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Built form, or human spatial organization, has usually been studied in cultural anthropology and archaeology as dependent on other factors such as social organization. Studies have been limited by a lack of measures permitting comparisons over time and space, so buildings remain little understood despite their visibility in the archaeological record. One approach emerging from multidisciplinary work emphasizes topology over physical characteristics such as shape and size; it examines linkages rather than individual components. The space syntax model of Bill Hillier and the Unit for Architectural Studies at University College London recognizes that spatial patterns are both the product and the generator of social relations. Built form is treated as part of a system of spatial relations, facilitating movement, encounter, and avoidance--both among occupants and between occupants and outsiders. Methods developed through analysis of a broad range of buildings and settlements are available to examine built space and its changes over time. A space syntax model allows a re-examination of great houses in and near Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, built from the mid-A.D. 800s to the mid-1100s. The great houses examined in Chaco Canyon are: Una Vida, Pueblo Bonito, Chetro Ketl, Pueblo del Arroyo, Pueblo Alto, and Kin Kletso. The outliers are Salmon Ruin and West Aztec Ruin. Where sufficient data are available, the control and access features formalized through floorplans are graphed and quantified, allowing comparisons over construction phases and between different sites. The goal is to reevaluate past interpretations, ranging from heavily-populated villages to largely empty redistribution or ceremonial centers. More diversity rather than consistency is apparent from individual great house floor plans, but certain spatial characteristics emerge. Access patterns tend to be asymmetric and non-distributed, becoming deeper over time. Yet the occasional presence of rings, allowing alternate routes within a building, differs from earlier and later building forms. Access patterns differ between and within east and west wings, and the core units, even during comparable time periods. Seen from the perspective of the floor plan, the examples of Chacoan architecture suggest differentiation both within and among great houses.

The archaeofaunal remains left by the Ancestral Puebloan people of Goodman Point Unit provides a valuable, yet underutilized resource into pit structure function. This thesis explores temporal changes in pit structure use and evaluates if a final feast occurred during a kiva decommissioning. The results from zooarchaeological analyses of a pithouse and two great kivas suggest that changes in pit structures at Goodman Point mimic the regional trend toward specialization until late Pueblo III. Cross-cultural studies on feasts, southwest ethnographies and previous zooarchaeological work established methods for identifying a feast. The analysis of differences in faunal remains from a great kiva and multiple room block middens imply that the remains in the kiva were from a final feast prior to a decommissioning ceremony and were not fill. Spatially and temporally the great kiva appears to be a unique, specialized structure in the cultural development of the Goodman Point community.

This paper presents an investigation of sedimentary deposition, soil formation, and pedoturbation in the Animas River Valley to determine the provenience of archaeological deposits in an open field at Aztec Ruins National Monument, NM outside of the Greathouse complex. Four stratigraphic pedounits correlated with active fan deposition have been proposed for the lower terrace in the project area with only one of these units retaining strong potential for buried archaeological deposits from the Anasazi late Pueblo II/Pueblo III period. The distal fan on the lower terrace and the Animas River floodplain appear to show poor potential for archaeological deposits either due to shallow sediment overburden with historic disturbance or alluvial activity during or after occupation. Based on these findings, four other zones of similar fan development have been identified throughout the Animas Valley and are recommended for subsurface testing during future cultural resource investigations.

We examine the emergence of the Neolithic in the Southwest United States by focusing on the Mesa Verde region and the research we have conducted there as a part of the Village Ecodynamics Project. The Mesa Verde region has many characteristics that make it an ideal place to study the emergence of the Neolithic. The region has about 20.000 recorded archaeological sites. These sites are highly visible because there has been relatively little erosion or deposition. The arid climate has resulted in remarkable preservation, and tree-ring dating provides precise chronological resolution. Tree rings also allow annual reconstructions of temperature and precipitation. Finally, Pueblo Indians continue to live in New Mexico and Arizona today, and their oral traditions can be combined with archaeological information to provide a more complete and inclusive reconstruction of the Pueblo past. We examine the lengthy occupation of the Mesa Verde region to better understand the relationship between the following key elements of the Neolithic: the introduction of domesticated food production, the causes and consequences of population growth, the effects of climate change, the intensification of the warfare, the degree of sedentism and frequency of population movement, the formation of villages, and the emergence of complex social and political organization. / En el presente trabajo se analiza el surgimiento del Neolítico en el Suroeste de los Estados Unidos sobre la base de la región de Mesa Verde y las investigaciones que los autores han dirigido como parte del Village Ecodynamics Project (VEP). Esta región tiene muchas características que la hacen ideal para estudiar el surgimiento del Neolítico. Tiene cerca de 20.000 sitios arqueológicos registrados que son bastante visibles debido a la relativamente poca erosión y los escasos procesos de deposición. El clima árido ha motivado una conservación notable y el fechado dendrocronológico ha proporcionado una definición cronológica precisa. Las series de anillos de los árboles también han permitido reconstrucciones anuales de la temperatura y las precipitaciones. Por último, los indios pueblo aún viven en New Mexico y Arizona en la actualidad, y sus tradiciones orales pueden ser combinadas con información arqueológica para brindar una reconstrucción más completa, inclusive, del pasado de estos grupos humanos. Se examina la larga ocupación de la región de Mesa Verde para entender mejor la relación entre los siguientes elementos clave del Neolítico: la introducción de una producción de alimentos domesticados, las causas y consecuencias del crecimiento poblacional, los efectos del cambio climático, la intensificación de la guerra, el grado de sedentarismo y la frecuencia del movimiento de poblaciones, la formación de aldeas y, por último, el surgimiento de la organización social y política compleja.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Universität Hamburg, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 198-212).

In large-scale civil structures, a limited number of sensors are placed to monitor the health of civil structures to reduce maintenance, communication and energy costs. In this thesis, the problem of optimal sensor location placement to infer the health of civil structures is explored. First, a comparative study of approaches from the fields of control engineering and civil engineering is conducted . The widely used civil engineering approaches such as effective independence (EI) and modal assurance criterion (MAC) have limitations because of the negligence of modes and damping parameters. On the other hand, control engineering approaches consider the entire system dynamics using impulse response-type sensor measurement data. Such inference can be formulated as an estimation problem, with the dynamics formulated as a second-order differential equation. The comparative study suggests that damping dynamics play significant impact to the selection of best sensor location---the civil engineering approaches that neglect the damping dynamics lead to very different sensor locations from those of the control engineering approaches. In the second part of the thesis, an initial attempt to directly connect the topological graph of the structure (that defines the damping and stiffness matrices) and the second-order dynamics is conducted.