[AlotOfReading]

It happens surprisingly often. I'm curious how your understanding differs though. I'm not trying to describe how we think about Chaco today, but rather how academics 60-70 years ago interpreted it through a diffusionist lens.

[pueblito]

My understanding is that the Spanish knew what the ruins were because they asked around and got the answer. I think there's a difference between knowing something and formally studying something scientifically and methodically. The latter surely must involve discounting second hand testimony while valuing physical evidence. Like, I can tell you about how my father-in-law found conquistador armor in an ice cave by the great sand dunes but academically that doesn't interest anyone.

I do find it difficult to understand how any academic could believe Pueblo people weren't (culturally predisposed?) to building Chaco Canyon when we have cities like Taos practically next door.

[AlotOfReading]

Chaco is pretty different than the modern Pueblos in a number of important ways. It's a lot more monumental (The back wall of Pueblo Bonito was ~5 stories tall), many potsherds have "mesoamerican" designs, the burials are incredibly rich, and the road network looks a lot like Aztec roads and the time period matched Toltecs, who were their "predecessors". Moreover, diffusionism was totally in vogue and it wasn't considered radical at all to suggest that Chaco was the distant outpost of some Toltecs making the local Puebloan populations labor for them. After all, Pacquime down in Chihuahua was an even larger, more impressive Toltec output (it wasn't). Additionally, though we now understand "anasazi" to refer to ancestral Puebloans, prior to the discovery/analysis of the Magician's Tomb in the 1920s, the link between ancestral and modern Puebloans was only suspected at best, and definitely not as a continuation.

Besides as any anthropologist would tell you, taking people purely at face value can hide some very complicated relationships. Some Navajo/Diné will tell you a lot of the ruins are their ancestors', for example. Some Hopi reportedly disclaimed Chaco to early archaeologists, calling it a bad place because they didn't want to claim descent from the political system. Something similar occurs with O'odham peoples and Hohokam structures.