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The site of Casas Grandes (or Paquimé) in northwest Chihuahua, Mexico, originally was estimated to contain some 2,300 rooms, placing it at the top of known prehispanic pueblo sizes. Its rooms were seen as arranged in blocks of as many as five stories, forming a vast, U-shaped pueblo. This room count and configuration are cited often in the past and present literature. We contend that Casas Grandes originally was interpreted in the most liberal terms. We reexamine it with a more conservative approach, and a different characterization emerges. The U-shaped configuration cannot be supported. Instead, we see a central, linear room block, a small part of which contained three stories. It was flanked on the west by well-known ritual architecture and surrounded on all sides by small, scattered, contemporary, one-story room units. The original room count estimation is reduced by about 50 percent, as is the concomitant estimate of nearly 5,000 residents. This has implications for extant models of the internal and regional organization of Casas Grandes.

Researchers have noted and studied the finely formed manos and metates of the Casas Grandes region of northern Mexico, but little is known about how and where they were produced. During a survey project in 2013, we located a quarry, the first discovered in this region, where grinding stones were manufactured using a suite of stone tools. We report the morphology of the site, the tool kit of the metateros (metate makers), and ethnoarchaeological implications resulting from the study of modern metateros that can aid in the interpretation of prehistoric ground stone quarries.