Communities and the Chacoan Regional System

John Kantner and Nancy Mahoney asked me to provide a final comment on these chapters because my research has focused on communities, primarily communities in the Mesa Verde region (Adler and Varien 1994; Varien 1999). In my own research, I have tried to think about communities in a way that makes sense in terms of social theory and as a unit for archaeological analysis that is both useful and identifiable. This approach closely resembles the position presented by Kolb and Snead (1997) in their discussion of communities. I begin with a simple definition to touch on the social theory that