It is generally assumed that these structures were residences for households engaged in subsistence farming. The household was (and still is) the basic social unit out of which more complex social units are conctructed. It probably consisted of a nuclear family -- an adult male, adult female and their unmated children -- commonly assumed to number about five people for purposes of population estimates. This household is the functional equivalent of the microband of the Archaic Period.
Members of these households were probably rather small people (about 1.5-1.6 m tall) who lived about 30 - 40 years ( Hodges ‘79). Ceramic figurines from the period suggest that men wore loincloths, women skirts, both made of woven material possibly agave fiber. Both men and women wore sandals, tied at the ankle, probably made fiber or hide. Men wore short hair; women wore long hair braided or twisted and piled. Both wore earspools, necklaces, and pendants of stone and shell.
These collections of up to 10 structures, and the households who occupied them, are sometimes termed hamlets. Some of these may have consisted of a single household unit, though the “isolated rural household” is (so far as the archaeological record reveals) not common during this period. Indeed, is possible (though not evident in the archaeological record) that some families continued to make their living exclusively by hunting-gathering. There was probably plenty of space for them to do this. The households living in each hamlet were probably all related in some way making the hamlet the functional equivalent of the band of the Archaic Period. Hamlets appear in the the settlement pattterns of all succeeding phases (and persist up to the present day) in the Valley forming the bottom tier of the settlement hierarchy.
Hamlets, for the most part, exhibit neither horizontal complexity nor vertical complexity. All households in any single hamlet engage in the same activities -- those associated with subsistence agriculture. No activities are undertaken at the hamlet level that are not undertaken at the household level. A few exceptions to this general characterization are provided by hamlets engaged in mineral resource procurement (salt, chert, clay) and possibly pottery manufacture.
