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Stephen H. Lekson.
The Chaco Meridian: one thousand years of political and religious power in the ancient southwest: 2nd edn.
Rowman and Littlefield. 2015

Revisiting his groundbreaking synthesis of Southwestern prehistory, Lekson expands our understanding of the political and economic integration of the American Southwest to encapsulate more than 1,000 years and 1,000 kilometers, from AD 500 to the arrival of the conquistadors, and from Choco Canyon to Aztec Ruins to Paquimé and even Culiacán in Sinaloa, Mexico.

Stephen H. Lekson.
A Study of Southwestern Archaeology.
University of Utah Press. 2018

For over a century, southwestern 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, this book 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 a 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.