Community Organization on the Edge of the Mesa Verde Region: Recent Investigations at Cowboy Wash Pueblo, Moqui Springs Pueblo, and Yucca House

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Research, Education, and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper examines the formation of three community centers on the piedmont of Ute Mountain: Yucca House, Moqui Springs Pueblo, and Cowboy Wash Pueblo. Two villages, Moqui Springs and Cowboy Wash, occupy the southernmost edge of central Mesa Verde region and Yucca House sits on the eastern Ute piedmont, also near the edge of the distribution of community centers in the central Mesa Verde region. The occupation of each village dates to the final decades of ancestral Pueblo occupation in the central Mesa Verde region and therefore inform on how communities on these borderlands were organized just prior to, and during, the depopulation of the region. These contemporaneous, late Pueblo III communities clearly organized themselves differently on the landscape, likely due to several social, environmental, and demographic factors, including the provenance of households, local environmental vagaries, the degree of social and economic isolation of a village, and the choices made regarding the types of communal architecture adopted and the rituals they facilitated. This research is the result of a successful long-term partnership among Crow Canyon, PaleoWest, the National Park Service, Colorado State Historic Fund, and the Ute Mountain Ute THPO that is focused on the preservation of these large sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Research, Education, and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35659.0