<p>During the Tairona period (10th–16th centuries AD), communities in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta restructured the regional landscape, constructing thousands of stone terraces, paved roads, and public plazas. This monumentality has been interpreted as evidence of hierarchical organization with dominant administrative centers. A regional settlement pattern study of the Río Frío basin challenges that interpretation. Multiple demographic nuclei coexisted across the landscape, and regional connectivity flowed through topographic corridors where medium-sized settlements acted as key passage nodes. Cooking vessel frequencies remained stable across settlement sizes, indicating autonomous household provisioning, while serving and storage vessels increased with aggregate settlement scale, consistent with periodic collective consumption events hosted at larger sites. Ceramic similarity networks reveal that bridging positions in material interaction were distributed across settlements of different sizes rather than concentrated in large centers. Technical homogeneity in vessel dimensions and residential architecture is consistent with shared design norms sustained through horizontal learning circuits, although alternative mechanisms cannot be excluded. These patterns indicate regional coordination operating through distributed mechanisms rather than through dominant centers, though the institutional arrangements underlying such coordination remain to be specified</p>