Archaeologists working at Ancestral Puebloan sites across the American Southwest distinguish kivas primarily by scale and apparent function, though interpretation of any specific structure's use is necessarily inferred from its physical remains rather than from surviving written testimony. Small kivas, typically serving what is understood to have been a single household or lineage group, are found in large numbers at sites such as Mesa Verde and throughout the Chaco Canyon region, often built directly adjacent to above ground residential room blocks. Great kivas, considerably larger and apparently built to accommodate gatherings well beyond a single household, appear at major Chacoan sites and are read by archaeologists as evidence of community wide or even regional ceremonial gatherings, given their scale relative to the residential population immediately around them.
The form itself is generally understood to develop out of earlier pit house dwellings, semi subterranean structures used for everyday habitation in earlier periods of Southwestern prehistory, with the specialized ceremonial kiva emerging as domestic architecture above ground diverged from a separate, more ceremonially specific underground form. Standard interior features recur across excavated examples of many periods, including a central hearth, a ventilation shaft designed to draw fresh air across the fire without visible ductwork, and a sipapu, a small floor pit read in Puebloan oral tradition as marking the point of human emergence into the present world.