Redefining the Scale of Chacoan Communities

What constitutes a Chacoan community? Understanding the scale and organization of Chacoan communities is essential for determining if Chaco operated as a system and for identifying the interactions that structured the relationships between outlying communities and Chaco Canyon. However, our knowledge of the political, economic, and social organization of Chacoan communities remains largely in the realm of speculation. Lekson (1991: 42) has pointed out that a primary reason we know little about the structure and variability of Chacoan communities is that surveys are typically limited to the immediate vicinity of great houses and that those sites may represent only a