Early Mimbres households: Exploring the Late Pithouse period (550–1000 AD) at the Florida Mountain Site

•Households are identified at the Florida Mountain site in southeastern New Mexico.•This intermittent site represents households similar to permanent village sites.•Social structures may continue to be established at temporarily occupied sites.

Many studies have explored the household to understand social organization, production, and other dynamics of societies throughout the world. In this work, the approach outlined by Richard Wilk and colleagues is used to investigate households at the Florida Mountain Site, an intermittently occupied Late Pithouse period (550–1000 AD) residential site in the Mimbres Mogollon area of Southwestern New Mexico. Drawing on the similarities of this intermittent residential site to contemporaneous pitstructure sites in the Mimbres area, we suggest that one or more household units occupied the site. Our analysis also supports previous inferences that Mimbres households were integrated into more inclusive levels of social organization (e.g., extended kin groups, villages, communities), but also indicate that this integration maintained cohesion during seasonal residential movements from more permanently occupied pitstructure sites.