The Comb Wash Great House Community in Regional Context: New Insights from Federal 1-m Lidar Data

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Comb Wash Great House was the first ancient Puebloan community center in Utah west of Comb Ridge to be formally recognized and described in the archaeological literature (W. H. Jackson 1875). It was ignored for more than a century before Owen Severance recognized and documented several Puebloan road swales there in the late 1980s. Subsequent investigations by BLM and University of Colorado crews sketched out the basic history and structure of the community landscape including a temporal relationship between the post-Chacoan Comb Wash Great House and its nearby predecessor the Chaco-era Arch Canyon Great House. Wider regional connections were less clear but associated roads pointed toward other great house communities to the north, northeast, southeast and west. Newly available federal lidar data have enabled 1-m-resolution, bare-earth lidar imagery that fully confirms all of Severance’s road identifications and reveals a number of new regional road and upland farmscape features that help clarify the Comb Ridge community’s place in a wider regional landscape and relationship to other regional communities. The result is a growing appreciation of interaction between ancient Puebloan communities across the northwestern San Juan region and their shared commitment to ritual activity involving constructed road circuits.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Lidar Research in the US Southwest

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53297