The Chaco Meridian: One Thousand Years of Political and Religious Power in the Ancient Southwest, 2nd ed - Stephen H. Lekson [epub]

According to archaeologist Stephen H. Lekson, much of what we think we know about the Southwest has been compressed into conventions and classifications and orthodoxies. This book challenges and reconfigures these accepted notions by telling two parallel stories, one about the development, personalities, and institutions of Southwestern archaeology and the other about interpretations of what actually happened in the ancient past.

While many works would have us believe that nothing much ever happened in the ancient Southwest, this book argues that the region experienced rises and falls, kings and commoners, war and peace, triumphs and failures. In this view, Chaco Canyon was a geopolitical reaction to the “Colonial Period” Hohokam expansion and the Hohokam “Classic Period” was the product of refugee Chacoan nobles, chased off the Colorado Plateau by angry farmers. Far to the south, Casas Grandes was a failed attempt to create a Mesoamerican state, and modern Pueblo people―with societies so different from those at Chaco and Casas Grandes―deliberately rejected these monumental, hierarchical episodes of their past.

Stephen H. Lekson is professor of anthropology and Curator of Archaeology, Museum of Natural History, at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has authored or edited over 10 books on southwestern archaeology including the award-winning Ancient Lands, Ancestral Places (Borderlands Book of the Year 1993), Canyon Spirits (Colorado Book Award Finalist, 2005), and A History of the Ancient Southwest (New Mexico Book Award, Science, 2010; Southwest Books of the Year, Notable Book, 2010). Lekson is also past president of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

Paperback: 284 pages
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers; 2nd edition (March 19, 2015)