Steve Lekson says that A Study of Southwestern Archaeology is his last book. Apropos a final publication by a prominent Southwestern archaeologist, the book includes a number of philosophical discussions about archaeology versus history, history versus heritage, science versus the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, indigenous archaeology versus historiography, processual versus postmodern, inter alia—all worth reading, in my opinion. Many of his animadversions are contained in 110 pages of narrowly spaced endnotes, so be prepared to flip back and forth constantly as you read. Full disclosure: in a section titled “Bombs Away,” Lekson devotes eight pages in his book to challenging much of my recent work on Pueblo social history, so readers should know that Steve and I have a long history of disagreements and our views on Chaco and the greater Southwest often diverge greatly. Caveat lector.

Lekson's “study” is in fact mostly about Chaco. In Lekson's view, Chaco is a Mesoamerican-style city-state—comparable to an Aztec altepetl—complete with kings and lesser nobles, commoners, and capital cities in a large economically and politically integrated region: in other words, an empire in the northern Southwest. Lekson, who has always proclaimed his heterodoxy and grumpy outsiderness, seems untroubled that few Southwestern archaeologists agree with his interpretation. And he thinks he knows why: his colleagues cannot imagine Chacoan complexity, because we are all stuck in a box called “Pueblo Space.” “Pueblo Space” was created in the racist anthropology of the nineteenth century, when Pueblos were consigned to the intermediate society evolutionary class by Lewis Henry Morgan. All Pueblos, past and present, are egalitarian, nonhierarchical, peaceful, communal, independent, self-sufficient, and unchanging. There is no room in “Pueblo Space” for anything more complex than a tribe, or perhaps a simple chiefdom, and certainly not a city-state. And what is to blame for all this bias? Anthropology, which turned its back on history and embraced Santa Fe's “Pueblo Mystique” marketing efforts that defined the Pueblos for tourists, collectors, and, according to Lekson, anthropologists.

Lekson's description of “Pueblo Space” as the current view of Southwestern archaeologists is an idealized (when not completely fictionalized) description of the Pueblos that dates to the first half of the twentieth century, where it owes a heavy debt to Ruth Benedict and others. Most scholars of the Pueblos and, more importantly, their Native colleagues have not taken Pueblo egalitarianism seriously for decades. Despite an ethos of egalitarianism, all Pueblos distinguish between ritual elites and commoners. In most Pueblos, ritual elites have the power to levy sanctions on individuals up to and including expulsion from the community for life (and in the past, witchcraft accusations could lead to the ultimate sanction). Anthropologist Joseph Jorgensen, who published a massive comparative analysis of 172 indigenous groups in western North America (1980, Western Indians), described the Rio Grande Pueblos—the most likely Chacoan descendants—as the most top-down, centralized ritual and political organizations in western North America north of Mexico.

Lekson's views on “Pueblo Space” have been clear in his lectures and writings for at least the last 30 years. He embraces the notion that Pueblo ancestors voted with their feet in the late 1200s to escape Chacoan hegemony (by then, manifested by the late Chacoan site of Aztec, New Mexico). He relegates droughts and other climate impacts to the dendroclimatological “tail wagging the dog of Southwestern pre-history” (p. 138). According to Lekson, a post-Chaco reinvention of Pueblo society combined with the profound impacts of Euro-American conquest and colonization in the centuries afterward effectively severed the link between the historic Pueblos and their precolonial Pueblo ancestors. However, modern scholarship increasingly views the hierarchical authority structures we see in all contemporary Pueblos as having roots in deep prehistory. What, exactly, was reinvented, and where? Did prehistoric social change and Euro-American conquest sever all connections between past and present? Lekson does not say, and his notion of “Pueblo Space” has little to do with the history of Pueblo scholarship. Instead, “Pueblo Space” is a rhetorical device designed to accomplish two things: (1) to justify ignoring Pueblo ethnographic research and (2) to disparage opposing views by putting them in the “Pueblo Space.” Lekson's unique style of expression and his cherry-picking of citations and data to justify his assertions make the book fun to read for some, infuriating for others; the book's title imitates Walter Taylor's A Study of Archaeology (1948), which was certainly not a dispassionate examination of archaeological method and theory.

Lekson refuses to grant “agency” to Chacoans, who were apparently incapable of creating their own brand of complexity. Chaco was a peripheral Mesoamerican society, a “secondary state” that relied on Mesoamericans to provide the evolutionary impetus as well as the governing model of social complexity. For Lekson, this is “history,” and anthropology is “anti-history.” But what kind of history is this? Aztec altepetls have their own history: there were many of them, and they flourished in historical contexts that postdate Chaco.

But if Chaco was not a Mesoamerican city-state, how should we explain the presence of copper bells, macaws, and cacao in Pueblo Bonito and other great houses? Chaco—in my view—was too far away and too deficient in resources to be within Mesoamerica's sphere of direct economic and political influence. What could possibly motivate legions of Mesoamericans to travel 1,200 miles on foot through their northern frontier to establish a secondary state in such a cold, arid, resource-poor region of northwestern New Mexico? Turquoise acquisition? Doubtful. Consider, however, that the view looking south from Chaco offered tantalizing glimpses of Mesoamerican power and its symbols that emergent Chacoan leaders could use to validate and intensify their status. Macaws, copper bells, and cacao, which were transported to the Southwest over long distances, could be used in Chaco to inspire awe. And all of these exotics could be carried in a basket or backpack (as depicted on some Mimbres bowls). Chaco may have been beyond the hegemonic reach of Mesoamerican states that lacked wheeled vehicles and domestic traction animals but was not too far for powerful objects and ideas to spread north and be transformed by nascent ritual elites. Under the circumstances, and despite Lekson's rejection of the term, rituality (coined by Robert Drennan and applied to Chaco by Norman Yoffee) seems to me a better fit than secondary state. And perhaps Cahokia, Lekson's favorite Chaco analogue, was on a similar trajectory.