The Dittert site is an ancient Pueblo settlement located in Armijo Canyon, New Mexico, roughly 35 miles south-southeast of the town of Grants. Comprising roughly 35 rooms over two stories of construction and a large blocked-in kiva, the site manifests an L-shape and the classic Pueblo III building style in the Greater Cibola region. The Dittert site is often described as a Chacoan great house. This attribution is incorrect for two reasons: 1) the site was built in the A.D. 1200s, after the collapse of the Chacoan system; 2) although a very well-constructed dwelling, the building does not have classic Chacoan core-veneer architecture.
Tree-ring and ceramic cross-dating show that Pueblo people lived at Dittert from A.D. 1225–1300. The Pueblo III building style can best be described as triple-wide walls, with carefully selected sandstone for the inner and out veneers and rougher, unworked stone in the middle of the walls. These walls average about 40 cm wide, less than half the width of classic Chacoan core-veneer walls.
The Dittert site (see map above) has a surrounding community with two roads that emanate outward from the site, a great kiva, and a dozen other pueblo sites. Many of these sites contain small pueblos built constructed with both sandstone masonry and adobe. The community lies in a transitional zone between Pueblo peoples with these two different building traditions: sandstone and adobe. Generally speaking, sites and people to the south and east of Dittert relied more on the adobe building style for pueblos, whereas sites to the north were more commonly built with sandstone or other rock masonry, with adobe mortar. The Dittert community is interesting because many of the sites manifest both types of architecture – roomblocks built with sandstone masonry and other, distinct roomblocks built with adobe.
These findings, coupled with research into ceramic and lithic raw material distributions, suggest that groups of different ethnic or social origins came together on these sites to build new, hybridized settlements.
— Summary by Paul F. Reed
