While ceramics, settlement patterns, and communal architecture changed a great deal over time, the form that Ancestral Puebloan residential architecture took has remained surprisingly consistent. This form is the unit pueblo (alternately called “San Juan pattern” or “Prudden Unit”), which was used from ca. AD 600s to the late AD 1200s. Unit pueblos are found throughout the Ancestral Puebloan world and, along with other evidence from the PI to PIII periods, “suggests broad similarities in architecture and settlement patterns in these areas through time, as well as population movement between them” (Cameron 2008:19). In addition to these cultural attributes, Lipe (2006) argues that a shared Ancestral Puebloan social identity is expressed architecturally through the use of the Unit …show more content…
This usually opens southward, with an estufa [kiva] occupying the partially enclosed court. […]

This simple form of ruin is so common, and it enters so frequently into the structure of many of the larger and more complex buildings that I have found it convenient to refer to it as the “unit type.” Houses of this type may have only three or four rooms along the back, with single rooms in the wings. Or there may be eight or ten rooms at the back with two or three in each wing. Frequently when there are several rooms along the back there are two or more estufas in the court.

Following Prudden’s identification, the unit pueblo has continued to be indentified at numerous sites. Despite the increased study, definitions of the unit pueblo have changed very little in the past century, with many archeologists still reproducing Prudden’s maps of publication. William Lipe (2006:263-264) defines the unit pueblo