North American Southwest Research Articles

Assessing cancer risk factors faced by an Ancestral Puebloan population in the North American Southwest

Ancestral Puebloan people in the North American Southwest suffered high rates of disease, poor health, and early age-at-death. Four individuals with skeletal expressions of cancer were found in a pre-Columbian population in the Taos Valley - Reports of malignant neoplasms in the archaeological record are uncommon and their presence in four of 82 individuals is a high occurrence. This study continues Whitley and Boyer's (2012) research testing whether concentrations of ionizing radiation were sufficiently high to induce cancer and related health issues. Access to a preserved and partly reconstructed subterranean pit structure inhabited between AD 1120 and 1170, allows us to test radon concentrations in a residential dwelling. This study found radon occurring in high levels, 19.4–20.3 pCi/L (717.8–751.1 Bq/m3) within the structure. Epidemiological reports are inconsistent when linking specific cancers and radon exposure. However, this study can control for many of the confounding factors plaguing other studies, provide unique data that have the potential to initiate dialogue on the etiology of neoplastic disease in the American Southwest, and add new dimensions to the study of the living conditions and health of the Ancestral Puebloans and their descendants.

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America

Every European power with colonies in the Americas, to varying degrees, enslaved Indian peoples. Americans also owned, bought, and sold Indian slaves. Although historians and other scholars have revealed much about this pernicious practice, especially over the past two decades, understanding of the implications of widespread and multigenerational Indian slavery has not generally filtered down to public awareness or the teaching of American history. In this “hybrid work of synthesis and original research,” Andrés Reséndez shines a bright light on the North American Southwest and California as places of long-term Indian slavery and forced labor that lasted until the twentieth century (p. 322). The author of books on the travels of Cabeza de Vaca and the borderlands history of Texas and New Mexico, Reséndez is most illuminating when focusing on Mexico before and after independence and on the former Mexican territories that became part of the United States after the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848). The book begins with detailed information about how the enslavement of Indians by the Spanish was initiated by Christopher Columbus but built upon existing Mediterranean world slavery and slave trading.

Social Interaction, Social Status, and the Organization of Medio Period Craft Production as Evidenced in Ground Stone Artifacts from 76 Draw

ABSTRACTThe analysis of ground stone artifacts is a productive avenue for gaining useful information regarding the past societies of the North American Southwest. Here we present the results of the analysis of 255 ground stone items recovered from 76 Draw, a Medio period (AD 1200 to 1450) settlement in New Mexico. We find that locally available stone was used to make a variety of utilitarian items. We then compare the assemblage to previously reported ground stone assemblages from Paquimé (the economic and political center of the Medio period world) and nearby sites in northern Chihuahua, Mexico. We find that our assemblage is very similar to those from the smaller Medio period settlements but quite distinct when compared to Paquimé’s assemblage. Paquimé’s ground stone reflects an emphasis on non-utilitarian ornaments, religiously significant items such as effigies, and distinct utilitarian items such as well-formed metates produced by specialists. In contrast, the 76 Draw and other assemblages reflect an emphasis on utilitarian items produced at the household level. From this, we conclude that the social differentiation evident at Paquimé and reflected in its ground stone assemblage did not extend across the entire Casas Grandes region, even though utilitarian ground stone tools reflect the same technological system.

DRESSING THE PERSON: CLOTHING AND IDENTITY IN THE CASAS GRANDES WORLD

Casas Grandes Medio–period (A.D. 1200–1450) human effigies are unique in the North American Southwest in that they depict primary and secondary sexual traits, making determination of sex and gender roles possible. Here, we build on previous discussions by considering the importance of depictions of clothing (e.g., belts and sashes), personal adornments (e.g., necklaces and bracelets), facial decorations, and other aspects of dress. We find that Medio-period symbolism for males and females was based on gender complementary that combined the productive, reproductive, and ritual activities of men and women within a single symbolic and ritual system. Some clothing styles are found on both males and females (e.g., arm bands), but there are also sex-based differences. Women wear low horizontal belts across their hips, whereas men primarily wear sandals and elaborate headbands. Aspects of dress also appear to be continued from previous cultures such as the Classic Mimbres (A.D. 1000–1150) and continued into historic northern Mexican and southwestern groups (e.g., headgear and some sandal types). Ultimately, we find that males have more elaborate dress and are associated with a specific set of ritually important symbols. Females are associated with cloud/fertility symbolism, sternal decorations, and birds.

Animating Architecture and the Assembly of an Elite City: Birth and Dedication of Nonhuman Persons at Paquimé, Chihuahua, Mexico

We discuss the role of dedication ceremonies at Paquime, Chihuahua, Mexico, using an animistic perspective involving other-than-human, spiritually potent agents who influence and are influenced by humans. Animated agents can include artifacts and architecture, which humans create through negotiating with other agents (e.g., the potter negotiates with the clay, kiln, and fire to make pottery). Dedication ceremonies in such cases help bring active agents to life and imbue them with the specific characteristics that humans want them to have. We illustrate this process using Puebloan ethnology from the North American Southwest and then explore three cases of architectural dedication at Paquime: the Mound of the Serpent, a pot under a water reservoir, and a central support post within the structure. These cases reflect the use of the architecture to help ensure access to water, which in turn helped Paquime’s elites establish their city as preeminent in the region.

Wood decay in desert riverine environments

Floodplain forests and the woody debris they produce are major components of riverine ecosystems in many arid and semiarid regions (drylands). We monitored breakdown and nitrogen dynamics in wood and bark from a native riparian tree, Fremont cottonwood (Populus deltoides subsp. wislizeni), along four North American desert streams. We placed locally-obtained, fresh, coarse material [disks or cylinders (∼500–2000cm3)] along two cold-desert and two warm-desert rivers in the Colorado River Basin. Material was placed in both floodplain and aquatic environments, and left in situ for up to 12years. We tested the hypothesis that breakdown would be fastest in relatively warm and moist aerobic environments by comparing the time required for 50% loss of initial ash-free dry matter (T50) calculated using exponential decay models incorporating a lag term. In cold-desert sites (Green and Yampa rivers, Colorado), disks of wood with bark attached exposed for up to 12years in locations rarely inundated lost mass at a slower rate (T50=34yr) than in locations inundated during most spring floods (T50=12yr). At the latter locations, bark alone loss mass at a rate initially similar to whole disks (T50=13yr), but which subsequently slowed. In warm-desert sites monitored for 3years, cylinders of wood with bark removed lost mass very slowly (T50=60yr) at a location never inundated (Bill Williams River, Arizona), whereas decay rate varied among aquatic locations (T50=20yr in Bill Williams River; T50=3yr in Las Vegas Wash, an effluent-dominated stream warmed by treated wastewater inflows). Invertebrates had a minor role in wood breakdown except at in-stream locations in Las Vegas Wash. The presence and form of change in nitrogen content during exposure varied among riverine environments. Our results suggest woody debris breakdown in desert riverine ecosystems is primarily a microbial process with rates determined by landscape position, local weather, and especially the regional climate through its effect on the flow regime. The increased warmth and aridity expected to accompany climate change in the North American southwest will likely retard the already slow wood decay process on naturally functioning desert river floodplains. Our results have implications for designing environmental flows to manage floodplain forest wood budgets, carbon storage, and nutrient cycling along regulated dryland rivers.

Shuttling

This exposition investigates practice-as-research dynamics through a project titled ‘Shuttle’, from which emerged a practice of ‘shuttling’ as a layered modality for processing methodological artistic research. An international crew of artists, designers, and performance makers enquire into peer-to-peer creative practice development: practices unfolding through the dramaturgy of a twenty-day, four-thousand-mile mobile performance-research journey in the deserts of the North American south-west. We trace the dynamics of a practice-as-research milieu through a suite of artistic operations, performatively elaborated through this rich-media exposition. Through ‘shuttling’, we generate parafunctional performative spaces and temporalities. Our spatio-temporal and sensory mode of research – conditioned, co-created, and situated as a mobile laboratory – posits reflexivity as an embodied practice, as a medium of ‘shuttling’ with the dynamic emergence of creative research practices.

Hohokam Canal Irrigation and the Formation of Irragric Anthrosols in the Middle Gila River Valley, Arizona, USA

Irragric anthrosols form as a result of prolonged deposition of fine sediments from irrigation water. Ancient irragric soils centuries to millennia old occur in several world regions, especially in arid environments of Asia and the Americas. This article presents evidence for an ancient irragric anthrosol in the North American Southwest, along the Snaketown Canal System in the Middle Gila River Valley, Arizona. This pedostratigraphic unit was formed as a result of a millennium of irrigation by Hohokam farmers from A.D. 450 to 1450. The irragric soil consists of a mantle of silty‐to‐loamy textures with minimal soil formation overlying a natural argillic horizon on a Pleistocene stream terrace. A soil mapped independently by the United States Department of Agriculture‐Natural Resources Conservation Service with these horizons corresponds closely with the canal system. Soil within the canal system tends to be lower in salt, sodium, and pH compared with external soils. This suggests that the irragric process improved soil for crop production through long‐term leaching and additions of fresh sediments with the irrigation water. This anthropogenic process of canal sedimentation has had a long‐lasting impact on the sedimentary record and soils in this arid environment.

The role of water in the emergence of the pre‐Columbian Native American City Cahokia

Studies of the role of water in the emergence and maintenance of complex societies often span functional, political, and economic perspectives on water management with a particular focus on conservation and water storage. However, water is also symbolically important typifying urban environments like the Olmec site of San Lorenzo in Mexico, the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, and Ancestral Puebloan sites in the North American Southwest. In fact, the symbolic and relational importance of water contributes to the location and emergence of some of the world's most prominent early cities and urban environments. In examining the role of water in the emergence of one of North America's largest pre‐Columbian cities, Cahokia (ca. AD 1050), it becomes apparent that early Native American people valued more than the functional properties of water, directly incorporating natural and man‐made water features into the city plan. Nestled into the naturally wet ridge and swale setting of the Mississippi River floodplain at the confluence of the Illinois, Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, water was a focal point of Cahokia's dynamic landscape impacting the location of earthen mounds, neighborhoods, causeways, and public plazas. Through an examination of the natural and built environments, I demonstrate the importance of water as symbolic and relational where Cahokians manipulated the natural environment to create a city that emerges out of a watery world. Understanding the relational and animate roles of water to the construction and maintenance of early urban environments can and does provide unique insight into ancient worldviews. WIREs Water 2015, 2:489–503. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1094This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Planning Water Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented

Are Social Networks Survival Networks? An Example from the Late Pre-Hispanic US Southwest

Archaeologists have regarded social networks as both the links through which people transmitted information and goods as well as a form of social storage creating relationships that could be drawn upon in times of subsistence shortfalls or other deleterious environmental conditions. In this article, formal social network analytical (SNA) methods are applied to archaeological data from the late pre-Hispanic North American Southwest to look at what kinds of social networks characterized those regions that were the most enduring versus those that were depopulated over a 250-year period (A.D. 1200–1450). In that time, large areas of the Southwest were no longer used for residential purposes, some of which corresponds with well-documented region-wide drought. Past research has demonstrated that some population levels could have been maintained in these regions, yet regional scale depopulation occurred. We look at the degree to which the network level property of embeddedness, along with population size, can help to explain why some regions were depopulated and others were not. SNA can help archaeologists examine why emigration occurred in some areas following an environmental crisis while other areas continued to be inhabited and even received migrants. Moreover, we modify SNA techniques to take full advantage of the time depth and spatial and demographic variability of our archaeological data set. The results of this study should be of interest to those who seek to understand human responses to past, present, and future worldwide catastrophes since it is now widely recognized that responses to major human disasters, such as hurricanes, were “likely to be shaped by pre-existing or new social networks” (as reported by Suter et al. (Research and Policy Review 28:1–10, 2009)).

Are Simulated Megadroughts in the North American Southwest Forced?*

Abstract Multidecadal drought periods in the North American Southwest (25°–42.5°N, 125°–105°W), so-called megadroughts, are a prominent feature of the paleoclimate record over the last millennium (LM). Six forced transient simulations of the LM along with corresponding historical (1850–2005) and 500-yr preindustrial control runs from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) are analyzed to determine if atmosphere–ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs) are able to simulate droughts that are similar in persistence and severity to the megadroughts in the proxy-derived North American Drought Atlas. Megadroughts are found in each of the AOGCM simulations of the LM, although there are intermodel differences in the number, persistence, and severity of these features. Despite these differences, a common feature of the simulated megadroughts is that they are not forced by changes in the exogenous forcing conditions. Furthermore, only the Community Climate System Model (CCSM), version 4, simulation contains megadroughts that are consistently forced by cooler conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean. These La Niña–like mean states are not accompanied by changes to the interannual variability of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation system and result from internal multidecadal variability of the tropical Pacific mean state, of which the CCSM has the largest magnitude of the analyzed simulations. Critically, the CCSM is also found to have a realistic teleconnection between the tropical Pacific and North America that is stationary on multidecadal time scales. Generally, models with some combination of a realistic and stationary teleconnection and large multidecadal variability in the tropical Pacific are found to have the highest incidence of megadroughts driven by the tropical Pacific boundary conditions.

Dual-tier approach to societal evolution and types

The dual-tier approach to studying societal evolution aims to identify both specific and general processes of prehistoric change that produced greater organizational complexity. The approach involves diachronic comparisons of archaeological sequences that represent typologically similar cases. Initial comparisons are done of historically related societies within world regions so as to define each region’s organizational variability for the type and time period being considered. This variability provides important contextual information for identifying exceptionally complex cases and understanding the reasons why they developed. Next, comparisons are done of different regions’ singularly complex cases to identify similar, but historically independent, processes of societal evolution. Societal types guide the selection of appropriate world regions and exceptionally complex societies to compare. Focusing on chiefdoms, a classic evolutionary type that we define by polity population size, we illustrate the dual-tier approach with late prehistoric sequences from Polynesia and the North American Southeast and Southwest. We show that the different regions’ exceptionally complex cases were located in optimal environments where they experienced population growth, intensified resource procurement, expanded political economy, and formalized religious ideology. However, the relative importance and details of these trends varied considerably. Documenting the “Goldilocks moments” that made organizational transformation possible offers a productive means for future evolutionary studies.

Using Least Cost Pathways to Understand the Processes of Migration from the Mesa Verde Region during the Pueblo III Period

During the Pueblo III period (A.D. 1150–1350), population densities declined to near total abandonment in the Mesa Verde region of the North American Southwest. The overall timing, size of group movement out of Mesa Verde, and the destination of migrants remain unresolved, due in part to a distinct shift in material culture in regions across the North American Southwest during this time. This spatial analysis calculates potential routes of movement between known archaeological sites in the Mesa Verde area and the northern Rio Grande, a frequently proposed destination region, to determine the extent to which the physical landscape influenced how and where migrants moved. The results show a convergence of the calculated pathways into a limited number of routes between the two regions. Pathway convergences may indicate socially transmitted migration routes whose initial pathway formed as a function of small migrant groups interacting with the topography of this region. Focusing future archaeological investigations on these identified potential corridors of movement can better resolve the timing and size of migrating groups, their patterns of movement and use of waypoint locations, potential destination options, and a better understanding of the effects of regional depopulation movement decisions.

The Better Angels of their Nature: Declining Violence through Time Among Prehispanic Farmers of the Pueblo Southwest

The central Mesa Verde and the northern Rio Grande regions housed two of the densest populations of prehispanic Pueblo peoples in the North American Southwest. We plot incidence of violent trauma on human bone through time in each region. Such violence peaked in the mid-A.D. 1100s in the central Mesa Verde, and in general was higher through time there than in the northern Rio Grande region. In the central Mesa Verde, but not in the northern Rio Grande, there is a tendency for violence to be greater in periods of low potential maize produccción per capita and high variance in maize produccción, though these structural tendencies were on occasion overridden by historical factors such as the expansion and demise of the Chacoan polity and the regional depopulation. Violence generally declined through time in the northern Rio Grande until the arrival of the Spanish, even as populations increased. We propose that this decline was due to the combination of increased social span of polities, the importance of inter-Pueblo sodalities, the nature of religious practice, “gentle commerce,“ and increased adherence to a set of nonviolent norms.

Long and spatially variable Neolithic Demographic Transition in the North American Southwest.

In many places of the world, a Neolithic Demographic Transition (NDT) is visible as a several-hundred-year period of increased birth rates coupled with stable mortality rates, resulting in dramatic population growth that is eventually curtailed by increased mortality. Similar processes can be reconstructed in particular detail for the North American Southwest, revealing an anomalously long and spatially variable NDT. Irrigation-dependent societies experienced relatively low birth rates but were quick to achieve a high degree of sociopolitical complexity, whereas societies dependent on dry or rainfed farming experienced higher birth rates but less initial sociopolitical complexity. Low birth rates after A.D. 1200 mark the beginning of the decline of the Hohokam. Overall in the Southwest, birth rates increased slowly from 1100 B.C. to A.D. 500, and remained at high levels with some fluctuation until decreasing rapidly beginning A.D. 1300. Life expectancy at 15 increased slowly from 900 B.C. to A.D. 700, and then increased rapidly for 200 y before fluctuating and then declining after A.D. 1400. Life expectancy at birth, on the other hand, generally declined from 1100 B.C. to A.D. 1100/1200, before rebounding. Farmers took two millennia (∼ 1100 B.C. to ∼ A.D. 1000) to reach the carrying capacity of the agricultural niche in the Southwest.

Dynamics of continental accretion

Subduction zones become congested when they try to consume buoyant, exotic crust. The accretionary mountain belts (orogens) that form at these convergent plate margins have been the principal sites of lateral continental growth through Earth's history. Modern examples of accretionary margins are the North American Cordilleras and southwest Pacific subduction zones. The geologic record contains abundant accretionary orogens, such as the Tasmanides, along the eastern margin of the supercontinent Gondwana, and the Altaïdes, which formed on the southern margin of Laurasia. In modern and ancient examples of long-lived accretionary orogens, the overriding plate is subjected to episodes of crustal extension and back-arc basin development, often related to subduction rollback and transient episodes of orogenesis and crustal shortening, coincident with accretion of exotic crust. Here we present three-dimensional dynamic models that show how accretionary margins evolve from the initial collision, through a period of plate margin instability, to re-establishment of a stable convergent margin. The models illustrate how significant curvature of the orogenic system develops, as well as the mechanism for tectonic escape of the back-arc region. The complexity of the morphology and the evolution of the system are caused by lateral rollback of a tightly arcuate trench migrating parallel to the plate boundary and orthogonally to the convergence direction. We find geological and geophysical evidence for this process in the Tasmanides of eastern Australia, and infer that this is a recurrent and global phenomenon.

Research on the Pueblo culture settlement system from the North American Southwest - results of the Sand Canyon-Castle Rock Community Archaeological Project

Research on the Pueblo culture settlement system from the North American Southwest - results of the Sand Canyon-Castle Rock Community Archaeological Project

On the Frontier of Photography: Carl Lumholtz and the Kodak Snapshot Camera

On the Frontier of Photography: Carl Lumholtz and the Kodak Snapshot Camera Phyllis La Farge (bio) In September 1890 the Norwegian naturalist and ethnographer Carl Lumholtz crossed the border into Mexico from Bisbee, Arizona. He was embarking on an expedition that in time would be the first of four, leading from the states of Sonora and Chihuahua as far south as Michoacán. Underlying his commitment to this venture was his experience as an explorer in Queensland, Australia. There, between 1880 and 1884, sponsored by the Zoological Museum in Christiana (as Oslo was then called), he collected plant and animal specimens. While spending the better part of a year in the remote Herbert River region, he came to appreciate the aboriginal people of the area, valuing their help and their knowledge of local flora and fauna. Having gone to Australia as a botanist and zoologist, he returned to Norway, a would-be ethnographer. Several years passed, however, before he decided on a way to pursue this new professional direction. As he subsequently wrote in Unknown Mexico, his account of his Mexican travels: I first conceived the idea of an expedition to Mexico while on a visit to London in 1887. I had, of course, as we all have, heard of the wonderful cliff-dwellings in the Southwest of the United States, of entire villages built in caverns on steep mountain-sides, accessible in many cases only with the aid of ladders. Within the territory of the United States there were, to be sure, no survivors of the race that had once inhabited those dwellings. But the Spaniards, when first discovering and conquering that district, are said to have come [End Page 473] upon dwellings then still occupied. Might there not, possibly, be descendants of the people yet in existence in the northwestern part of Mexico hitherto so little explored?1 It is not clear what individuals, lectures, or readings may have inspired him during his London visit but his decision can be understood in the context of the increasing interest at the time in the anthropology and archaeology of the American Southwest. In 1879, in an early effort to promote serious study of Native Americans, John Wesley Powell, the geologist and explorer who became the founding director of the Bureau of Ethnology—later the American Bureau of Ethnology—sent the anthropologists John Stevenson; his wife, Matilda Coxe Stevenson; and Frank Hamilton Cushing to study the Zuni Indians. The same year saw another milestone in the growing attention to the past and present of the area, the founding of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA). The first president of the institute, the art historian Charles Eliot Norton (and others), favored a focus on the archaeology of ancient Greece and Egypt—wasn’t the investigation of ancient “high cultures” far more important than excavating the paltry remains of peoples whose descendants were still only a few steps above savagery? But the historian Francis Parkman (who had lived for a period with the Sioux Indians) and Frederick Ward Putnam, director of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, were successful in pressing to make American archaeology one of the goals of the institute. At the suggestion of the pioneering anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, this policy led to the choice of the scholar-archaeologist Adolph Bandelier to explore and document archaeological sites in the Southwest. As early as February 1880, however, even before the AIA had made a firm commitment to sponsoring him in the Southwest, Bandelier had already conceived of extending his work into Mexico, thus prefiguring Lumholtz’s plan of ten years later.2 It’s reasonable to surmise that these and other developments3 were known to Lumholtz. They may well have inspired his decision and led him to meet with Bandelier and to visit the Zuni before his entry into Mexico in 1890. With his wish to find in Mexico the descendants of the builders of cliff dwellings north of the border Lumholtz hoped to establish a lost link not only between past and present but—perhaps less explicitly—what had become politically separate worlds, the North American Southwest and the northwest of Mexico. He did not...

Megadroughts in Southwestern North America in ECHO-G Millennial Simulations and Their Comparison to Proxy Drought Reconstructions*

Abstract Simulated hydroclimate variability in millennium-length forced transient and control simulations from the ECHAM and the global Hamburg Ocean Primitive Equation (ECHO-G) coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation model (AOGCM) is analyzed and compared to 1000 years of reconstructed Palmer drought severity index (PDSI) variability from the North American Drought Atlas (NADA). The ability of the model to simulate megadroughts in the North American southwest is evaluated. (NASW: 25°–42.5°N, 125°–105°W). Megadroughts in the ECHO-G AOGCM are found to be similar in duration and magnitude to those estimated from the NADA. The droughts in the forced simulation are not, however, temporally synchronous with those in the paleoclimate record, nor are there significant differences between the drought features simulated in the forced and control runs. These results indicate that model-simulated megadroughts can result from internal variability of the modeled climate system rather than as a response to changes in exogenous forcings. Although the ECHO-G AOGCM is capable of simulating megadroughts through persistent La Niña–like conditions in the tropical Pacific, other mechanisms can produce similarly extreme NASW moisture anomalies in the model. In particular, the lack of low-frequency coherence between NASW soil moisture and simulated modes of climate variability like the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, Pacific decadal oscillation, and Atlantic multidecadal oscillation during identified drought periods suggests that stochastic atmospheric variability can contribute significantly to the occurrence of simulated megadroughts in the NASW. These findings indicate that either an expanded paradigm is needed to understand multidecadal hydroclimate variability in the NASW or AOGCMs may incorrectly simulate the strength and/or dynamics of the connection between NASW hydroclimate variability and the tropical Pacific.

The Role of Ritual Variability in Social Negotiations of Early Communities: Great Kiva Homogeneity and Heterogeneity in the Mogollon Region of the North American Southwest

Religion and religious buildings play critical roles in the social negotiations that surround early village formation. Although religion and the buildings or spaces that house concomitant ceremonies may certainly serve to bring people together under a unified creed, ritual activities also provide settings that people can manipulate to their own ends. Great Kivas appear to have been a major locus of supra-family rituals in the Mogollon area from A.D.1 to 1000. We examine Great Kiva architecture and feature variability across three major areas and three time periods to understand the degree to which there was similarity in ritual practice across the region. The patterns of variation suggest that people took opportunities to make such buildings more individual and more responsive to a family’s or small group’s particular purposes.