, you know, that got me thinking that, okay, you know, something happened to Chaco that was outside the lines for modern Pueblo or ethnographic Pueblo. And Pueblos do know, I don't remember Chaco, and they don't trot it out. They don't want to, you know, it's not something you talk about because it wasn't a positive thing. I mean, it would help them on their road to becoming who they are today. But the experience itself was not positive, even though it was a wonderful place. It was like the Emerald City of Oz, you know, they had all this parrots
00:36:02
Speaker
turquoise and, you know, it was a glittery place, but it ended badly. I guess the final thing is, you know, I'm listening to these Indian people, these public people, Navajo people, and looking at the archaeology and wondering, you know, why can't other people see this? Why can't other archaeologists see this? You know, Chaco is a ringer. It's not something that, you know, we're prepared to grasp unless we go outside of the Southwest.
00:36:27
Speaker
And I finally realized that we were working with the wrong tools, that the way most of the Southwestern archaeologists were trained is they were very much trained in Pueblo ethnology and given this antiquated, to my mind, antiquated anthropological approach to dealing with the past, which is the big questions, where did the Pueblos come
Beyond Traditional Archaeology
00:36:48
Speaker
from? I mean, that was literally the big question on PhD qualifying exams, stuff like that. How do you account for the Pueblos? Which is an interesting question, but it may.
00:36:58
Speaker
not relevant to Chaco. They came through Chaco, but institutions of Chaco in its society are not represented in modern public. The history is and the memory is, but Chaco is something else. So, you know, I started thinking about how people got trained and this sort of ethos in the southwest, which I call Pueblo space, which again is a construction of Santa Fe and Fred Harvey and all the
00:37:23
Speaker
flute music and Zen gardeners and, you know, that kind of stuff that is pervasive in the Southwest. And, you know, the third thing was, yeah, realizing that we had the wrong set of tools. We're working with inappropriate tools for understanding Chaco. So tell us a little more about, you know, what you're describing is much more of a historical approach and some of the problems that can come on focusing
00:37:48
Speaker
Too much in an anthropological framework. So there's right, this famous quote, archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing. And yet it seems like in the case of Chaco, what we're seeing is that, you know, archaeology must be something more than anthropology or it is nothing or it's something a little bit off. So how do you see us using the insights and the tools of history to investigate
00:38:15
Speaker
these ancient times without written records. Of course, we have the oral traditions to work with. But tell us about your ideas of history in the ancient North American past. Well, back up here, the archaeology was allied with history in Europe. When we brought it over here as part of the colonial package, the colonial view, racist view on Native Americans as they didn't have any history. You know, these people are savages and have any history as we understood it. So they have to be studied
00:38:45
Speaker
in a natural science discipline as specimens. And in the 70s, when I was being trained, that was new archaeology, which is all hyperscience. It was sort of funny when you think about it now, it was just people puffing around in lab coats. But they thought history was just background noise, that you need to get rid of history to do science. And there were actually anti-history, which piling that on top of the old anthropological view, the ethnological view, that there wasn't much history in the New World.
00:39:12
Speaker
made it really rough to think historically. What I mean by thinking historically, thinking historically means that change happened, the stuff that happened in the past, and it wasn't all linear change, that you might have something that didn't survive into modern times. You do have, you know, call it collapse, call it whatever. You did have dead ends. You did have things that, you know, were experiments that didn't work. It isn't a linear progression from rude beginnings up to Taos, the Pueblo Taos or something like that. The main problem
00:39:42
Speaker
I see is sort of deprogramming Southwestern archaeology. So people admit that there was a history and it's not a history of where the Pueblos came from. I mean, it is, it is that too. But there's a whole lot more to the Southwest than modern Pueblos. Historically, historically, you know, there's a thousand years of history where all kinds of stuff happened.
00:40:02
Speaker
And we have to figure that out. Figuring that out is not easy. You know, if this were easy, everybody would be doing it. You sort of have to use every trick in the book to reconstruct history. And it's maybe possible to develop a pre-historiography, not meaning nothing derogatory about prehistory in a sense. It just means trying to write history without the tools and the resources of academic history, the discipline of history, which are mainly written.
00:40:28
Speaker
But you can do it. I mean, the logic is exactly the same, it's just the evidence is different. And you're not going to, you know, know the name of this guy, or you're not going to know the motivations that you might get from reading somebody's letters or something like that. It'll be more like historical geography, but at least it'll be historical, where up to the 1970s, it wasn't historical. It being southwestern archaeology.
00:40:53
Speaker
Another aspect of this approach you've highlighted in your work, which I think is really important for all of us to think about, is that what we consider these bounded cultural units of ancestral Puebloan or Anasazi and Ahohokam and Mogayon,
00:41:13
Speaker
You know, the standard approach in the Southwest is that, well, I guess these people probably knew about each other, but, you know, I do Mogollon and I don't really know what's going on up or people know what's going on in the other areas, but they don't see it related to what they're studying. So.
00:41:29
Speaker
Share with us a little bit about, I mean, your work has spanned these cultural areas. What's the importance for archaeologists, not only in the Southwest, but throughout North America, to know about what's going on outside of their specific region of expertise or interest? I think you could be a decent archaeologist if you had
00:41:50
Speaker
smaller horizons and specialized in some area, but you shouldn't be writing interpretive stuff. To really be doing useful interpretive historical stuff, you need to know the whole Southwest and you need to know what's going on in California. You need to know what's going on in the Mississippi Valley. You need to know what's going on in West Mexico and the Huasteca. You need to know what's going on in Central Mexico because these are all part of the historical context of what you're trying to describe.
00:42:16
Speaker
I was never a very good ho-com archaeologist, but I went down there and tried to learn. And it's interesting because ho-com is a really dynamic episode in the history of the Southwest. Really amazing things happening down there. And they're happening right before Chaco. I mean, ho-com reaches its peak right about 900, 10 hundred, and then it collapses back into Phoenix. That's right when Chaco takes off.
00:42:40
Speaker
So it's like punch, counter punch, where Ho-O-Com is the biggest thing in the Southwest until about 900 or 1000, then Choco explodes. And I don't think that's unrelated. I think there's a historical connection there between the rise, not demise, but the rise and fall of Ho-O-Com and the rise of Choco, eventual fall. One thing is just a, for instance, here is T-shaped doors, which are sort of iconic around Mesa Verde
00:43:08
Speaker
places like the Four Corners, the ancestral Pueblo area.
00:43:12
Speaker
If you look where T-shaped doors, and they really are iconic is the right word for them, even in ancient times, they obviously, they're highly symbolically charged. They're in exterior doors where everybody can see them and the doors that open to the outside world. So people approaching a building would see this big T-shaped door. They aren't for convenience. I mean, again, there's a symbolism there that I can demonstrate that they're symbolic. I can't tell what it meant, but a T-shaped is pretty important.
00:43:38
Speaker
They start at Chaco Canyon and then they start, you know, only in the great houses in the biggest buildings. And then they move north to, if you map them three times, they move north to Aztec ruins where they're in all the great houses, but they get democratized. So all the commoners have them now in their exterior doors, walls. You can see them at Mesa Verde. You can see them, you know, Utah. I see them all over the place. And then after, you know, 1280, when, when Aztec goes down and everybody leaves the four corners,
00:44:06
Speaker
That T-shape that is so important disappears from the Pueblo area. I mean, there's maybe two or three examples after 1300. And those are even questionable. Where they reappear is way down south in the heart, south of the Magión district at Casas Condes. And it's subsidiary sites, it's secondary sites.
00:44:28
Speaker
So there's these huge T-shaped doors and T-shaped altars and stuff like that. So if you map this out, there'd be a cluster of T-shaped doors around Chocol in the 11th and 12th centuries, and then a cluster at Aztec ruins and the Aztecs region in the four corners in the late 12th and 13th centuries. And then they disappear and they reappear all over the place of Northern Chihuahua in the 14th century and 15th century. So you have to know the archeology
00:44:54
Speaker
And it's a really obvious pattern, right? But you have to know the archeology to see that pattern. So yeah, you have to think beyond your valley in the ancestral Pueblo area or your valley in the members valley in the Mogollon area or whatever. You have to know, at least have a passing knowledge of all that stuff, which is a lot of stuff to learn.
00:45:16
Speaker
Absolutely. And kind of just for our listeners, really kind of portraying how Dr. Lexington practices what he preached. It's when I got accepted to CU Boulder, you know, my advisor, Dr. Bob Kelly was very happy that I was going to the department of Steve Lexington and Kathy Cameron was how he viewed.
00:45:31
Speaker
Colorado, and I'm a Plains archaeologist. I remember Dr. Lexington, I don't know if you do. One of my first interactions with you was at Scott Ortman's house for, I think it was like a farewell barbecue for his postdoc who was returning back to England. And I was very, very nervous to talking to you. And you had recently just gotten back from Spyro with Dr. Tim Pocketat, and I believe Dr. Gerardo Gutierrez. And I was like really excited to talk to you. And I work in the Plains and
00:45:56
Speaker
The Mississippi region is very influential in where I work. And I remember, you know, Dr. Lexon, I recently heard you just got back from some of these great mound, great mound site of Spyro. And like without missing a beat, you're like, we only call the mounds their pyramids and that's just colonial baggage. And we should really get rid of that from our.
00:46:12
Speaker
from our lexicon and just I was like, Oh, yes, exactly. You're absolutely right. And just like trying to awkwardly move, move conversations away. And then, you know, you went, you went to this, this site, which is clearly not in New Mexico, it's in Oklahoma and looking at some of these broad regional patterns and also.
00:46:29
Speaker
bring back to again, this, this notion of colonial baggage, part of the, the colonial package, as you called it. So yeah, just kind of like, this isn't the, for listeners, Dr. Lexon isn't just talking about the Southwest, but these views extend beyond just, just the Southwest and Chaco.
Future of Archaeology and Broader Perspectives
00:46:45
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it's funny if Native Americans had a boat, they're all canoes, even if it's a, you know, a hundred foot long.
00:46:54
Speaker
like Viking ship boat, which they had, I mean, not with the sails and all that stuff. But these things going up and down the Mississippi River, they're all canoes. And if they build a pyramid, it's a mound, which Monksmount at Cahokia is the biggest pyramid north of central Mexico, but it's a mound. Again, these are the colonial attitudes that we have to get past. When people, you know, I'm interested in decolonizing, but
00:47:18
Speaker
One of the first things that Southwestern archaeologists have to do is decolonize their brains, their methods. Absolutely. And kind of just summing this all up because having you on is a privilege to have you on this podcast. You recently retired and we just kind of want to know, like, what do you hope your legacy is in Southwestern archaeology or in archaeology as a whole?
00:47:42
Speaker
Well, I did some substantive things in Chaco and in the members country, which most of that stuff hopefully will probably last. I mean, you know, again, substantive stuff. In terms of the future of southwestern archaeology, the people of my generation, the boomers, it's too late. Those guys aren't happy with where I'm taking the archaeology at all because it's different than what they learned in the 70s and 80s. So I got my hopes pinned on.
00:48:10
Speaker
younger people. I wrote that last book, mainly for folks to come and we'll see what good, if any, it does. But yeah, and we haven't talked about this, but the integration of old-school archaeology with what native people have to say has certainly improved in the course of my career. And I'm not taking any credit for that, but that's a hopeful sign as well.
00:48:35
Speaker
Excellent. Well, with that, we just interviewed Dr. Steve Lexington about Chaco's rippling influence in the Southwest after its peak. Thank you so much for listening to the Site Bytes podcast, episode four of season one. Be sure to tune in next time when we're joined by Patrick Cruz, who will talk with us about the perspectives on Chaco from descendant indigenous communities.
00:49:13
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, in the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.