Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Megaliths And Monumental Architecture At Coal Bed Village, An Ancestral Pueblo Site In Southeastern Utah, James R. Allison, Fumi Arakawa, Marion Forest, Katie K. Richards, David T. Yoder

Faculty Publications

Worldwide, megaliths are a common form of monumental architecture in Neolithic and later societies. Archaeologists in western Europe, and other parts of the world where megalithic monuments occur, have often discussed the meanings of megalithic features as well as their associations with ritual, territoriality, and social organization. In the Pueblo Southwest, most monumental architecture takes the form of large, unusually tall buildings (“great houses”), oversized ritual architecture (“great kivas”), or landscape features (roads and berms), all of which are most commonly associated with the Chaco system. Ancestral Pueblo people also occasionally built with ostentatiously large rocks, but megalithic features and …