Chaco and Cahokia in Continental Contexts

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Method, Theory, and History in the Mississippian World: Papers in Honor of Timothy R. Pauketat" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Tim Pauketat published Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City in 2009. That same year, I published History of the Ancient Southwest. While differently structured, the books shared similar goals: to place their protagonists – Cahokia and Southwest – in context(s), epistemologically and historically. Both offered accounts of the process of archaeology: how we know what we know. And both presented histories of the protagonists’ contemporaries: what was going on at those times. Both books hinted and suggested possible dynamics between and among ancient North American societies, but neither fully connected the dots. Pauketat’s 2023 Gods of Thunder connects the dots. I review and offer a friendly critique of Gods of Thunder’s take on the Southwest and perhaps connect some different dots, or some dots differently.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Method, Theory, and History in the Mississippian World: Papers in Honor of Timothy R. Pauketat

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50866