Creating Symmetry: The Cultural Landscape in the Sand Canyon Locality, Southwestern Colorado

Abstract

Public architecture provides one important line of evidence for examining how people organized themselves and interacted through time. The constellation of these public buildings across cultural landscapes also provides information about how different groups of people mediated relations at different social scales ranging from individual communities to regional networks. This paper uses the location of public buildings to suggest close intercommunity ties between two large ancestral Pueblo communities in southwestern Colorado. It is argued here that the composition, location, and orientation of public structures relative to each other in these two communities reflect a supracommunity level of planning and social organization that was rooted in the Chaco regional system. The suggested dualism of this system mirrors modern social divisions apparent in some Pueblo villages today.