Archaeological expeditions in the 1890s and 1920s focused on the excavation of Pueblo Bonito—one of several great houses in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico—and the two refuse mounds directly south of its enclosing wall. Trenches were placed in both mounds to locate burials (none were found) to examine geomorphology and to develop a ceramic sequence based on stratigraphy. A limited number of artifacts was collected during these excavations and are presently housed at the American Museum of Natural History and at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Neil Judd supervised the last of the trench excavations in 1927, backfilling the units with fill that had been shoveled to the edges during fieldwork.

Fast forward to 2004–2007, when W. H. Wills and the University of New Mexico were granted permission from the National Park Service to conduct the Chaco Stratigraphy Project (CSP) by reopening three of Judd's trenches. The permit allowed for re-excavating and screening the disturbed fill, recording and sampling stratigraphy, and cataloguing and analyzing artifacts. The primary research questions driving the CSP related to the production, exchange, consumption, and discard of artifacts from Pueblo Bonito. Utilizing datasets from Pueblo Alto, small house sites such as 29SJ629, and other sites within and outside of the canyon, materials collected and analyzed from the trenches were compared. This offered an unprecedented opportunity to address issues regarding the production, exchange, consumption, and discard of material culture at Pueblo Bonito, with consideration of both historic and modern excavation results.

Chapter 1 of The Pueblo Bonito Mounds of Chaco Canyon guides us through the historical background of previous research and introduces us to the CSP, methods used, and associated research questions. Chapters 2 through 5 focus on pottery, including grayware (Chapter 2), whiteware (Chapter 3), red/brown ware (Chapter 4), and worked sherds (Chapter 5). Chapters 6, 7, and 8 focus on lithic artifacts, including chipped stone tools (Chapter 6), ground stone tools (Chapter 7), and ornaments/pigment (Chapter 8). Chapter 9 presents the results of faunal analyses. The final chapter (10) summarizes these findings and extends their interpretations with additional comparative analyses focused on production (of pottery, chipped stone tools, ground stone tools, plants and animals, ornaments, and textiles), exchange (of ceramics, chipped stone, macaws and parrots, shell, turquoise and other minerals, and stimulants such as cacao and Ilex), consumption (feasting and ritual drinks), and discard (ritual disposal, discard pathways, and accumulation rates).

CSP results indicate that the mounds formed as household refuse was discarded over the span of approximately 125 years during the Bonito Phase (AD 900–1140). The West Mound was formed slightly earlier than the East Mound, and it fell out of use earlier as well. Materials recovered indicate exchange with regions outside of the canyon, with a gradual shift in relationships from the Four Corners area to the north, then to areas further south, and finally westward to the Cibola/Mogollon area. A high percentage of materials came from the Chuska area, either through exchange or direct acquisition at the source. Pueblo Bonito residents specialized in and produced a wide variety of artifacts, including ceramics, chipped stone tools, ground stone tools, and ornaments. There is evidence that all artifact classes recovered from the excavations of Pueblo Bonito's rooms and kivas are also present in the mounds. These include items less frequently recovered, such as cylinder jars and macaw remains. Project results also suggest that feasts took place at Pueblo Bonito and that two distinct groups composed of numerous households may have discarded their refuse separately, thereby creating the East and West Mounds, respectively.

After a century of archaeological investigations, numerous questions remain about the residents of Pueblo Bonito. The CSP has advanced our understanding considerably by collecting and analyzing thousands of artifacts to provide modern-day interpretations of issues significant to anthropology. This well-written and well-organized volume is a must-read for any scholar working in the U.S. Southwest and for any archaeologist who is conducting research on a previously excavated (professionally or otherwise) site. The Pueblo Bonito Mounds of Chaco Canyon demonstrates the research potential of disturbed contexts, and it highlights what can be learned by reexamining the archaeological record with modern perspectives and techniques. The authors invite further research to broaden our knowledge of Pueblo Bonito's residents and their relationship to other great and small houses throughout the regional system. CSP data from Pueblo Bonito would be valuable for further efforts in examining the mounds as part of the built environment, determining if residents were full-time or seasonal occupants, reconstructing population estimates based on artifact accumulation rates, and reconstructing environmental conditions based on pollen, archaeobotanical, and faunal data.