Marketing Conquest and the Vanishing Indian: Michael Wilcox on Diamond

Stanford archaeologist Michael Wilcox argues that the narratives anthropology and archaeology tell about Indigenous disappearance are themselves instruments of conquest — and that the actual mechanisms of colonization were not guns, germs, and steel but lawyers, gods, and money (Wilcox 2010, 112). His article “Marketing Conquest and the Vanishing Indian: An Indigenous Response to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse” (Journal of Social Archaeology 10(1): 92–117) responds to Diamond from inside the field whose published literature Diamond drew on. This page is the canonical treatment of Wilcox’s article on Living Anthropologically. The lecture above covers the article’s argument through the Pima/O’Odham case, the Diamond critique, and the Lawyers/Gods/Money reframing; the Chaco Canyon archaeological evidence is referenced but not worked through in depth, and the Pueblo Revolt ideology material gets picked up in the next class as the bridge into the colonial world system before anthropology. Both are summarized below for completeness. For the broader anthropological critique of Guns, Germs, and Steel as a book, see Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond: Against History. For Diamond’s earlier “Worst Mistake” article, see Domestication as Worst Mistake?. For documentation of the archaeological sources Diamond drew from, see Agriculture as Worst Mistake.

Key Concepts

The Pima/O’Odham were still providing emergency provisions and water to the U.S. Army through the 1870s — 400 years after supposed conquest (Wilcox 2010, 94).
The name “Pima” comes from the O’Odham phrase “pi maas” — what Spanish soldiers in 1692 recorded when they asked O’Odham men who they were. It translates as “I don’t understand what you are saying” (Wilcox 2010, 94).
The Hohokam are an invented people. American archaeologists arriving in 1880 refused to connect the massive irrigation system to the dispossessed O’Odham they could see, inventing instead an extinct ethnic group (Wilcox 2010, 98).
What destroyed O’Odham agriculture was not Indigenous environmental mismanagement but Anglo settlement and upstream water diversion that left the Gila River dry before it reached O’Odham farms (Wilcox 2010, 97).
Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel frames European conquest as a geographical accident driven by domesticates, immunities, and pathogens — removing human agency from the European side of the equation (Wilcox 2010, 99–100).
Collapse reverses that framing: where European success was accident, Indigenous failure becomes choice (Wilcox 2010, 98, 102). The two books bookend each other.
Chaco Canyon was most likely a multi-ethnic ritual center, not a city. Packrat middens show no forest to deforest, and isotopic analysis (Sr87/Sr86 ratios) proves construction timber and corn were imported from 75–90 kilometers away in the Chuska Mountains and San Juan River floodplain (Wilcox 2010, 107–111).
Diamond never consulted any Pueblo communities about Chaco despite permanent signs at every Great House identifying it as a sacred site (Wilcox 2010, 103).
Wilcox’s reformulation: the actual instruments of conquest were lawyers, gods, and money — legal frameworks denying Indigenous water rights, militarized Christianity, and economic ambition for land (Wilcox 2010, 112).
Archaeology should explain survival, not just conquest. Diamond’s narrative of disappearance is itself “the most noxious and potent agent of conquest” (Wilcox 2010, 114–115).

Michael Wilcox: Stanford Anthropology

Michael V. Wilcox is an archaeologist in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, of Yuman and Choctaw descent (Wilcox 2010, 117). His book The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact (University of California Press, 2009) develops the framework summarized in the Journal of Social Archaeology article. “Marketing Conquest and the Vanishing Indian” was also reprinted in Patricia A. McAnany and Norman Yoffee’s edited volume Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2010), the collective archaeological response to Diamond’s Collapse.

Wilcox’s intervention is distinct from a general anthropological critique of Diamond. He writes from inside North American archaeology — the field whose published literature Diamond drew on — and demonstrates that the archaeological record contradicts Diamond’s specific claims about Chaco Canyon and the Hohokam. The critique works at the level of evidence, not just theory.

The Pima, the O’Odham, and the Invention of the Hohokam

Wilcox opens with a story most readers won’t have heard. In the years before the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), U.S. Cavalry expeditions arrived in the Sonoran Desert exhausted and short on supplies, and were surprised to find a thriving community of Indigenous agriculturalists diverting Gila River water into an elaborate system of irrigation canals. Throughout the 1800s, Pima farmers freely offered emergency provisions to the U.S. Army. By the 1870s the tribe was providing up to six million pounds of wheat annually to gold rush migrants, military parties, and transcontinental travelers (Wilcox 2010, 94). Native Americans did not just disappear in 1492.

The people the Spanish called “Pima” never called themselves that. In 1692 a party of Spanish soldiers happened upon a small group of O’Odham men and asked them who they were. The reply, “pi maas,” translates roughly as “I don’t understand what you are saying” — and the Spanish dutifully recorded it as the tribal name (Wilcox 2010, 94). The power to name a people is, as Wilcox argues, itself an instrument of conquest.

The Hohokam are an invented people. When the first American archaeologists came to investigate massive irrigation systems and adobe great houses in 1880, they had trouble believing any connection existed between the advanced civilization they were excavating and the impoverished O’Odham they could see around them (Wilcox 2010, 98). Rather than documenting the recent collapse of the O’Odham economy — which was happening in front of them — they invented an extinct ethnic group based on the O’Odham word “hohokam” for “those who have gone before” or “all used up.”

What had actually destroyed O’Odham agriculture was not Indigenous environmental mismanagement but Anglo settlement after federal desert land legislation. Anglo-American farmers, unfamiliar with desert irrigation, over-watered massive tracts, salinized soils, and within a few years diverted so much water upstream that the Gila River ran dry before reaching O’Odham farms (Wilcox 2010, 97). In 1873 an O’Odham delegation traveled to Washington to plead with the government to stop the theft of water by Anglo farmers; Indians, lacking U.S. citizenship until 1924, could not defend themselves in court. By 1878 Congress recommended removal of the Pima to Oklahoma; by 1893 tuberculosis carried by Bureau of Indian Affairs personnel had killed half of the O’Odham population. None of this was accidental.

The Thirteen Colonies Problem

The lecture connects Wilcox’s argument to a broader pattern in U.S. history education. Elementary and middle school textbooks typically devote a few pages to Paleo-Indians crossing the Bering land bridge, then jump immediately to the thirteen colonies. Maps show the rest of the continental United States grayed out with state boundaries already drawn — as if those territories were simply waiting to become states rather than being home to complex societies with their own histories.

Students learn 200 years of colonial history while remaining ignorant of simultaneous events in what would become the Southwest: Spanish colonization, the Great Pueblo Revolt of 1680 that Wilcox examines in detail, ongoing negotiations between Indigenous nations and colonial powers, the Haitian Revolution’s impact on the Louisiana Purchase. This pedagogical pattern — and not Wilcox’s article directly — is what makes the article’s argument feel surprising to students. The Pima providing wheat to the U.S. Army in the 1870s is shocking only because the curriculum has erased the possibility.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: Conquest as Geographical Accident

Wilcox describes Diamond’s argument with precision. Guns, Germs, and Steel presents itself as an attack on racial determinism, but its actual story is that European conquest was a geographical accident — Europeans happened to live where the domesticable animals and crops were, and microscopic pathogens did the real work of conquest (Wilcox 2010, 99–100). The argument removes human agency from the European side of the equation. The narrative becomes palatable to modern readers because successful colonization was, in this framing, no one’s fault.

The compounding problem, Wilcox argues, is that Diamond drew his data from an archaeological literature that had spent much of the late twentieth century documenting Indigenous “failures” without reference to descendant communities. Read without that reference, every archaeological site becomes evidence of social, technological, or environmental failure — and the absence of a permanent settlement becomes proof of an evolutionary dead-end. Diamond’s conclusions about Chaco and the Hohokam followed naturally from that literature, even where the literature itself was wrong.

Collapse: Indigenous Societies “Choose to Fail”

Then comes Collapse. The same author who explained European success as accident now explains Indigenous failure as choice. As Wilcox puts it, the subtle shift is between the “accident” of conquest in Guns and the “choice” of success or failure among Diamond’s Anasazi in Collapse (Wilcox 2010, 101). Europeans accidentally conquer; Indigenous societies choose to fail. The two-book project absolves the conquerors and pathologizes the conquered.

The framing also misreads the archaeological record. Many of the “abandonments” Diamond cites — at Chaco Canyon, in the O’Odham homeland, throughout the Pueblo world — were not collapses but reorganizations. Mobility was a social strategy. Communities that left a landscape often left for reasons unrelated to environmental failure, including deliberate distance from coercive religious or political authority. The next section examines this in detail at Chaco.

Drive-By Archaeology: The Chaco Canyon Evidence

The middle chapters of Wilcox’s article work through the archaeological evidence at Chaco Canyon — the central case in Diamond’s Collapse. The lecture references this evidence briefly without working through it in depth. The following summarizes the article’s argument for readers consulting this page.

Diamond’s claim is that Chaco collapsed through deforestation, overpopulation, and environmental mismanagement, culminating in warfare and cannibalism between AD 1125 and 1150 (Diamond 2005, 151–152; summarized in Wilcox 2010, 104). The archaeological evidence does not support this:

There was never a forest to deforest. Packrat middens in the canyon reveal a climate and ecology almost identical to today’s. The estimated 200,000 trees used for construction came from the Chuska Mountains, 75 kilometers to the west (Hall 1988, cited in Wilcox 2010, 108).
Food and water were imported. Isotopic signatures (Sr87/Sr86 ratios) in corn from Chaco middens match plants grown 80–90 kilometers away in the Chuska Mountains and San Juan River floodplain (Reynolds et al. 2005; Benson et al. 2003, cited in Wilcox 2010, 109–110). The canyon averages fewer than 100 frost-free days per year — short of the 120 days modern Pueblo farmers require for corn cultivation.
The permanent population was small. Only 350 burials have been found across roughly eight centuries of occupation (AD 400–1300). Only a small number of rooms have hearths or mealing bins — the normal indicators of year-round residence (Wilcox 2010, 110–111).
There is no evidence of warfare or cannibalism. Only a small percentage of burials show perimortem violence; no burial evidence supports large-scale warfare (Lekson 2002, cited in Wilcox 2010, 111).
People did not disappear. The “end” of Chaco coincides with the appearance of Pueblo peoples throughout the region exhibiting the same architectural forms and material cultures (Wilcox 2010, 111).

Chaco was most likely a multi-ethnic ritual center where ideas and food were exchanged during periodic pilgrimages along precisely oriented road systems. The dispersal of Pueblo peoples after Chaco is reorganization, not collapse — and may reflect a deliberate response to the dangers of ritual centralization. Diamond ignores this entirely (Wilcox 2010, 111).

Lawyers, Gods, and Money: The Real Instruments of Conquest

Wilcox’s most-cited reformulation appears on page 112 of the article: a more appropriate troika of destruction than Diamond’s would be “Lawyers, Gods and Money.” Where Diamond emphasizes free-floating technologies and pathogens, Wilcox argues that the actual instruments of conquest required active human construction and maintenance.

Lawyers. Legal frameworks denied Indigenous rights. Federal desert land legislation transferred water from O’Odham farms to Anglo settlers. Indians lacked U.S. citizenship until 1924. Democratic institutions defended the rights of voters; Indigenous peoples were not voters (Wilcox 2010, 97, 114). The Spanish Entradas read formal documents requiring submission before military engagement; those who resisted after the reading could have “Total War” or “Fire and Blood” legally waged upon them (Wilcox 2010, 113).

Gods. Spanish Christianity was militarized through the figure of Santiago Matamoros (St. James the Moor-killer), modeled on the Reconquista of Spain. Colonial New Mexico functioned as a projected cosmogram of the Reconquista — the Spanish capital was named Santa Fe after the siege city outside Granada. When battling the Pueblos, Spanish warriors invoked Santiago’s name and referred to Pueblo kivas as “mosques” (Wilcox 2010, 112–113). The justification for forced conversion traces to Augustine’s fifth-century letters to the Pope, which used three words from the gospels — “Feed my sheep” — to argue that all peoples could and should be compelled to join the faith, by force if necessary.

Money. Economic ambition for land and water drove the violence. The Spanish wanted the labor and the agricultural infrastructure of Pueblo and O’Odham communities; Anglo settlers wanted the water rights. The technologies of conquest were not free-floating accidents; they were instruments in the service of specific economic claims.

The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 as Ideology, Not Drought

Diamond mentions the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in Collapse as a historically recorded instance of extended drought — a model, he suggests, for the end of Anasazi settlement at Chaco. Wilcox reads the Revolt very differently: as evidence of the role of ideology in colonial conflict, not environmental determinism. The Revolt followed escalating Spanish religious coercion — increased taxation, forbidden Pueblo ceremonies, arrested religious leaders — and the driver was the militarized Christianity examined in the previous section, not the weather (Wilcox 2010, 113–114). This also reframes “abandonment” itself: many of the post-contact sites Spanish archaeologists interpreted as collapses were Pueblo communities deliberately relocating to maintain religious distance from Spanish coercion. Abandonment, for Wilcox, is a social strategy — not evidence of failure. One interpretation creates space for Indigenous survival; the other writes Indians out of the present.

Assuming Indians Are Still Here

The article’s conclusion turns the question 180 degrees. If Indigenous peoples survived — and they did — then the question archaeology should answer is not why they disappeared but how they survived. Wilcox writes that he must “assume that Indians are still here (as I am forced to do)” — an Indigenous archaeologist reading literature that consistently writes his own people out of the present (Wilcox 2010, 114). The hedge captures the absurdity of the position.

His criticism extends beyond Diamond personally to anyone who frames global inequalities as the work of impersonal forces. Conquest is not finished; it is enacted, re-enacted, and rewritten for each succeeding generation. In that sense, narratives like Diamond’s are themselves agents of ongoing colonization — “the most noxious and potent agent of conquest” being the narrative itself (Wilcox 2010, 114–115).

The implication for archaeology is direct: the field needs to explain survival, not just conquest. That includes working with descendant communities, taking seriously Indigenous interpretations of contested landscapes, and recognizing that the abandonments archaeologists document were often deliberate strategies for survival — not collapses.

Seven Points: A Pedagogical Distillation

What I’m calling seven main points are my pedagogical distillation of Wilcox’s argument — useful for an Introduction to Anthropology classroom but not Wilcox’s own structure. They follow the article’s argument and can serve as a study guide:

Indigenous societies did not simply disappear in 1492 (Wilcox 2010, 94).
Native peoples are still here, and crucial to ongoing questions like Southwestern water management (Wilcox 2010, 96).
The Hohokam “disappearance” is a myth — Anglo farmers diverted O’Odham water in the late nineteenth century (Wilcox 2010, 97–98).
Guns, Germs, and Steel frames conquest as geographical accident (Wilcox 2010, 99–100).
Collapse contradicts that by framing Indigenous societies as choosing failure (Wilcox 2010, 98, 102).
Archaeologists should work with descendant communities — Diamond never spoke to any contemporary Pueblos about Chaco (Wilcox 2010, 103–104).
Military conquest does not transform societies — what transforms them is lawyers, gods, and money (Wilcox 2010, 112).

The conclusion that follows from all seven: archaeology and anthropology need to explain survival, not just conquest (Wilcox 2010, 114).

Course Context

This lecture was part of Introduction to Anthropology 2022, in the archaeology unit following Through the Lens of Anthropology by Muckle, Tubelle de González, and Camp (Commissions earned). The course assigned Wilcox’s article for two consecutive class meetings, with pages 111–115 re-read for the next class. The follow-up lecture, The Colonial World System Before Anthropology, extends Wilcox’s militarized-Christianity concept — the Santa Fe-Granada connection, the Reconquista template, the “mosques” language — into the broader colonial world before anthropology introduced the idea of culture: Potosí silver, sugar plantations as proto-factories, Haiti and the Louisiana Purchase.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is “Marketing Conquest and the Vanishing Indian”?

A 2010 article by Stanford archaeologist Michael Wilcox in the Journal of Social Archaeology 10(1): 92–117, also reprinted in Questioning Collapse (Cambridge University Press, 2010). The article responds to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse from the perspective of an Indigenous archaeologist, arguing that Diamond’s narratives serve colonial logic by treating European conquest as accident and Indigenous “collapse” as choice.

Who is Michael Wilcox?

What does “lawyers, gods, and money” mean?

Wilcox’s reformulation of Diamond’s “guns, germs, and steel.” Where Diamond emphasizes free-floating technologies and pathogens, Wilcox argues the actual instruments of conquest were legal frameworks denying Indigenous rights, militarized Christianity (the Santiago Matamoros cult, the Reconquista template), and economic ambition for land and water (Wilcox 2010, 112). These are human constructs that required active maintenance — not accidents.

What does the archaeological evidence at Chaco Canyon actually show?

Chaco was most likely a multi-ethnic ritual center for periodic pilgrimage, not a year-round city. Packrat middens show no forest to deforest. Isotopic analysis proves construction timber and corn were imported from 75–90 kilometers away. Only 350 burials after roughly eight centuries of occupation. Diamond’s deforestation-overpopulation-collapse narrative is contradicted by the archaeological evidence (Wilcox 2010, 104–111).

Why does Wilcox write “Assuming that Indians are still here”?

Wilcox is an Indigenous archaeologist studying his own ancestors in a literature that consistently writes them out of the present. The hedge captures the absurd position of having to assume your own existence because the field has erased contemporary Indigenous peoples from its narratives. The phrase appears in the article’s conclusion (Wilcox 2010, 114).

How does this differ from a general critique of Guns, Germs, and Steel?

Wilcox’s intervention is specifically Indigenous and archaeological. He works through the actual material evidence at Chaco Canyon and the documented history of the Pima/O’Odham, demonstrating that Diamond’s claims contradict the archaeological record his book draws on. For the broader anthropological critique — including Wolf, Mann, Restall, and Errington and Gewertz on Yali’s question — see Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond: Against History.

Related Resources

Full article: Wilcox, Michael. 2010. “Marketing Conquest and the Vanishing Indian: An Indigenous Response to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse.” Journal of Social Archaeology 10(1): 92–117.
Wilcox’s book: The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact (University of California Press, 2009).
Reprint volume: McAnany, Patricia A., and Norman Yoffee, eds. 2010. Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire. Cambridge University Press.
For broader critique of Guns, Germs, and Steel: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond: Against History
For Diamond’s earlier “Worst Mistake” article: Domestication as Worst Mistake?
For documentation of Diamond’s archaeological sources: Agriculture as Worst Mistake
Hub: The Americas — Indigenous histories and contemporary issues