Native people of the American Southwest began a major transition in life style around A.D. 200 when they began to develop agricultural communities and the more or less permanent residences that went along with that. These early communities consisted of substantial pithouses and related community structures, i.e. early kivas and communal work areas. Pithouse architecture had its origins some 2,000 years earlier, but approximately A.D. 200 it evolved into permanent structures to house extended families. The standard design contains a semi-subterranean room or rooms with an above ground roof structure that was very well suited to keep the residents warm in the winter and well protected from severe weather. For some 700 years, this was the preferred house type in the Southwest. Later the pithouse was replaced with the more familiar above-ground pueblo made of adobe or stone.
In this engaging study assembled and edited by archaeologists Lisa Young of the University of Michigan and Sarah Herr of Desert Archaeology, 24 prominent Southwestern scholars examine pithouse community development in the populous cultural areas of the region, including the northern San Juan Basin, the southern Colorado Plateau, Mimbres/southern Mogollon, and the Hohokam Basin. These major areas are compared to more sparsely populated areas like the northeast Hohokam peripheries, the Arizona Transition Zone, the Cibola region, southeastern New Mexico, and the northern Rio Grande.
As Southwestern people made the complex transition to a sedentary agricultural lifestyle, all kinds of cultural and social changes occurred. People’s relationship with the landscape changed to reflect a new sense of space, community, and cultural identity.
This volume also contains an in depth study of regional economic change and community development as well as demographic shifts that all these fundamental changes brought about. This a time of great change in the Southwest, and Southwestern Pithouse Communities is a major contribution to the body of knowledge about this critical period.
