Spring 2004 Architecture Studies at Pueblo La Plata

Karen Schollmeyer

Spring 2004 Architecture Studies at Pueblo La Plata

Part of the Legacies on the Landscape project

Author(s): Karen Schollmeyer

Year: 2004

Summary

Studies of the architecture of Pueblo La Plata, particularly room construction

sequences, formed one component of the Legacies on the Landscape project research in 2004. The goals of this portion of the project were to improve our understanding of how the pueblo was built, and to gain a sense of population size and changes over time. In particular, we wished to determine whether a sizeable core area of rooms (representing the first construction phase of the pueblo) was visible, and whether the pueblo was constructed all at once, in several large construction episodes, or through the gradual accretion of a few rooms at a time.

This information is of interest for several reasons. Prehistoric human impacts on

the landscape around Pueblo La Plata would have been influenced by the size of its

population. Accurate information about the number of rooms and their sizes is essential in making reliable population estimates. Information on the construction sequence of pueblo rooms may indicate whether most were occupied simultaneously (indicating a large population), whether the population occupying the pueblo grew gradually, or whether different groups of rooms were used at different times during the pueblo’s occupation (indicating a smaller population at any given time). This information also has implications for how access to landscape resources was organized, as the earliest residents may have had access to different resources or have had lower resource demands (as a smaller group) than later populations occupying the pueblo.