Ancestral Pueblo Villages and the Panoptic Gaze of the Commune

Aggregated villages with large, central plazas appeared across the Western Pueblo region of the US Southwest by the fourteenth century AD. We view the adoption of this settlement form not strictly as an adaptive response to economic and social circumstances, but rather as a reflection of changes in the social relations of power and conceptualizations of community in the Pueblo world. Enclosed plazas became a form of panoptic architecture, structuring what were intrinsically unequal social relations between individuals or groups and the entire communities of which they were a part. This process has implications for the emergence of new power relations in pre-state societies.