Steve Lekson – “Studying Southwestern Archaeology”

For over a century, archaeology got the history of the ancient Southwest wrong.  So argues Steve Lekson as he advocates for an entirely new approach – one that separates archaeological thought in the Southwest from its anthropological home and moves it to more historical ways of thinking.  Focusing on the enigmatic monumental center at Chaco Canyon, the presentation provides a historical analysis of how Southwest archaeology confined itself and how it can break out of those confines and proceed into the future.  Looking past old preconceptions brings a different Chaco Canyon into view: more than an eleventh-century Pueblo ritual center, Chaco was political capital with nobles and commoners, a regional economy, and deep connections to Mesoamerica.  By getting the history right, a different science of the ancient Southwest becomes possible and archaeology is reinvented as a very different discipline.