The Role of Ritual Variability in Social Negotiations of Early Communities: Great Kiva Homogeneity and Heterogeneity in the Mogollon Region of the North American Southwest

Religion and religious buildings play critical roles in the social negotiations that surround early village formation. Although religion and the buildings or spaces that house concomitant ceremonies may certainly serve to bring people together under a unified creed, ritual activities also provide settings that people can manipulate to their own ends. Great Kivas appear to have been a major locus of supra-family rituals in the Mogollon area from A.D.1 to 1000. We examine Great Kiva architecture and feature variability across three major areas and three time periods to understand the degree to which there was similarity in ritual practice across the region. The patterns of variation suggest that people took opportunities to make such buildings more individual and more responsive to a family’s or small group’s particular purposes.