Yale School of the Environment and the Yale School of Architecture; In common parlance, Chaco Canyon is shorthand for societal collapse. The monumental ruins in present-day New Mexico, the story goes, are testament to the hubris of the Pre-Colombian peoples that occupied the site. Purportedly, they overran the carrying capacity of the land and their fractious nature prevented social cohesion, leading to an abandonment of the great houses in the 13th and 14th centuries CE. This spurious narrative persists despite the archeological finds of the past 30 years, which show that the society centered in Chaco Canyon was a well-resourced and well-organised polity. In particular, the geographer Jared Diamond, in his scholarly as well as his popular works, can be credited with proliferating this image of Chaco Canyon's collapse. The tenacity of this narrative, while no doubt political, is also buttressed by the prevalence of structuralist paradigms in North American archeology's interpretation of pre-contact architecture. In these paradigms, Chaco Canyon is understood as a 'house society' that, having developed from a simple society, collapsed on the precipice of its transition to social complexity. A synthesis of recent scholarship, however, allows us to interpret the apparent collapse as a transition from one form of complexity to another. This transition was indexed by the reoccupation and reuse of great houses - built by Chaco's earlier inhabitants as ceremonial structures - as residential structures by their inhabitants in the latter part of the 12th century CE. This reoccupation is notable in two ways: it is an exception to the teleology assumed by the idea of 'house society', and it undermines the argument that the site's later abandonment was the result of social collapse. In what follows, my analysis centers on Pueblo Bonito, a large and well-studied great house in Chaco Canyon. A close reading of the events in Pueblo Bonito suggests that the patterns of reoccupation in the late 12th century do not a represent a social discontinuity or collapse, but instead bear the imprint of a shift to a more egalitarian polity in Chaco and the surrounding region.
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