#He's just using it for this stuff. Positing kings and battles and the Chaco World as an empire

[specialagentartemis]

Chaco as a military state- what?? What grounds is that theory using??

Steve Lekson is a genuinely respected Chaco archaeologist with a... very idiosyncratic proposal about its social organization, which I am never sure how much he seriously believes and how much he puts forward to be provocative on purpose.

I think he put forward his idea of Chaco Canyon as the seat of a true state with the ability to muster a military to enforce the alliances with other Great House outliers back when it was more popular to view Chaco as a much more communal religious pilgrimage location. He posited the Great Houses as elite spaces akin to palaces, with their displays of wealth and power and evident ability to organize vast amounts of labor to build them, and the Chaco Roads serving a similar function as Inca or Roman roads: allowing the ability to muster forces and move people and supplies across the landscape quickly. He interpreted elite control over exotic and valuable goods as evidence of a much stronger and more centralized control over the political sphere, and outlying Great Houses not as individual organizations mirroring and claiming Chacoan power for their own communities but impositions of a Chaco worldview from the Canyon as center. and this was even before the DNA study where we learned about matrilineal elites/rulers!

Genuinely can't tell how much he believes it, vs. how much it's the academic version of performance art where he' says's saying to the Establishment, "you wanna believe in hippy-dippy Chaco soooo bad. What if they were a state? What if they did rule by imposed hierarchical coercion? What if the outlying Great Houses weren't a voluntary alignment with Chacoan ideology but an imposition of it by force? Why do you think there couldn't be a North American empire? Does that challenge your ideas of Chacoans as peaceful religious noble savages too much?" He has a very well-written and thought-provoking chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Southwest Archaeology about the need for scientific imagination and narrative history. It begins like this:

A colleague once told me that it was impossible to write a narrative history of the ancient Southwest. So I wrote one. In my narrative (Lekson 2009), there were rises and falls, triumphs and tragedies, nobles and commoners, war and peace, cities and countrysides—tropes of history everywhere in the world—but these almost never appeared in scholarly accounts of the ancient Southwest. And that was the polemic of my history: American anthropological archaeology denies to Native societies north of Mexico any significant history (Lekson 2010). Just a few notable events, mostly natural: a drought here, a collapse there, a migration or two, and so forth—but no kings-and-battles history, nothing for narrative.

It's a political stance as much as it's an archaeological claim, and he has been annoying other Chaco specialists for decades with this.