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Banner image: Stephen Lekson (with tripod) and colleagues excavate the great house at Chimney Rock in southern Colorado. (Credit: CU Boulder)

Some of Stephen Lekson鈥檚 fondest memories from his 45-plus years as an archaeologist are of mornings at Chimney Rock.听

This site in southern Colorado was a satellite community for a society called听the Chaco Canyon culture, which thrived in the Four Corners region from about 850 to 1150 A.D.听

The town spreads over sandstone cliffs that climb nearly 1,000 feet above a valley. And at the top of what Lekson called a 鈥渒nife edge ridge鈥� is a great house, a massive living space that overlooks the smaller dwellings below.听

To get to that building, 鈥測ou鈥檇 drive up out of the clouds, and the fog would burn off, and you鈥檇 see mountains all around,鈥� said Lekson of the CU Boulder Museum of Natural History and Department of Anthropology. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a beautiful setting.鈥�

But for Lekson, who recently retired, that beautiful setting also says something about the ancestral Pueblo peoples who lived there. He contends that the Chaco Canyon culture was a stratified civilization, ruled by elites or royals who resided in great houses and towered over castes of commoners鈥攍iterally, in the case of Chimney Rock.听

It鈥檚 an argument that goes against what generations of archaeologists have believed about the Southwest: that the people who populated this region before contact with Europeans lived only in small, agrarian and egalitarian societies. It鈥檚 also the central theme of the scientist鈥檚 new book, .

鈥淚n the Southwest, we鈥檝e had this glass ceiling that got set over the field more than 100 years ago,鈥� Lekson said. 鈥淎nd for some reason or another we just can鈥檛 get out from underneath it.鈥�

Chocolate and听parrots

That glass ceiling, Lekson explained, begins with academic baggage鈥攊n particular, the assumptions that white archaeologists made about the Southwest in the early 20th Century.

Public intellectuals like Ruth Benedict and John Collier, reeling from the violence of World War I, created an image of the Southwest that was filled with 鈥淶en gardeners,鈥� Lekson said鈥攑eaceful people who lived in harmony with their environment. It had little to do with the lives of actual Pueblo peoples, modern or ancestral.听

鈥淚n that interwar period, there was a lot of change,鈥� Lekson said. 鈥淚 think that image of Pueblos appealed to Americans: They鈥檙e permanent, constant and peaceful.鈥�

In his new book, which was released in late 2018, he makes the case that such a stereotype doesn鈥檛 fit for huge chunks of the historic Southwest, including Chaco Canyon.

That civilization, he said, may have encompassed as many as 100,000 people at its height, with a capital city in what is now in New Mexico. And they probably weren鈥檛 all equal.

Take a great house about 85 miles south of Chimney Rock called Pueblo Bonito: The rulers who lived in this building鈥攚hich was four stories tall and contained an estimated 650 rooms鈥攄rank cacao and kept macaws imported from Mexico. They also buried select members of their dead in indoor crypts lavished with thousands of turquoise beads. That鈥檚 a big contrast with commoners who lived in much smaller homes and buried their own dead in communal cemeteries.

鈥淚f you picked up Chaco and dropped it anywhere else in the world, archaeologists wouldn鈥檛 have any problem with it,鈥� Lekson said. 鈥淚n the Southwest, we鈥檝e turned it into a pilgrimage center, anything but a capital city, which is clearly what it was.鈥�

Scott Ortman, an assistant professor in anthropology at CU Boulder, has also studied the ancient Southwest. He agrees that Chaco Canyon looks like nothing else for hundreds of miles.

鈥淭here are all these ways in which the legacy of early anthropology is still with the field,鈥� he said. 鈥淚 think Steve鈥檚 book is the clearest and best deconstruction of that.鈥�

Moving forward

It is also Lekson鈥檚 last book as an archaeologist鈥攑robably. With that in mind, he doesn鈥檛 want to come off as a gadfly or a malcontent. Instead, he鈥檚 trying to answer a question that many young researchers have asked him: what now?

Lekson鈥檚 biggest piece of advice is that members of his field need to start thinking less like cultural anthropologists and more like historians. In practice, that means taking a deeper look at archaeological evidence and paying attention when that data doesn鈥檛 fit the academic stereotype of a Pueblo.听

鈥淲e treat these societies as following a straight line to when some white guy shows up in 1920s and writes down an anthropological account,鈥� Lekson said. 鈥淏ut a historian would say that in any society, there are ups and downs and dead ends.鈥�

In other words, Lekson hopes that Southwestern archaeologists will begin to see the region for what it is: complex, dynamic and human.听

鈥淭hat鈥檚 all I鈥檓 trying to do in this book鈥攖o draw out some things that will help to move the field forward,鈥� he said.