Phoenix, Arizona
The last two chapters in Crucible of Pueblos try to offer assessments of the rest of the book from very different perspectives. The second-to-last, by Steve Lekson, is the shortest chapter in the book, and much of it is drawn from Lekson’s own recent book giving an overview of Southwestern archaeology (which he is very upfront about admitting, to his credit). Nevertheless, it does manage both to situate the present book in the context of other synthetic works covering specific periods of Southwestern prehistory and to situate the areas covered by the book into their own context given what else was happening in other regions at the time.
First, Lekson notes that this volume is the latest in a series of books bringing together experts on different sub-regions of the northern Southwest to compile and analyze data on the most important sites of a given period. This hasn’t been a formal book series, but more of an ad-hoc process of meetings and resulting publications that have ended up being functionally similar. The most obvious examples of other books like this are two published by the University of Arizona Press and deliberately put in similar formats, covering the Pueblo III and Pueblo IV periods. Lekson claims that he played a major role in organizing the meeting that led to the Pueblo III book, the first to be published, which I didn’t know but have no reason to doubt (he was not a contributor to the published book). I discussed that book a few years back in a series of posts very similar to this one. I’ve also read the Pueblo IV volume but haven’t discussed it in any detail here.
What I found particularly interesting was Lekson’s argument that the Pueblo II period, the time of the florescence of Chaco Canyon, is also covered by a volume in this informal series, in this case a special issue of the journal Kiva that was part of the series of meetings and publications that Lekson organized to synthesize the work of the Chaco Project. I have all of the articles in that issue in electronic format, although I haven’t read them all. This chapter makes me think I should.
Finally, Lekson presents Crucible of Pueblos as the equivalent volume for Pueblo I, which makes a lot of sense for me. As he notes, information on major sites is a lot harder for this period than for subsequent ones, as they are much more subtle on the landscape than in later periods. Nevertheless, he recognizes the amount of information brought together for the first time here and its importance, as do I. I’ve tried to convey the importance of this information in this series of posts and I hope I’ve succeeded.
Moving to his discussion of the Pueblo I period itself, Lekson tries to situate the process of village formation in the northern Southwest in the context of developments elsewhere, particularly in the southern Southwest and to a lesser extent Mesoamerica. This is the part of the chapter that’s drawn largely from his book, so it wasn’t new to me, but it is still an interesting and thought-provoking way to conceptualize Pueblo I. The basic argument he makes is that while village formation was (mostly) new in the northern Southwest in Pueblo I and is in some ways its most interesting development, there had been villages in the deserts of southern Arizona and adjacent areas for centuries at that point, and for even longer further to the south in Mexico, the probable origin of the concept for this part of the world. Specifically, he suggests that the formation of villages in the northern Southwest may have been a reaction to the expansion of the Hohokam out of the Phoenix Basin during the so-called “Colonial Period.” It’s not clear exactly what form this expansion took in terms of migration, diffusion, or other processes, but Lekson argues persuasively that people further north and east on the Colorado Plateau must have been aware of it and that they probably factored it into their own decisions about where and how to live.
In the book, Lekson goes into more detail about all of this, but for this chapter he more or less stops there. As I said before, this is a very short contribution, but an interesting one. And, of course, it is written in Lekson’s inimitable and highly accessible style. Not the most weighty or original part of this book, perhaps, but interesting and worthwhile all the same.
Gambler's House 