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A great house is a large, multi-storied Ancestral Puebloan structure; they were built between 850 and 1150. Archeologists differ as to their purpose, but they might have been residences for large numbers of people, or ceremonial centers that only priests occupied. Archeologist Stephen H. Lekson has proposed that they might have been the palaces of Puebloan royalty, particularly those found at Chaco Canyon.
Whereas the term "great house" typically refers to structures in Chaco Canyon, they are also found in more northerly locations in the San Juan Basin, including the Mesa Verde region, where great house construction flourished during the late 11th and early 12th centuries, and may have begun as early as 800. Mesa Verdeans usually built their great houses on the site of older villages.