Chaco reloaded: Discursive social memory on the post-Chacoan landscape

Archaeologists have recently begun to address the ways in which past peoples revived, referenced, utilized, and amended their own, more distant pasts for diverse social and political ends. Social memory refers to shared ideas about the past. Monumental architecture entails the discursive construction of memory. Memory can be grounded in direct connections to immediate ancestors, or it can involve tenuous links to remote antiquity. In the terrain between, ideas about the past are both replicated and distorted. The concepts of citation and translation help clarify these processes. In the Southwest USA, architects in diverse temporal and social contexts invoked the memory of the prominent ritual center Chaco Canyon. At the twelfth-century site of Aztec, builders cited Chacoan architecture to legitimate ritual and political organization. In the thirteenth century in the Four Corners region, builders translated Chacoan ideas into McElmo-style towers to stabilize and transform a world in chaos.