Pueblo II Period
The Pueblo II Period (AD 900 to AD 1150) was the second pueblo period of the Ancestral Puebloans of the Four Corners region of the American southwest. During this period people lived in dwellings made of stone and mortar, enjoyed communal activities in kivas, built towers and water conversing dams, and implemented milling bins for processing maize. Communities with low-yield farms traded pottery with other settlements for maize. The Pueblo II Period (Pecos Classification) is roughly similar to the second half of the "Developmental Pueblo Period" (AD 750 to AD 1100). It is preceded by the  Pueblo I Period, and is followed by the Pueblo III Period. Architecture. Villages were larger and more community buildings than in the Pueblo I Period. Structures were generally made of stone masonry. By AD 1075, double-coursed masonry was sometimes used, which allowed for second story construction. Homes made of stone were more sturdy and fire-proof than the materials used previously. The grouping of the pueblos were called "unit pueblos". Some pueblo sites used a standard plan of front and back pairs of rooms which formed a common cluster of 12 rooms; The rear rooms were used for storage  and the front rooms used as living areas. Round-shaped, below ground and standardized kivas were used for ceremonial purposes. Large kivas, called great kivas, were built for community celebrations and were sometimes as large as in diameter. Towers, up to tall, were built with housing clusters, with underground access to a kiva or as look-out posts. Trash mounds were generally placed south of the village. Agriculture. Production and use of water conservation dams and reservoirs were also a community-based activities. Reservoirs might reach in diameter by deep, such as the reservoir near Far View House in Mesa  Verde National Park. Terraced, silt-retaining check dams were created on sloping drainage areas where melting snow or rain water ran downhill through the terraced dams. The dams retained moisture and silt and effectively managed runoff to lower terraces which made an ideal scenario for southwestern agriculture. The population grew during this period, requiring greater amounts of food for the villages. To increase their yield, there was experimentation to cultivate larger corn cobs, including the Mexican or southern Arizona "maize blanco" and "oñaveno," and locally produced hybrids. They supplemented their diet with hunting and wild plants found on small patches  of land unsuitable for farming, but as the land became over-populated, wild food and game became scarce. The optimal southwestern farming locations were adjacent to springs, seeps or marshes. Early in the Pueblo II period, the most desirable spots had been taken and, presumably young, families searched out open land to farm, hoping that precipitation would be sufficient to support their crops. There were periods of time of seasonal hunger and drought when people moved away from their villages and returned "following the rains," stories told by elders of pueblo communities. Evidence of near starvation as children are evident  in the interrupted growth lines in their bones and "enamel hypoplasias" in their teeth. The number rooms for work areas and storage increased during this period. Often the rooms were in the residential buildings, in some cases there were deep pit-houses. Nearly 25% of the rooms were used for grinding corn on metates and storing the grain in mealing bins. The mealing bins were designed for grinding areas, where the bins were set alongside one another during a communal effort to grind corn using metates and manos. Pottery. Common pottery include corrugated gray ware pottery and decorated black-on -white pottery. Corrugated pottery was made from coils of clay wound into the desired shape and the clay is pinched, which created the corrugated texture. In addition to the common gray were used for cooking and storage, pottery from this period included bowls, jars with lids, mugs, ladles, canteens, pitchers, and effigy pots in bird and animals shapes. Pottery was used in trade for food in low-productive farming areas. This helped supplement the diets of people who needed to barter for food – and allowed those with very productive lands to focus on farming. For instance, Chaco Canyon area produced  large amounts of surplus food which was traded for pottery. Other material goods. Material goods changed little from the previous periods, such as: Cultural groups and periods. The cultural groups of this period include: