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Research, Education, and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center: 12

Research, Education, and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center

12

12

Community Centers

Forty Years of Sustained Research in the Central Mesa Verde Region

Donna M. Glowacki, Grant D. Coffey, and Mark D. Varien

An essential aspect of Stuart Struever’s vision for Crow Canyon was creating an institution that could support long-term research by teams of specialists (Struever 1968; see also Kohler et al., chapter 3, and Lightfoot and Lipe, chapter 2 in this volume). Perhaps nothing illustrates this vision and the value of long-term collaborative research more than Crow Canyon’s sustained documentation of central Mesa Verde region community centers. Begun in 1983, Crow Canyon’s research into the largest sites in the region (i.e., community centers or what some call large, central villages) continues to this day. Many chapters in this volume discuss community centers, including chapters by Adler and Hegmon, chapter 16, Kuckelman, Potter et al., chapter 13, and Schleher et al., chapter 14.

Over the last forty years, Crow Canyon’s community center research integrated many different projects and involved numerous Crow Canyon staff and collaborators (table 12.1). These collaborators include several Crow Canyon research associates, regional archaeologists, and many institutions: Washington State University, University of Notre Dame, PaleoWest LLC, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Historic Preservation Office (THPO), Mesa Verde National Park, Hovenweep National Monument (National Park Service), Canyons of the Ancients National Monument (Bureau of Land Management), and the US Forest Service. Collaborators also include many generous private landowners who gave us permission to study sites on their property. Finally, the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, History Colorado State Historical Fund, Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts (Notre Dame), and Crow Canyon provided funding for community center research. Table 12.1 summarizes the projects that contributed to the community center database.

Table 12.1. Community center research history.

Project Name

Study Area

Project Dates

Time Period of Study AD

Centers Studied

Publications

Community Center Mapping and Excavations

Central Mesa Verde Region

1983–present

600–1300

10

Publications for each site:

https://www.crowcanyon.org/index.php/access-our-research/site-reports-databases

Pueblo Cultures in Transition

Conference / Pueblo III Volume

Northern San Juan Region

1989–1990

1100–1300

109

Adler and Varien (1994);

Kenzle (1997);

Varien et al. (1996)

Village Mapping Project

Central Mesa Verde Region

1993–1995

1050–1300

30

Lipe and Ortman (2000)

Varien PhD

Central Mesa Verde Region

1994–1997

950–1300

135

Varien (1999); Varien (2002)

Glowacki PhD

Northern San Juan Region

2004–2013

1150–1300

253

Glowacki (2015)

VEP I

Central Mesa Verde Region,

southwestern Colorado: 1,817 km2

2003–2006

600–1300

106

Glowacki and Ortman (2012); Varien et al. (2007)

Mesa Verde Village

Assessment Project

Mesa Verde National Park

2007–2008

725–1300

55

Glowacki (2007)

VEP II

Central Mesa Verde Region,

southwestern Colorado: 4,600 km2

2009–2014

725–1300

13

Schwindt et al. (2016); Reese et al. (2019)

Ute Mountain Ute Lands

Community Center Studies

Ute Mountain Ute Nation Lands

2012–2020

800–1300

9

Potter et al., chapter 13 in this volume

Community Center

Reassessment Project

Central Mesa Verde Region,

southwestern Colorado

2016–2021

600–1300

13

Glowacki et al. (2017)

Crow Canyon defines a community center as containing at least one of the following: fifty or more structures; nine or more pit structures (kivas); and/or public or civic-ceremonial architecture (Adler and Varien 1994; Glowacki and Ortman 2012, 220–221; Varien 1999). A threshold of nine pit structures suggests a minimum population of about 45–50 people residing at these sites. However, sites with seven or eight pit structures, or even fewer, can qualify if they have either public architecture or high numbers of associated rooms. According to a database recently compiled from Colorado and Utah state records, archaeologists have recorded about 21,000 Puebloan residential sites in the central Mesa Verde region of southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah (database on file, Crow Canyon Archaeological Center). Only 263 of these meet the criteria for community centers. Thus, only 1 percent of known settlements grew large enough to become centers. When compared to the tens of thousands of smaller residential sites in the region, their size, longevity, and the presence of public architecture indicate community centers played a particularly important role in structuring social, economic, and political activities in communities and in the larger regional settlement system. The community centers served as focal sites for larger communities comprised of smaller residential sites and as important nodes in the larger regional social landscape.

In this chapter, we discuss the forty-year history of community center research at Crow Canyon, describe the current state of our community center database, and discuss large-scale patterns and variation in community centers across space and through time (AD 600–1290) in an area slightly larger than the central Mesa Verde region (figure 12.1). We close by evaluating the impact of Crow Canyon’s long-term community center research, discussing our ongoing initiatives, and laying out our plans for future studies.

Locations of central Mesa Verde and middle San Juan regions, McElmo and Mesa Verde Proper subregions, and 2 Village Ecodynamics Project study areas

Figure 12.1. Map showing central Mesa Verde region, McElmo subregion, Mesa Verde proper, middle San Juan region, and locations of VEP I and II study areas. Courtesy of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

A Brief History of Community Center Research

Community center research emerged as a central focus for the institution in the 1980s, when community organization was becoming an important concept across the Southwest (e.g., Kane 1983; Marshall et al. 1979; Rohn 1977; Wills and Leonard 1994). It coincided with the inception of Crow Canyon, when E. Charles Adams, Bruce Bradley, and Michael Adler mapped Sand Canyon Pueblo in 1983 (Kohler et al., chapter 3, and Lightfoot and Lipe, chapter 2 in this volume). Although Crow Canyon’s excavations at Sand Canyon Pueblo (1984–1993) and nine community centers thereafter were not specifically designed as part of the community center research project, these excavations provided invaluable calibration for the interpretation of centers known only from surface remains. For these data and detailed reports, see Crow Canyon’s online research database (https://www.crowcanyon.org/index.php/access-our-research/site-reports-databases).

The first community center inventory was begun for the Wenner-Gren–funded Pueblo Cultures in Transition Conference in 1990 that focused on characterizing the distribution of large sites throughout most of the greater Southwest between AD 1150 and 1350 (Adler 1996). As discussed by Kohler and others in this volume (see chapter 3), this conference represents an important milestone in Crow Canyon’s history where the Center, for the first time, took on regional and macroregional research. A team of Crow Canyon archaeologists, led by William Lipe and Mark Varien, compiled this initial list of centers in southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah (table 12.1). They obtained site forms for recorded sites; however, a formal database was not constructed. Collectively, team members informally visited roughly 75 percent of these sites (n = 80). They used tree-ring dated (excavated) sites to characterize how pottery, architecture, and site layout changed through time, and then used these characterizations to qualitatively assess sites without tree-ring dates and assign them to fifty-year time periods (Varien et al. 1996).

The Village Mapping Project (Lipe and Ortman 2000) subsequently used this community center inventory to identify thirty centers for further study. Directed by William Lipe, Richard Wilshusen, and Scott Ortman, this project took stereo-pair aerial photographs of thirty centers, mapped fifty centers using photogrammetry and a Topcon GTS-303 total station, conducted in-field pottery and lithics analyses, and nominated six of these newly documented centers to the National Register of Historic Places. Crow Canyon then excavated small portions of three of these centers—Woods Canyon (Churchill 2002), Yellow Jacket (Kuckelman 2003), and Hedley (Ortman et al. 2000) Pueblos—as part of the Village Testing Project (Varien and Wilshusen 2002, 11–12).

Two PhD dissertations also focused on community centers, adding new ones to the inventory, and conducting new analyses. Mark Varien’s (1999) research focused on 135 centers dating between AD 950 and 1300 in a 14,022 km2 area of the central Mesa Verde region. He conducted a catchment analysis that illustrated how successive centers formed the nucleus of persistent communities that occupied specific localities for at least three centuries. Donna Glowacki’s (2015) study included the entire northern San Juan region and specifically focused on centers dating between AD 1150 and 1280, nearly doubling the number of centers considered by previous studies (n = 253). She analyzed intraregional variation in community center distribution, size, population, and organization (public architecture) and conducted a regional compositional analysis to reconstruct pottery production and interaction. Her findings show strong differences in the histories of intraregional organization and interaction between, and among, eastern and western Mesa Verde centers that shaped how migration and regional depopulation unfolded throughout the mid- to late 1200s.

The Village Ecodynamics Project (VEP) represents a long-term, multi-institutional, and multidisciplinary research program (2002–2016) focused on understanding the relationship between ancestral Pueblo people and their environment from AD 600 to 1760 (Kohler and Varien 2012; Kohler et al., chapter 3 in this volume). Funded primarily (but not exclusively) by two large National Science Foundation grants (numbers 0119981 and 0816400), the two successive phases of the project (VEP I and VEP II) expanded the geographic focus in central Mesa Verde region by increasing the southwestern Colorado study area from 1,817 km2 (VEP I) to 4,600 km2 (VEP II) and shifting the temporal scope to include an earlier period (AD 600–1280).

An important component of the VEP included a community center survey to systematically expand and upgrade the community center database. The VEP project created a database of all recorded sites in the expanded study area, over 18,000 sites. Using this database, the community center survey cross-checked the existing database of centers to identify additional centers not in the inventory. This expanded list of community centers was further assessed to identify those with inadequate documentation. The VEP community center survey revisited as many of these sites as possible to make new maps and conduct in-field pottery analysis (Glowacki and Ortman 2012). Over the course of both VEP projects, researchers conducted fieldwork at seventy-one centers. We also systematically compiled existing data for centers in the VEP study area, resulting in a new database with information on 172 centers. Finally, the VEP team developed new quantitative methods to determine the periods of occupation for each center and to estimate the number of people living at each center during each period of occupation (Ortman et al. 2007; Schwindt et al. 2016; Varien et al. 2007).

The VEP II community center survey focused on documenting centers in Mesa Verde National Park (MVNP). Survey practices at MVNP recorded individual roomblocks—regardless of how close they were to each other—as separate sites; therefore, we had to identify the sites that needed to be consolidated into distinct community centers. This assessment began with the Mesa Verde Village Assessment Project (MVVAP), which was tasked with identifying the status of site data across the park to evaluate needs for the VEP analyses (Glowacki 2007). The MVVAP synthesized information on the major communities throughout the park and laid the groundwork for the VEP II community center fieldwork at MVNP.

Between 2012 and 2020, Crow Canyon assisted the Ute Mountain Ute THPO and PaleoWest, LLC, to create preservation plans for nine community centers on Ute Mountain Ute lands (Potter et al. 2020). This effort involved fieldwork that included creating new maps, assessing architecture, and conducting in-field surface pottery analysis. This fieldwork is only a small part of the more ambitious preservation plans developed by the THPO and PaleoWest for these sites, yet it dramatically improved our understanding of these centers (Potter et al., chapter 13 in this volume). In some cases, these efforts provided the first official documentation of these centers.

From 2016 to the present, our research into community centers continued through the Community Center Reassessment Project. We first critically reexamined the VEP II–generated demographic estimates for each community center (Schwindt et al. 2016), comparing the occupation period results with the archaeological record for each site. This process of critical assessment made it clear that some community centers needed additional research efforts to improve the data underlying large-scale demographic reconstructions. To address some of these site-specific issues, we conducted new fieldwork. In 2017, three community centers in Mesa Verde National Park (MVNP) were reevaluated (Glowacki et al. 2017), and nine centers, or potential centers, in the broader study area (outside the park boundaries) were revisited. This reevaluation included completing pottery tallies at sites with insufficient pottery data and remapping selected sites for which only sketch maps, or other less-detailed maps, existed. These analyses resulted in over 3,800 sherds from thirty-four pottery tallies to be incorporated into our regional analyses. On a more limited basis, site-specific reevaluations elsewhere in our study area have taken place as opportunities arise. One such study was the recent (2019) collections-based reevaluation of pottery obtained by Fort Lewis College during excavations at Morris 25 (Firor and Riches 1988). We are also reviewing site forms and reports to cross-check or add center data in other cases to further augment the database.

Our critical review process also identified discrepancies in some of the occupation spans generated by the demographic profiles estimated via VEP II Bayesian analyses (Schwindt et al. 2016) versus what researchers know from the extant archaeological data. These discrepancies are largely related to the difficulties presented by these large multicomponent community centers; their complex and long histories present an interesting challenge for our analytical methods that estimate population size for each period of occupation. Therefore, the reassessment also includes a critical evaluation of these VEP methods as applied to community centers, a process that is ongoing.

The community center surveys and subsequent research have benefited greatly from the assistance of many archaeologists who were not directly involved in the project. Their expertise and knowledge helped us immensely with identifying centers and adding key historical and archaeological information. We remain grateful for all their assistance and generosity over the years. The community centers database has also been used by other researchers and was incorporated into other important research initiatives, including CyberSW (http://cyberSW.org) and the Chaco Research Archive (http://chacoarchive.org).

The Community Center Database

The current community center database consists of all centers identified by the projects listed in table 12.1 (n = 325; figure 12.2). As centers from each new project were added to the inventory, we removed duplicate entries and corrected, or updated, records as needed. When new fieldwork was conducted, we used the methods developed at the inception of the VEP (Glowacki 2012; Glowacki and Ortman 2012). Crow Canyon excavations provide data for ten of these community centers, and centers have been excavated by other researchers and institutions (e.g., chapters in this volume by Kuckelman, Potter et al. [chapter 13] and Schleher et al. [chapter 14] discuss partially excavated community centers, and chapters by Arakawa et al. [chapter 15], Oas and Adams [chapter 22], and Schollmeyer and Driver [chapter 21], and Badenhorst et al. [chapter 20] examine the lithics, botanical remains, and faunal remains from excavated centers). However, the majority of data on centers comes from the analysis of surface remains. Because of VEP projects and Crow Canyon’s research focus, the most intensively studied community centers are located in southwestern Colorado—with our understanding of centers in southeastern Utah and some just across the Colorado–New Mexico border coming from other projects listed in table 12.1. The total number of existing, or potential, centers within the area shown in figure 12.2 (i.e., central Mesa Verde region) is 263. An additional sixty-two centers come from Glowacki’s (2015) regional analysis of Pueblo III period centers located in the middle San Juan region, but these are not the focus of this chapter.

Community Centers: Distribution and Broad Trends over Time

The distribution of all the community centers in the database (figure 12.2) illustrates how highly concentrated the centers were in the Mesa Verde core (i.e., the McElmo and Mesa Verde proper subregions; figure 12.1). In part, this high concentration occurs due to the many research projects conducted in this area, but it likely also occurs because the Mesa Verde core contains many favorable environmental and ecological characteristics, including abundant, high-quality arable land, more precipitation, and longer growing seasons on the Mesa Verde cuesta. Note that early centers in southeastern Utah are likely underrepresented for the AD 600–900 period, as they have not been the focus of projects contributing to the community center database to date. Thus, the concentration of community centers in the Mesa Verde core is best evidenced with the most comparable data by the distribution of the late period centers (see section “Late Cycle Community Centers [AD 900–1280]”). Glowacki (2015) has described the high density of late community centers in this area as being part of the McElmo Intensification (AD 1225–1260), a time when population levels and aggregation increased and a dramatic social organizational shift occurred. To further examine our current database, we focus on the central Mesa Verde region specifically and consider the differences between community centers during the early and late aggregation cycles (Glowacki and Ortman 2012; Varien et al. 2007; Wilshusen 2002).

A topographic map showing the distribution of all of the community centers in the current database

Figure 12.2. Distribution of all community centers in the database associated with the projects listed in table 12.1. Courtesy of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

Early Cycle Community Centers (AD 600–900)

The current database includes forty-nine early centers, which are displayed in figure 12.3. The early community centers are generally dispersed across the central Mesa Verde region; however, there are two subregions—Dolores and Mesa Verde proper—where the density of early centers is higher (figure 12.1). Again, archaeological biases contribute to this pattern as both areas had the largest projects (Breternitz 1993) and longest research attention (Nordenskiöld [1893] 1990) when compared to other parts of the central Mesa Verde region. Likely, there are also cultural and environmental reasons for how and why these areas exhibit higher population densities and larger villages during the early cycle. For example, both locales have geographic advantages, including the Dolores River and its access to both agricultural land and large game (Kohler and Reed 2011), and the arable land and favorable precipitation and growing season on Mesa Verde (Adams and Petersen 1999).

Study area in southwest Colorado and southeast Utah, and distribution of early centers in AD 600-900, with centers concentrated on Mesa Verde cuesta

Figure 12.3. Distribution of the early centers (AD 600–900). Courtesy of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

Not all of these early centers have room counts, but the majority do have estimates (n = 32), and for these centers the average number of rooms is 103 and ranges from 8 to 486 rooms. For early centers, roomblock count and length are more often recorded than pit structure count because surface rubble is more visible than pit structure depressions. Thus, roomblock count is often used as a measure of center size. Of the 44 centers with roomblock counts, the average number is 10 with a range from 1 to 37. Examples of large centers include villages such as McPhee Village (Kane and Robinson 1988) and Grass Mesa Village (Lipe et al. 1988) in the Dolores River valley and the Badger House community in Mesa Verde National Park (Hayes and Lancaster 1975). At some of these large centers, most if not all of the members of the community lived in the center itself.

Many of these centers are associated with public architecture, generally great kivas or other mass assembly structures (n = 17). Four early centers have two great kivas recorded, suggesting either extended use of these sites with great kiva construction over a longer span or intensified use of public architecture at some sites. That only roughly one-third of the centers have well-defined public architecture suggests that the social and natural conditions of centers varied, and communal gatherings were facilitated via different means (Glowacki and Ortman 2012, 238–239, table 14.3; Wilshusen et al. 2012). The conditions promoting aggregation were not widely shared, and different models of community integration or identity construction were present across the study area during this period.

Late Cycle Community Centers (AD 900–1280)

The 230 late centers in the database are displayed in figure 12.4. There are nearly five times as many centers in the late aggregation cycle. This increase in number is due, in part, to the focus of many community center projects on this late period and the inclusion of late centers in southeastern Utah (n = 53) (Glowacki 2015); however, an increase in population levels during this period also plays a role.

The location and distribution of late community centers in southwestern Colorado differ from the early cycle. Notable high-concentration areas are at the head of, and along, canyons in the McElmo area, which includes Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, and two distinct groups in the northern and southern parts of MVNP. In the case of the MVNP centers, the two concentrations have different occupational histories, as the northern group of centers were depopulated by the early AD 1200s (e.g., Morefield Canyon Great House Village), and the southern centers are dominated by cliff dwellings that reached their peak size during the mid- to late AD 1200s. Also, of note is the relatively regular spacing between large centers in the Montezuma Valley (Glowacki 2015; Potter et al., chapter 13 in this volume).

There are also distinct differences in both number and distribution between centers in southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah. Not only are there fewer centers in southeastern Utah, but also the centers predominantly occur along drainages and exhibit wider spacing. These differences in distribution across Central Mesa Verde (CMV) point to intraregional variation in the social organization and relationships among these largest villages (see Schleher et al., chapter 14 in this volume, for a discussion of potential relationships between Sand Canyon and Goodman Point Pueblos). Additionally, situating settlements on canyon rims, at canyon heads, and on talus slopes becomes more common than upland settings across the CMV in the late aggregation cycle (e.g., Glowacki and Ortman 2012).

Study area in southwest Colorado and southeast Utah, and distribution of late centers in AD 900-1280, with centers concentrated in southwest Colorado

Figure 12.4. Distribution of the late centers (AD 900–1280). Courtesy of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

Among all of these centers, room counts are the most consistent means of identifying center size; 146 centers have estimated room counts. The average number of rooms at these late centers is 95, with a range from 3 to 700. Although a number of late-cycle centers are larger than the largest center in the early period, there are also many that minimally meet the fifty-room threshold for center status. An important development in the AD 1200s is the change in village layout from what had been a conventional San Juan pattern linear roomblock arrangement to a more aggregated and inwardly focused village configuration (Glowacki 2015, 167–171; Lipe 2006; Lipe and Ortman 2000). The mix of village types in the AD 1200s suggests there were different types of social and religious organizations that were emerging as people were aggregating into increasingly larger villages (Glowacki 2015).

These changing and intensifying social dynamics are also evident in the frequency, distribution, and diversity of public architecture, including great houses, great kivas, plazas, and bi-wall or tri-wall structures. Forty-one centers have at least one great house, 65 centers have at least one great kiva; 77 centers have plazas; and 22 centers have either D-shaped, bi-wall, or tri-wall structures (see Lekson, chapter 17 in this volume, for a discussion of tri-wall structures). The type of public architecture present varies through time and corresponds to broader cultural developments in the study area: most great houses occur between AD 1075 and 1140; most D-shaped, bi-wall, or tri-wall structures occur from AD 1225 to 1280, and great kivas occur throughout the period but were common from AD 1000 to 1225. Plazas become larger and better defined at aggregated villages dating after AD 1225. The expanded use of public architecture shows that significant cultural changes were occurring that increasingly emphasized communal gatherings and indicate that there were different ideas about social and ceremonial practices.

Terminal Period Community Centers (AD 1250–1280)

Community centers played different roles in the final decades of occupation in the central Mesa Verde region. In particular, the largest villages were among the last locations to be depopulated, especially in the McElmo subregion (Glowacki 2015, 2020; Lipe 1995), suggesting that there may have been some sense of security or sunk-cost investment afforded by centers as social and climatic conditions deteriorated. To examine the distribution of terminal late community centers in the database, we examine centers that date between AD 1250 and the final depopulation of the region. Using the VEP analysis allows for a narrower focus on those centers with a post-AD 1260s occupation; this analysis has not yet been applied to centers in southeastern Utah, so we begin this period at AD 1250 to facilitate comparison across the entire central Mesa Verde region. Additionally, current evidence suggests that emigration from southeastern Utah was occurring earlier than in southwestern Colorado (Glowacki 2015; Matson et al. 2015; see also Bellorado and Windes, chapter 18 in this volume, on the depopulation of Cedar Mesa). Thus, the terminal period of occupation likely varies east to west across the central Mesa Verde region.

The current database has eighty-one terminal Pueblo III period centers; these are displayed in figure 12.5. Most of the terminal centers had lower population levels than were present at their peak occupation, and these centers were most often located in canyon settings, including canyon rims, canyon heads, and cliff dwellings. In general, there were somewhat fewer terminal community centers in southeastern Utah, and they are markedly smaller than those in southwestern Colorado. In southwestern Colorado, Yellow Jacket and Goodman Point Pueblos are the largest, followed by Hampton Ruin, Sand Canyon Pueblo, and Yucca House. Located near the Colorado-Utah border, the Hedley Main Ruin, which is part of the larger Hedley Site Complex, represents the largest terminal period center in southeastern Utah. Hedley Main Ruin has eighty-five pit structures, which makes it slightly smaller than the largest centers in southwestern Colorado. Additionally, the next largest terminal center in southeastern Utah, the 10-Acre Site, is roughly one-third the size of Goodman Point Pueblo, and less than one-fourth the overall size of Yellow Jacket Pueblo at its peak.

Study area in southwest Colorado and southeast Utah, and distribution of terminal late centers in AD 1250-1280, and centers concentrated in McElmo subregion

Figure 12.5. Distribution of the terminal late centers (AD 1250–1280). Courtesy of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

Ongoing Studies and Future Directions

The long-term research coordinated and supported by Crow Canyon over the last forty years has enabled the continual growth of our understanding of the largest ancestral Pueblo villages. We now know more about population changes, social organization, interaction, and changing trajectories and relationships at larger geographic scales than would have been possible otherwise. This important ongoing commitment to institutional support for community center research also allows us to continue to plan for future research initiatives. Our community center research continues to locate new centers and to cross-check, update, and revise data using recent survey and documentation. Additionally, a systematic reevaluation of VEP’s Bayesian methods to better account for multicomponent site occupation contexts is underway. Once complete, an in-depth analysis of community center organization and change will be conducted to better understand differences among subregions.

New technologies are also being applied to ongoing community center research including drone-based photogrammetry and LiDAR (light detection and ranging) for site mapping (Coffey and Varien 2022; Potter et al. 2020; Varien et al. 2021). These highly accurate technologies allow for the compilation of more accurate site maps and, in conjunction with ground-truthing, ultimately better size estimates and feature counts.

Efforts to expand the regional study area are also underway. Although PII and PIII centers in southeastern Utah have been studied at regional scales (e.g., Cameron 2009; Glowacki 2015), a systematic assessment of the Pueblo occupation from AD 600 to 1290 has not yet been undertaken. A new initiative seeking to expand the VEP methods and apply them to southeastern Utah centers has begun by starting to gather site data in a centralized database. This project will eventually allow comparison between the social and settlement dynamics in the eastern and western parts of the central Mesa Verde region and show differences in timing of occupation. This effort will likely identify more early centers in the west and will collect new data to better define late cycle centers in southeastern Utah. Beyond this effort, eastern centers (e.g., Sacred Ridge, Blue Mesa), particularly the early centers, have not yet been included in the CMV community center database; we plan to incorporate these into our future research.

Compilation of the community center database has stimulated a great deal of research on these large sites, and much has been learned about the largest ancestral Pueblo villages in the central Mesa Verde region and the important social, religious, economic, and political roles they played in Pueblo life and history in the region. This research includes studies that have focused on sociopolitical organization and social power, demographic scaling, stone tool procurement, and exchange networks (e.g., Arakawa 2012; Coffey 2016; Coffey and Ryan 2017; Crabtree et al. 2017; Lipe 2002; Glowacki 2015; Kohler and Varien 2010; Ortman and Coffey 2017). We look forward to future work that will continue to build on this long and productive trajectory of research initiated by the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

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