A History of the Ancient Southwest

Stephen H. Lekson's A History of the Ancient Southwest, published by the School for Advanced Research Press in 2009, is a scholarly synthesis of the archaeology of the pre-contact American Southwest, arguing for political and religious continuity connecting Chaco Canyon, Aztec Ruins and Paquime across centuries in a way that challenges accounts treating each as a separate, disconnected culture. Lekson is a career Southwest archaeologist whose earlier fieldwork underlies the argument. Its strength is that long specialist engagement with the region's excavated evidence, offered as a genuinely synthetic account rather than a site by site survey. Its limit is that Lekson's continuity thesis, especially the claim of a meaningful north-south alignment connecting these sites, remains debated among Southwest archaeologists rather than settled consensus, so a claim built on it should be attributed to Lekson's own argument.