History of Research

Results

Table 13.1 summarizes the architectural and pottery characteristics of each village; we discuss each center in the sections that follow.

Table 13.1. Characteristics of each village.

Source: Table created by authors.

Reconstructing the Community

Each of these villages developed in the context of historic settlement in the surrounding locality, and they exhibit characteristics that suggest they were community centers for larger, dispersed populations, including their relatively large size and public architecture (Glowacki et al., chapter 12 in this volume). Employing the method developed by Ortman, Mark Varien, and T. Lee Gripp (2007) for the Village Ecodynamics Project (VEP) (see Kohler et al., chapter 3 in this volume, for a discussion of the VEP), several interesting patterns emerge.

At Cowboy Wash Pueblo, when a 7 km radius around the center is analyzed using the VEP method, a more continuous settlement pattern between AD 1020 and 1225 is detected than as evidenced by the UMUILAP excavations—which document repeated settlement and depopulation of the wash during this interval (figure 13.6). A similar pattern is apparent for the final periods; only a portion of the community occupied the village. Most people in the Cowboy Wash Pueblo community lived in small hamlets, even in the late thirteenth century AD (figure 13.7).

At Moqui Springs Pueblo, a different pattern emerges during the final period. A larger proportion of the community lived in the main pueblo. Similar to Cowboy Wash, Pueblo occupation was short lived. Interestingly, the number of small-site households within 7 km of the main village did not decrease substantially during the later period, suggesting that the groups who built and occupied Moqui Springs immigrated into the area rather than deriving from local small-site occupants, a process that likely occurred in the Cowboy Wash community.

At Yucca House, an even starker pattern is evident. During the final decades, most people lived in the large village. It also appears, given the large number of households present in the later period, that there was a large population influx, not simply an aggregation of the local population. This contrasts with the history of occupation of the Cowboy Wash, which again appears to have been the result of the aggregation of the local population rather than population immigration and nucleation.

The differences noted thus far among these three community centers are significant in terms of size, organization, landscape position, associated communal architecture, and occupation history. The only comparable attributes among them are their overlap in occupation (AD 1250–1280), their relatively short occupation span (one or two generations), and the fact that they are the largest sites in their respective areas. Variables that likely contributed to these differences include not only the provenance of the occupants (local or nonlocal) but also local environmental factors such as rainfall and soil fertility and the proximity to other central Mesa Verde communities.

The Cowboy Wash community, for example, appears to have been built and occupied by locals. This community was also the most isolated community in the study in that they were located the farthest from other communities in the central Mesa Verde region. One indication of the economic and social isolation of this community is the raw materials used for lithic production, which are different from the raw materials from sites located elsewhere in the central Mesa Verde region, especially the relatively high proportion of igneous minette at Cowboy Wash (Arakawa 2006; Arakawa and Gerhardt 2007; Arakawa et al., chapter 15 in this volume; Potter et al. 2013, 11).

Moreover, of the three communities analyzed here, this community was associated with the harshest landscape that was the most tenuous for farming (Huckleberry and Billman 1998). As Ermigiotti et al. note in chapter 4 in this volume, during droughts, including the late AD 1200s when ancestral Pueblo people migrated from the region, better lands in the Four Corners would have produced sufficient yields even during years when environmental conditions were significantly below average. By contrast, as demonstrated by Crow Canyon’s campus gardens, only negligible yields are attained in poorer areas (like Cowboy Wash). It is perhaps not surprising then that this community was the smallest and its members built and occupied the smallest central village with the least amount of communal architecture.

Moqui Springs Pueblo likely represents immigration of groups to the toe of the Ute Mountain who established a new organizational format for a village—the plaza-oriented, inward-focused village. This format is rare in the Mesa Verde area and is more akin to the organizational format of villages in the northern Rio Grande (Ortman 2012). Another uncommon trait of this village is the cluster of kivas (n = 12) on an adjacent ridge that lacks evidence of habitation (e.g., dense middens or aboveground architecture). Moqui Springs appears to represent a new form of social organization and a new way of living and conducting rituals on the edge of the Mesa Verde region just prior to depopulation.

Yucca House, the largest of the three villages, even more clearly represents immigration into the local area. This community, rather than experimenting with new organizational and ritual forms, resembles other terminal Pueblo III period villages in the region (Lipe and Ortman 2000). The exception to this is the Lower House, which has no analogues in the region. Yucca House also appears to be the village most tied into other communities within the central Mesa Verde region, as reflected in its organizational layout.

Each community dealt with the challenges of environmental stress and social isolation that came with occupying the Ute Piedmont in different ways. Another difficulty that each community had to contend with was violence. Settlement in the dispersed communities that predate Cowboy Wash, Moqui Springs, and Yucca House Pueblos includes small sites with abundant evidence of conflict and violence, most of which dates to about AD 1150. The evidence for violence includes disarticulated human bones that were broken and reduced, along with the presence of burning, cut marks, and skull fractures. These remains come from four sites near Cowboy Wash Pueblo, one site near Moqui Springs Pueblo, and one near Yucca House. Altogether, the remains include a minimum of twenty-four people, with both sexes and ages from newborns to elderly represented (Billman 2003, 6.21–6.28).

The violence occurred immediately before depopulation at most sites at around 1150, and Brian Billman (2003, 8.5) argues that the entire Cowboy Wash community was extinguished at this time, leaving the southern piedmont temporarily depopulated. The Grinnell site near Yucca House differs because the disarticulated remains of seven people were gathered from elsewhere and buried in a cist on the floor of a kiva at the site, with the site remaining occupied after this interment.

Evidence for conflict and violence also exists for the mid-to-late thirteenth century AD, when each of the community centers discussed here were occupied. Billman (2003, 8.5) reports on a site in Cowboy Wash where a kiva was burned and at least one woman and three juveniles were killed sometime after AD 1248. Near Yucca House, Richard Wetherill excavated a kiva at the Snider’s Well site that contained mass inhumation of individuals that appear to have died as the result of conflict. Archaeologists have relocated Snider’s Well and argue it dates to mid-to-late AD 1200s based on surface pottery. The aggregated villages that formed on the Ute Piedmont clearly developed in an area whose history included an episode of severe violence, and violence likely continued during the time when these centers were constructed and occupied (see Kuckelman, chapter 19 in this volume, for additional examples).

Conclusions

These contemporaneous, late Pueblo III period communities clearly organized themselves differently on the Ute Piedmont landscape. We have made the argument that this variation is due to several social, environmental, and demographic factors, including the provenance of households, local environmental vagaries, the degree of social and economic isolation of a village, and the choices made regarding the types of communal architecture adopted, or experimented with, and the rituals they facilitated. One factor that seems consistent, though, is the persistent threat and presence of violence throughout the history of all of these communities (see Kohler et al., chapter 3 in this volume).

Contrary to findings at large villages in the heart of the Mesa Verde region, such as Sand Canyon Pueblo and Castle Rock Pueblo, one of the more interesting patterns we detect regarding violence is that on the Ute Piedmont, it occurred predominantly in small sites rather than the large centers. This concentration may be due to more excavation occurring at small sites. Regardless, the recurrence of these events at small sites likely encouraged the eventual aggregation of households into larger (and therefore “safer”) villages, a process proposed by Richard Wilshusen and James Potter (2010) for village formation in the Pueblo I period (AD 700–900). Notably, much of the Cowboy Wash community chose to remain living in small sites during the Pueblo III period; they also did not invest in communal architecture—and by extension the rituals they housed—to the extent that other communities did. The Moqui Springs and Yucca House communities, by contrast, appear to have committed more to the idea of the central village and to performing novel and diverse rituals within them, strategies perhaps aimed at mitigating both environmental and social stress wrought by living on the edge of the central Mesa Verde region in the late thirteenth century AD.

Acknowledgments. We would like to thank and acknowledge the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, Mr. Terry Knight, for allowing us to conduct investigations at Cowboy Wash Pueblo and Moqui Springs Pueblo and for allowing us to discuss and publish the results of these investigations in this chapter. We would also like to acknowledge History Colorado for supporting the fieldwork through grants awarded to the THPO. Donna Glowacki and Kelsey Reeder conducted ceramic analyses on the excavated materials from Cowboy Wash Pueblo, and Fumi Arakawa conducted lithic analysis on both the survey data (in-field analysis) and on the excavated materials. Thanks to Scott Ortman who co-led the field school at Cowboy Wash. Jim Potter’s work at Cowboy Wash Pueblo was supported by the PaleoWest Foundation. We are grateful to Larry Nordby, who was chief archaeologist at Mesa Verde National Park, for approaching Crow Canyon to collaborate on the Yucca House Mapping Project and to Donna Glowacki, who directed that project while working for Crow Canyon.

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