Small Site Analysis in the Southwest: A Comparative Analysis of Two Communities on Perry Mesa, Arizona

Landscapes across the American Southwest are littered with prehistoric structures of less than 10 rooms used for a variety of functions – from seasonal field houses, to storage, to year-long residences, to boundary markers. These structures, while largely ignored in much of the archaeological literature, can provide information on the human impact across an entire landscape, instead of simply focusing on the pueblo itself or on the agricultural fields. How, then, can these small architectural units be analyzed and quantified for future studies across the landscape? This paper will attempt to answer this question by focusing on four variables – mound height, stone shaping, number of rooms, and the area of the room block - which provide some insight into the time, labor, and planning invested into their construction.
Further understanding of these factors can allow inferences to be made concerning the intensity of surrounding land use, planned construction, and social importance assigned to each pueblo (Cameron 1999). For example, if the small structures around one site appear to have been more planned than those around another in a similar context, it can be inferred that clear differences, ecologically or socially, exist between the two pueblos. This paper explores and compares the architectural “constructedness”, a unit of comparison that is created in this paper from the four variables mentioned above, of small structures located around the larger pueblos of Pueblo la Plata and Pueblo Pato which can provide insight into the prehistoric settlement history offer a proxy for future studies on the environmental legacies of the region.

美国西南部的各类景观中，遍布着不足10间房的史前建筑遗迹，这类建筑兼具多重功能：既可作为季节性田间小屋、储物场所，也可作为长期居所或边界标识。尽管这类建筑在多数考古学文献中长期被忽视，但它们能够为全区域的人类活动影响提供研究视角，而非仅聚焦于普韦布洛（Pueblo）聚落本身或农田区域。那么，如何针对跨区域的后续研究，对这类小型建筑单元进行分析与量化呢？本文将通过聚焦四个变量展开研究以解答该问题：台基高度、石材修整工艺、房间数量以及房区总面积，这些变量能够反映建筑建造所投入的时间、人力与规划程度。

对上述因素的进一步解析，可帮助我们推断周边土地利用强度、建筑规划程度，以及赋予各普韦布洛（Pueblo）聚落的社会重要性（Cameron，1999）。例如，若某遗址周边的小型建筑相较于同背景下另一遗址的同类建筑，呈现出更高的规划程度，则可推断两处普韦布洛聚落之间存在明确的生态或社会差异。本文以四个上述变量构建出比较单元——建筑营建特征（constructedness），并对美国西南部普韦布洛拉普拉塔（Pueblo la Plata）与普韦布洛帕托（Pueblo Pato）大型聚落周边的小型建筑展开分析与比较，以期揭示该区域的史前聚落发展史，并为后续开展区域环境遗产相关研究提供替代参照。