Stodder_PI Mesa Verde_Paper_Data and Metadata Issues in Documenting Pueblo I Mortuary Variation in the Mesa Verde Region

Mortuary data from Pueblo I sites in the Dolores and Animas-La Plata Project areas suggest that the structural and nonstructural contexts of burials are critical to understanding mortuary practice in this pivotal era and in earlier and later Ancestral Pueblo groups. Extramural interment contexts and their spatial relationships to houses, surface structures, and stockades are worthy of systematic study. Pithouse burials on floors and benches, in ventilators and in fill, vary in temporal relation to structure and site abandonment. House burials in particular suggest a fruitful area of comparison with other SW groups and an important category for metadata development.