Heitman's (Reference Heitman2016) feminist critique of Chacoan archaeology seeks to rebalance the gender ledger by cataloging the many important roles that women played in Ancestral Pueblo societies. Unfortunately, she launches her critique by casting my avunculate sodality hypothesis (Ware Reference Ware2014) as a contrasting “male perspective on social transformations in Chaco Canyon” (Heitman Reference Heitman2016:472). This statement misrepresents my work and therefore deserves comment.

My avunculate hypothesis is grounded in matrilineal theory, so it would hardly qualify as a strictly “male perspective” on anything. The hypothesis simply acknowledges that in societies where matrilineal ideologies predominate, ritual and political authority—which tend to be monopolized by men in most societies, and in all Pueblos—often shifts from fathers and sons to uncles and nephews. Pueblo homology supports the theoretical expectation. Even today, Western Pueblo sodalities are embedded in matrilineal descent groups through the office of sodality head priest, which typically passes from maternal uncle to sororal nephew within the avunculate—always depending, of course, on the availability of suitable personnel (Ware Reference Ware2014:94–96).

I am not surprised that Heitman misses the finer points of my avunculate hypothesis, since her critique never mentions the importance of matrilineal descent among the Pueblos. I would have thought it relevant to feminist theory that two-thirds of all Pueblos, from every Pueblo language family, embrace matrilineal ideologies; that female ownership of house and land was noted by the first Spanish explorers to reach the Western Pueblo world in the 1500s (James Reference James1997), so the practices must have originated in precolonial times; that recent analyses of Eastern Pueblo kinship terminologies suggest that Iroquois and Crow alliance structures underlie all Pueblo kinship systems, including the now thoroughly bilateral Rio Grande Tanoans (Hill Reference Hill and Whiteley2018; Whiteley Reference Whiteley and Whiteley2018); and, finally, that a series of stratified elite burials spanning over 300 years from Pueblo Bonito have recently been shown to have identical mitochrondrial DNA (Kennett et al. Reference Kennett, Plog, George, Culleton, Watson, Skoglund, Rohland, Mallick, Stewardson, Kistler, LeBlanc, Whiteley, Reich and Perry2017). These facts alone would likely explain much of the emphasis on female symbolism that Heitman documents. We must ask, therefore, why Heitman neglects an important aspect of kinship theory that supports her thesis. Based on her publication record, it would appear that Heitman's investment in Lévi-Strauss's house society model somehow precludes her consideration of descent theory (e.g., Heitman Reference Heitman, Heitman and Plog2014).

I have expressed concerns about Heitman's use of house theory to explain Chaco social-political formations elsewhere (Hays-Gilpin and Ware Reference Ware2015:336–38) and will not belabor the points here, except to express regret that descent theory has been so devalued in the works of recent social theorists (e.g., Kuper Reference Kuper1982) that scholars are now forced to consult ancient pre-1980s texts to acquaint themselves with its relevance to social theory. Readers can judge for themselves, but I see nothing in my work that can be construed as devaluing the role of women in Pueblo society, Chaco included. As I point out (e.g., Ware Reference Ware2014:99–101), women are never entirely excluded from the ritual and political life of Pueblo communities, they have their own ritual sodalities and serve important support roles in most male sodalities, and matrilineal lineages and clans still play vital integrative roles in over half of all Pueblo communities, from every Pueblo language family.

There are other mischaracterizations of my book in Heitman's critique but one example stands out because it suggests that she may have sampled but probably never actually read the book. According to Heitman (Reference Heitman2016:477), “Counter to Ware's assertions, Lamphere (Reference Lamphere and Crown2000:385) argues that the post-A.D. 1040 transformation apparent in the Chacoan built environment was a reflection of the widening social differentiation between ‘ordinary’ and ‘important people’—a distinction clearly evident among contemporary descendant communities.” Heitman is referring here to Lamphere's “ritual power model,” which actually aligns perfectly with the arguments I make about Chaco. For example, I argue there are two categories of Pueblo people, the ceremonially rich and ceremonially poor, and that these categories likely have deep historical roots since they are pan-Pueblo in scope (Ware Reference Ware2014:44–46). I hypothesize that the growth and elaboration of ritual hierarchies during the Classic Bonito Phase (1040–1100 CE) resulted from the detachment of ritual sodalities from the avunculate and thus from matrilineage control (Ware Reference Ware2014:120–26). This would have elevated the status of Chacoan ritualists relative to kin-based leaders, contributing to a widening social differentiation between the ceremonially rich and ceremonially poor that led eventually to the sodality-based polities that govern all Eastern Pueblos today, and the gender hierarchies that evolved in consequence. Although I failed to cite Lamphere's model in my book, I wish I had, since our arguments are virtually identical.