This volume presents the latest research on the development and use of communal spaces and places across the Mogollon region in what is now the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. New data demonstrate that these spaces and places, though diverse in form and function, were essential to community development and cohesion, particularly during critical formative periods associated with increasing sedentism and farming, and during comparable periods of social change.

The authors ask questions crucial to understanding past communities: What is a communal space or place? How did villagers across the Mogollon region use such places? And how do modern archaeologists investigate the past to learn how ancient people thought about themselves and the world around them? Contributors use innovative approaches to explore the development and properties of communal spaces and places, as well as how and why these places were incorporated into the daily lives of village residents. Buildings, alongside other types of communal spaces, are placed into broader cultural and social contexts, acknowledging the enduring importance of the kiva-type structure to many Native American societies of the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico.