If you can make the trip to Chaco Canyon, I highly recommend it. During the day, you can spend time exploring (and I really felt like I was _exploring_) the canyon and spend the nights looking at the nicest views of the night sky you'll ever see.

PS Rental compact cars can get totally handle a 13 mile dirt road.

Agreed. Mesa Verde in Colorado is also fantastic.

One fact I find notable with these "massive" societies in the American South West is how small they were. For example, the linked article describes a site with hundreds of rooms. That implies thousands of people.

And, Chaco was the kingpin. Many other fascinating sites, such as Walnut Canyon, had "tens of rooms."

One thing I have lately wondered about, is whether humans were mostly patrilocal before the dawn of recorded history, or mostly matrilocal, or sometimes one and sometimes the other.

There are some matrilocal societies now extent which seem to date from the dawn of recorded history, like the Muso.

Do you mean the Mosuo of Yunnan? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosuo

Another interesting prehistoric tradition still alive in Yunnan but which has almost died out is cliff burial - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanging_coffins - recently I searched for and found the sole remaining area in which it is practiced across continential Eurasia in a remote part of eastern Yunnan.

Apparently, prehistoric means between 800 and 1130 CE.

For America? Sure. History is a period with written records.