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This open area is the plaza or courtyard. It served much the same function as a town square where ceremonial dances and other group activities took place. Also, when weather permitted, much of the daily domestic work was done here—shelling corn, twisting cordage, scraping hides, firing pottery, and fashioning tools of stone, bone and wood.
The plaza was divided by a single row of rooms into two courts. Many grinding stones were found in these rooms which served as one of two community centers for mealing corn into flour. Corn was ground on a large troughed stone, the metate (meh-TAH-tay), with a smaller, loaf-shaped stone, the mano. The metates were arranged in a line of bins where several women could work together. Another milling center was in four adjacent rooms in the east wing.