In this article, we explore transformations and continuities in cosmology and cultural landscape structure across Pueblo history in the US Southwest. Many researchers have directly compared the archaeology of the society centered at Chaco Canyon (ca. AD 850–1140) in northwestern New Mexico with ethnographic documentation of Pueblo communities from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This approach makes it difficult to understand how cultural transformation played out in the intervening centuries. Here, we investigate this history by comparing Kin Nizhoni, a Chaco-era Great House community in the Red Mesa Valley, with Wiyo’owingeh, a post-Chacoan community in the Rio Grande Valley. We find that the built environments of both sites expressed similar cosmological principles, but architectural expressions of these concepts became less explicitly marked over time. We also find that this similar cosmology was mapped onto different social structures, with a focus on elite architecture in the Chaco era as opposed to communal dwellings with spatially separated shrines in later Pueblo contexts. We close by proposing a connection between the functions of Chacoan Great Houses and later Pueblo World Quarter Shrines. Overall, our findings underscore the utility of cultural landscape studies for tracing relationships between religion and society across North American Indigenous histories.

Monumental roads were constructed during the ninth to thirteenth centuries by the regional society centred on Chaco Canyon in the US Southwest. Here, the authors present new lidar and field documentation of parallel roads at the Gasco Site, which sits within a ritual landscape south of Chaco Canyon. Their findings reveal that the Gasco Road is substantially longer than previously believed and forms alignments between natural springs and towards the winter solstice sunrise over Mount Taylor, a mountain sacred among contemporary Indigenous peoples. These findings highlight the agency of landscapes and skyscapes in structuring ritual practices in ancient societies worldwide.

Humans inhabit rich social and physical worlds and archaeology is increasingly engaging with the multi-sensory experience of life in the past. In this article, the authors model the soundscapes of five Chacoan communities on the Colorado Plateau, where habitation sites cluster around monumental great houses. The work demonstrates that the audible range of a conch-shell trumpet blown from atop these great houses consistently maps the distribution of associated habitation sites. Staying within the audible reach of great houses may have helped maintain the social cohesion of communities in the past which, the authors argue, also has implications for the management of archaeological landscapes in the modern world.