ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some new ideas about the Southwestern archaeology of the Great Pueblo period. The Pueblos provide the living models, but the huge ruins of Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde are the archetypes of the Pueblo style. Much of the popular literature treats the buildings of Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde as though they were the Pyramids. Archaeologists assumed that Great Pueblo period sites had similarly deep roots. The imputation of great time-depth for Great Pueblo period ruins follows the same logic as the more specific case of kivas. Great Pueblo period structures were probably very different kinds of buildings than those of Taos or Zuni. Despite their formal and technological similarities to the later pueblos, the Great Pueblo structures had very different use-lives, different functions, and different histories. It is important to realize that the archetypes of the Pueblo style may not have been pueblos in any conceptually useful sense.
