Small Site Analysis in the Southwest: A Comparative Analysis of Two Communities on Perry Mesa, Arizona

Summary

Landscapes across the American Southwest are littered with prehistoric structures of less than 10 rooms used for a variety of functions – from seasonal field houses, to storage, to year-long residences, to boundary markers. These structures, while largely ignored in much of the archaeological literature, can provide information on the human impact across an entire landscape, instead of simply focusing on the pueblo itself or on the agricultural fields. How, then, can these small architectural units be analyzed and quantified for future studies across the landscape? This paper will attempt to answer this question by focusing on four variables – mound height, stone shaping, number of rooms, and the area of the room block - which provide some insight into the time, labor, and planning invested into their construction.

Further understanding of these factors can allow inferences to be made concerning the intensity of surrounding land use, planned construction, and social importance assigned to each pueblo (Cameron 1999). For example, if the small structures around one site appear to have been more planned than those around another in a similar context, it can be inferred that clear differences, ecologically or socially, exist between the two pueblos. This paper explores and compares the architectural “constructedness”, a unit of comparison that is created in this paper from the four variables mentioned above, of small structures located around the larger pueblos of Pueblo la Plata and Pueblo Pato which can provide insight into the prehistoric settlement history offer a proxy for future studies on the environmental legacies of the region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Legacies on the Landscape

Keywords

Temporal Coverage

Calendar Date: 1200 to 1450

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Landowner(s): Bureau of Land Management

Sponsor(s): Arizona State University, Department of Anthropology

Repository(s): Arizona State University Museum of Anthropology

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