From Prehistoric Villages to Cities: Settlement Aggregation and Community Transformation 0415836611, 9780415836616

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From Prehistoric Villages to Cities

Archaeologists have focused a great deal of attention on explaining the evolution of village societies and the transition to a Neolithic way of life. Considerable interest has also concentrated on urbanism and the rise of the earliest cities. Between these two landmarks in human cultural development lies a critical stage in social and political evolution. Throughout the world, at various points in time, people living in small, dispersed village communities have come together into larger and more complex social formations. These community aggregates were, essentially, middle range; situated between the earliest villages and emergent chiefdoms and states. This volume explores the social processes involved in the creation and maintenance of aggregated communities and how they brought about revolutionary transformations that affected virtually every aspect of a society and its culture. Although a number of studies have addressed coalescence from a regional perspective, less is understood about how aggregated communities functioned internally. The key premise explored in this volume is that large-scale, long-term cultural transformations were ultimately enacted in the context of daily practices, interactions, and what might be otherwise considered the mundane aspects of everyday life. How did these processes play out in diverse and historically contingent settings? What are the strategies and mechanisms that people adopt to facilitate living in larger social formations? What changes in social relations occur when people come together? This volume employs a broadly cross-cultural approach to interrogating these questions, employing case studies that span four continents and more than 10,000 years of human history. Jennifer Birch is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Georgia, USA.

Routledge Studies in Archaeology

1 An Archaeology of Materials Substantial Transformations in Early Prehistoric Europe Chantal Conneller 2 Roman Urban Street Networks Streets and the Organization of Space in Four Cities Alan Kaiser 3 Tracing Prehistoric Social Networks through Technology A Diachronic Perspective on the Aegean Edited by Ann Brysbaert 4 Hadrian’s Wall and the End of Empire The Roman Frontier in the 4th and 5th Centuries Rob Collins 5 U.S. Cultural Diplomacy and Archaeology Soft Power, Hard Heritage Christina Luke and Morag M. Kersel

6 The Prehistory of Iberia Debating Early Social Stratification and the State Edited by Maria Cruz Berrocal, Leonardo García Sanjuán, and Antonio Gilman 7 Materiality and Consumption in the Bronze Age Mediterranean Louise Steel 8 Archaeology in Environment and Technology Intersections and Transformations Edited by David Frankel, Jennifer M. Webb and Susan Lawrence 9 An Archaeology of Land Ownership Edited by Maria Relaki and Despina Catapoti 10 From Prehistoric Villages to Cities Settlement Aggregation and Community Transformation Edited by Jennifer Birch

From Prehistoric Villages to Cities Settlement Aggregation and Community Transformation Edited by Jennifer Birch

First published 2013 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data From prehistoric villages to cities : settlement aggregation and community. pages cm. — (Routledge studies in archaeology) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Land settlement patterns, Prehistoric. 2. Land settlement patterns— History. 3. Cities and towns, Ancient—History. 4. Civilization, Ancient. I. Birch, Jennifer. GN799.S43F76 2013 930—dc23 2012049471 ISBN: 978-0-415-83661-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-45826-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures List of Tables Preface 1 Between Villages and Cities: Settlement Aggregation in Cross-Cultural Perspective

vii xi xiii

1

JENNIFER BIRCH

2 The Anatomy of a Prehistoric Community: Reconsidering Çatalhöyük

23

BLEDA S. DÜRING

3 Coming Together, Falling Apart: A Multiscalar Approach to Prehistoric Aggregation and Interaction on the Great Hungarian Plain

44

PAUL R. DUFFY, WILLIAM A. PARKINSON, ATTILA GYUCHA, AND RICHARD W. YERKES

4 Social Organization and Aggregated Settlement Structure in an Archaic Greek City on Crete (ca. 600 BC)

63

DONALD C. HAGGIS

5 Appropriating Community: Platforms and Power on the Formative Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia

87

ROBIN A. BECK, JR.

6 Social Integration and the Built Environment of Aggregated Communities in the North American Puebloan Southwest

111

ALISON E. RAUTMAN

7 Competition and Cooperation: Late Classic Period Aggregation in the Southern Tucson Basin HENRY D. WALLACE AND MICHAEL W. LINDEMAN

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Contents

8 Organizational Complexity in Ancestral Wendat Communities

153

JENNIFER BIRCH AND RONALD F. WILLIAMSON

9 Community Aggregation through Public Architecture: Cherokee Townhouses

179

CHRISTOPHER B. RODNING

10 The Work of Making Community

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STEPHEN A. KOWALEWSKI

Contributors Index

219 223

Figures

1.1 Locations of sites and regions discussed in this volume: (1) Çatalhöyük, Konya Plain, Anatolia (Düring); (2) Körös Region, Great Hungarian Plain, Hungary (Duffy et al.); (3) Azoria, Kavousi area, northeastern Crete (Haggis); (4) Taraco Peninsula, Lake Titicaca Basin (Beck); (5) Salinas Region, Southwestern United States (Rautman); (6) Southern Tucson Basin, Southwestern United States (Wallace and Lindeman); (7) South-central Ontario, Canada (Birch and Williamson); (8) Southern Appalachians, Southeastern United States (Rodning). 2.1 Early Neolithic sites in Asia Minor mentioned in this chapter. 2.2 Spread of house sizes at Çatalhöyük (N = 105). 2.3 Distribution of subfloor burials in level VIB at Çatalhöyük. 3.1 Tells to scale with extent of horizontal settlement around them. 3.2 Microregional patterns in the Late Neolithic. 3.3 Microregional patterns in the Middle Bronze Age. 4.1 Map of the Kavousi area of northeastern Crete. 4.2 Settlement patterns in the Early Iron Age and Archaic periods in the Kavousi area: Panagia Skali (70); Azoria (71); Vronda (77); Kastro (80); cemeteries (68; 78–79; 81); Avgo Valley Early Iron Age settlement cluster (83–85; 89–91). 4.3 Azoria South Acropolis (R. D. Fitzsimons and G. Damaskinakis). 4.4 Development of Building I-O-N at Vronda in LM IIIC (top) (after Glowacki 2007: 133, Fig. 14.4); development of the Northwest Building on the Kastro (bottom) (drawing by M. S. Mook). 4.5 Northeast Building at Azoria (Archaic house) (R. D. Fitzsimons). 5.1 The Southern Lake Titicaca Basin. 5.2 Plan View, Structure 1 and Structure 2, Alto Pukara. 5.3 Hypothetical reconstruction of the Upper House complex, Chiripa.

4 24 30 32 48 51 52 66

67 73

74 75 88 91 94

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Figures

5.4 Yaya-Mama monolith, Taraco, Peru, H. 221 cm, W. 22 cm (after Chávez 1988: Fig. 5). 5.5 Yaya-Mama slab, Chiripa, W. 37.5 cm, L. 53 cm (after Chávez 1988: Fig. 4a). The border of this slab was formed by notches cut into its corners (Chávez and Chávez 1975: 55), actually making a cross formée of the slab itself. 6.1 Pre-Hispanic and Hispanic Period Pueblos of the Salinas Basin, showing the Spanish Mission sites of Quarai, Abo, and Gran Quivira. The archaeological sites and surveys mentioned in this chapter are located near the large late pueblo of Gran Quivira, on the eastern flanks of Chupadera Mesa. 6.2 Archaeological sites near Gran Quivira (from Caperton 1981; redrawn and updated by Marieka Brouwer). 6.3 Linear jacal site with activity area (redrawn from Chamberlin 2008: Fig. 5.1). 6.4 Kite Pueblo (LA 199), an early adobe pueblo. 6.5 The Adobe Pueblo at Frank’s Pueblo (LA 9032). 7.1 Middle Rincon phase (AD 1000–1100) villages and Tucson phase (AD 1300–1450) villages along the Martinez Reach of the Santa Cruz River. 7.2 Casa Azul, an aggregated settlement north of Martinez Hill. 7.3 Martinez Hill Ruin settlement complex south of Martinez Hill. 7.4 Northern Gabel compound at the Martinez Hill Ruin. 7.5 Estimated social units consolidated in the Martinez Hill Ruin south of Martinez Hill. 8.1 Map of the north-central shore of Lake Ontario indicating key sites mentioned in the text. 8.2 Draper and Mantle site plans. Draper site plan reproduced from Finlayson (1985); Mantle plan shows the early phase of occupation. 8.3 Section of Mantle site settlement plan indicating three phases of palisade construction and borrow trench. 9.1 Selected archaeological sites and Cherokee town areas in the southern Appalachians (after Rodning 2009a: 628, 2011b: 132). Sites that are known or thought to have townhouses are listed in italics: (1) King, (2) Ustanali/New Echota, (3) Ledford Island, (4) Great Tellico/Chatuga, (5) Mialoquo, (6) Tuskegee, (7) Tomotley, (8) Toqua, (9) Chota-Tanassee, (10) Citico, (11) Tallassee, (12) Chilhowee, (13) Kituwha, (14) Birdtown, (15) Nununyi, (16) Ravensford Tract, (17) Tuckasegee, (18) Alarka Farmstead, (19) Cowee, (20) Joree, (21) Whatoga, (22) Nequassee, (23) Echoee, (24) Coweeta Creek,

104

105

113 115 122 124 125

135 141 143 144 145 159

162 165

Figures ix (25) Dillard/Old Estatoe, (26) Peachtree/Great Hiwassee, (27) Spike Buck/Quanasee, (28) Brasstown Valley, (29) Nachoochee/Echota, (30) Chattooga, (31) Keowee, (32) Seneca, (33) Chauga, (34) Tugalo, (35) Estatoe, (36) Garden Creek, (37) Biltmore Mound, (38) Warren Wilson. 9.2 Early stages of the townhouse at the Coweeta Creek site in southwestern North Carolina (after Rodning 2009a: 642, 2011b: 140).

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Tables

3.1 Characteristics of site networks for the Late Neolithic and Middle Bronze Age. 3.2 Summary of settlement measures.

53 54

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Preface

This volume began as a symposium organized for the 2011 Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meetings in Sacramento, California. That session was entitled “Come Together: Regional Perspectives on Settlement Aggregation.” Our stated aim was to explore the social processes involved in the formation and maintenance of aggregated settlements cross-culturally through multiple spatial and temporal scales of analysis. The participants were invited based on work they had conducted on sites and regions that demonstrated evidence for settlement aggregation at regional and local scales and that had produced large data sets that permitted insights into community-level transformations. Following the session, there was a fair amount of discussion among the participants and audience, who agreed that important themes had emerged that linked the papers together and that could be fruitfully explored in greater depth. My interest in processes of settlement aggregation stems from my work on the coalescence of ancestral Wendat communities. In the early stages of my dissertation research, my supervisor, Aubrey Cannon, gave me a copy of Stephen Kowalewski’s paper “Coalescent Societies,” which is referenced in chapter 1. Steve’s formulation of coalescent societies provided me with a conceptual framework for exploring processes of aggregation among the precontact Northern Iroquoian communities that were the subject of my dissertation. My aim for the SAA session was to once again take Steve’s formulation of coalescent societies down an order of magnitude and explore how these processes played out in communities situated in different temporal, geographic, and cultural contexts. Half of the chapters in this volume began as papers in that session (Haggis; Beck; Rautman; Birch and Williamson; and Kowalewski as discussant), and half were solicited based on their fit with the themes and aims of the volume (Düring; Duffy, Parkinson, Gyutcha, and Yerkes; Wallace and Lindeman; and Rodning). Although the geographic scope of the chapters is not exhaustive, they span four continents and cover diverse regions and time periods where settlement aggregation resulted in dramatic processes of social, political, and economic change. As such, they directly address the processes of cultural change that are at the heart of archaeological inquiry.

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The chapters are presented in chronological order. This arrangement resulted in a geographic flow that begins in Asia Minor and then moves to Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. We then head across the Atlantic to Bolivia, in South America, before sweeping north to two locations in the American Southwest and on to eastern North America, with examples from the Southern Appalachians and the Lower Great Lakes. In the final chapter, Stephen Kowalewski provides a thoughtful conclusion, drawing from cross-cultural examples that reflect the social and physical work involved in making community. In every case examined, aggregation, whether physical or symbolic, led to a new kind (and scale) of human social community. Issues of social ordering and integration were met with new institutions, rituals, political systems, and cultural practices. Public buildings and communal spaces were constructed, facilitating and manifesting the new social relations that went on in and around them. My part in bringing this volume together was facilitated by a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Georgia, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Thanks to Stephen Kowalewski for his advisement during that time. I would also like to express my sincere appreciation to each of the contributors for their thoughtful exploration of what transpires when we come together and endeavor to create something new.

1

Between Villages and Cities Settlement Aggregation in Cross-Cultural Perspective Jennifer Birch

Archaeologists have focused a great deal of attention on explaining the origins of village societies and the transition to a Neolithic way of life. Considerable interest has also concentrated on urbanism and the rise of the earliest cities and states. Between these two revolutions in human cultural development lie a number of organizational forms that represent less well-known phases in human social evolution. In this volume we attempt to arrive at a more thorough understanding of one such intermediate social formation: aggregated settlements. Throughout the world, at various points in time, people living in small, dispersed village communities came together into larger and more complex social formations. Some of the better-known cases of settlement aggregation come from prehistoric southwestern North America. In the Mogollon, Hohokam, and Anasazi areas after AD 1000 there was a shift in settlement whereby populations nucleated, resulting in the abandonment of large tracts of land. People who had been living in small villages with a hundred or so inhabitants came together into large, aggregated pueblos with populations of up to 1,000 or more (cf. Adler 1996; Cordell 1994; Hegmon et al. 1998; Hill et al. 2004; Rautman 2000, this volume). In Neolithic Eurasia the best known example of settlement aggregation may be the site of Çatalhöyük. Inhabited 9,000 years ago by as many as 8,000 people, Çatalhöyük is famous for its huge size, dense occupation, and art rife with religious symbolism (Düring, this volume; Hodder 2010a, 2010b). Many other examples of aggregation that resulted in the formation of large, densely populated settlements have also been identified archaeologically in prehistoric Africa, Europe, Mesoamerica, the Near East, and North America (e.g., Ethridge and Hudson 2002; Gerritsen 2004; Kowalewski 2006; Kuijt 2000; Parkinson 2002) and ethnographically documented in Amazonia and New Guinea (e.g., Gross 1979; Tuzin 2001), to name but a selection. While these communities differ in size and historical context, what they have in common is that they are all essentially middle range—situated between prehistoric villages and emergent chiefdoms and states. The aim of this volume is to explore the social processes involved in the creation and maintenance of aggregated settlements and how they brought about

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transformations that affected virtually every aspect of a society and its culture. Our goal here is to draw out some of the similarities and differences in the cultural mechanisms people developed to deal with the challenges of living in larger, more complex social formations. A number of common themes emerge in the chapters contained herein, including the role of the built environment in mediating social relations, the construction of public spaces and structures, the importance and integrative potential of religion, ritual and mortuary behavior, changes in the social means of production and consumption, and oscillations in interregional interaction that accompanied the reconfiguration of geopolitical landscapes. Because many studies of aggregation have focused on settlement patterns at the regional scale, one of our aims is to explore how processes of coalescence played out at the community level, in the diverse and historically contingent settings of everyday life.

THE PROBLEM WITH TYPES Aggregated settlements do not fit neatly into commonly utilized taxonomies for describing societal or settlement types. The most common sociocultural typologies identify and differentiate between mobile hunting and gathering bands, farmers living in tribal or segmentary societies, chiefdoms, and states with urban centers and complex political and economic systems (e.g., Morgan 1877; Service 1962, 1975). Common classification schemes for types of settlements follow a similarly evolutionary structure, progressing from isolated hamlets or farmsteads to villages and towns, the latter two sometimes belonging to a settlement hierarchy that included regional centers or cities. On the one hand, these typologies are useful because they provide conceptual frameworks for cross-cultural comparison that help us organize our thoughts about different kinds of human societies (Renfrew and Bahn 2004: 181) and settlements (Flannery 1976). However, they also have the potential to mask diversity in the archaeological and ethnographic records and can lead to a disproportionate concern with issues of classification. Take, for example, arguments about whether Cahokia was a large chiefdom or an inchoate state (Anderson 1997: 260; O’Brien 1992; Peregrine 1992, 1996). In many ways, the societies discussed in this volume fall outside these typological schemes and can only be placed in them with a degree of awkwardness. Some give the impression of being too large to be classified as villages but retain many aspects of social organization associated with segmentary village societies. Others developed a degree of social and economic complexity that implies a protourban classification, but lack evidence for hierarchical leadership and social stratification associated with early cities and states. In regions where large-scale processes of aggregation resulted in the concentration of population into fewer large sites, they may also have functioned as regional centers. Given this range of variability, it would seem

Between Villages and Cities 3 that aggregated settlements represent processes of social evolution that demonstrate precisely why anthropologists should abandon sociocultural types or at least be critical of their explanatory utility (cf. Feinman and Neitzel 1984; Pauketat 2007; Yoffee 1993). Typologies work as tools for describing and classifying diverse phenomena, but they are far less successful in explaining how sociocultural and sociopolitical forms changed over time. To understand the significant degrees of similarity and variation in aggregated settlements we need to identify common patterns in how processes of aggregation were accomplished. Thus, to explain cultural change we need to identify the mechanisms through which cultural modification occurred and the conditions under which those processes developed. However, before we can identify these mechanisms, we need to more carefully consider exactly what we mean by aggregated settlement.

WHAT KINDS OF SITES ARE WE TALKING ABOUT? The societies and communities discussed here were not a product of internal population growth. Rather, most formed through processes of aggregation that, by and large, involved people abandoning a regional pattern of small, dispersed settlements in favor of aggregation into larger, more nucleated settlements. These communities were permanent and occupied year-round, which differentiates them from seasonal aggregations of mobile bands. While not a universal feature of hunter-gatherer societies, patterns of seasonal nucleation and dispersal served both economic and social needs, bringing people together to find mates, share information, and renew social ties. The importance of aggregations of macrobands extended beyond subsistence needs and included important social and ritual practices. The cave paintings of Altamira (Conkey 1980) and the monumental megalithic enclosures at Göbekli Tepe (Schmidt 2011), both sites of hunter-gatherer aggregations, attest to the cultural importance of and investment into such places. The fact that sites of seasonal nucleation have been identified around the world throughout human history speaks to the antiquity of aggregation as a mechanism for the transmission and reproduction of social practices and the creation and affirmation of cultural identities. More permanent forms of large, coresidential settlements appear in the archaeological record relatively soon after the shift to sedentism, suggesting that aggregation remained a deeply rooted adaptive mechanism in human societies. This pattern has been referred to by different terms in the archaeological literature, including agglomeration (Hodder and Cessford 2004), aggregation (Kuijt 2000; Rautman 2000), convergence (Tuck 1971), fusion (Bandy 2004), nucleation (Gerritsen 2004), or coalescence (Ethridge and Hudson 2002; Kowalewski 2006). In each case, these changes in settlement brought about the reconfiguration of existing social relations to accommodate larger groups and manage tensions that might arise in the resulting societal

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formations, resulting in dramatic, and sometimes rapid, transformations in social organization and culture; changes that were every bit as profound as those that accompanied the transition to village life or the rise of cities and civilizations. By and large, rapid settlement aggregation did not favor the emergence of centralized, hierarchical political organization. Instead, corporate or collective decision-making structures developed (Kowalewski 2006: 117). As such, these social formations do not fit traditional understandings of complex societies. However, there is no doubt that the processes and relationships that they encompassed were complicated. In this way this volume represents part of the ongoing effort to broaden archaeology’s focus beyond preoccupation with the development of vertically controlled and integrated societies to include more horizontal structures of organizational complexity (cf. Blanton et al. 1996; Crumley 1995; Johnson 1978; McIntosh 1999; Spielmann 1994) and how these sociopolitical configurations come into being. The sites discussed in this volume span more than 10,000 years of human history and are spread across four continents (Figure 1.1). I believe it would be counterproductive to attempt to find a common settlement type that defines them. It is, however, useful to review the terms that the authors use. Düring discusses “community organization” at Çatalhöyük, which has been described variously as a “large agglomerated village” (Hodder and Cessford 2004), a “town” (Hodder 2010a), and a “city” (Mellaart 1967); though Düring and his contemporaries reject such an urban classification. Duffy and colleagues discuss “nucleated village” settlements in Neolithic Europe, and

Figure 1.1 Locations of sites and regions discussed in this volume: (1) Çatalhöyük, Konya Plain, Anatolia (Düring); (2) Körös Region, Great Hungarian Plain, Hungary (Duffy et al.); (3) Azoria, Kavousi area, northeastern Crete (Haggis); (4) Taraco Peninsula, Lake Titicaca Basin (Beck); (5) Salinas Region, Southwestern United States (Rautman); (6) Southern Tucson Basin, Southwestern United States (Wallace and Lindeman); (7) South-central Ontario, Canada (Birch and Williamson); (8) Southern Appalachians, Southeastern United States (Rodning).

Between Villages and Cities 5 Haggis focuses on an “archaic city” in Eastern Crete. Beck’s platform complexes were constructed by middle formative “villagers” in Bolivia. Rautman refers to the pueblo settlements in her study area in the U.S. Southwest as “village-communities.” It is worth noting that the term pueblo has its etymological roots in the Castilian word for “town.” Wallace and Lindeman, also writing about the Southwest, refer to “villages” and, more basically, “room blocks and platform mounds with attached rooms,” noting that while earlier researchers described settlements in the Lower Tucson Valley as “pueblos,” they would not in fact be called pueblos by today’s definition. Moving to eastern North America, the Cherokee “towns” discussed by Rodning (also deriving their name from a European lexicon) are somewhat smaller than the aggregated ancestral Huron “villages” discussed by Birch and Williamson. In terms of how these social formations developed, some resulted from the aggregation of numerous small village-based communities whether physically (e.g., Birch; Düring; Haggis; Rautman; Wallace and Lindeman) or symbolically (e.g., Beck; Rodning), others were the result of the breakdown or reorganization of larger or more complex social formations or were living within range of such societies (e.g., Duffy et al.). Over time some went on to become urbanized (e.g., Haggis). Others allied into polities or confederacies (e.g., Birch; Rodning), and some eventually dissolved, returning to a more distributed settlement pattern (e.g., Duffy et al.; Wallace and Lindeman). In each case, the inhabitants of these communities faced a common challenge: how to organize and sustain populations living together in larger groups than existed before. As such, we are not so much interested in why these settlements formed, but rather how they came to be and how they were maintained. Other questions include: Once people came together, what kept them together? How did they provide the necessities of life for these populations? What role did shared ideologies play in fostering a sense of community? What social, political, economic, or formal mechanisms did people develop to maintain community cohesion? Was sustained settlement nucleation a desired outcome, or was it a short-lived response to particular historical or environmental conditions? In what ways were they different compared to what came before? It is the relationships between households, suprahousehold units, and communitywide organizational structures that are the subject of our interest. Because mechanisms for both integrating and ordering populations develop primarily in the context of day-to-day interaction and decision making, the local community is the most appropriate scale of analysis for exploring changes in social production and reproduction in the context of settlement aggregation.

AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF COMMUNITIES This study places the community at the center of historical processes of sociocultural change. The term community is frequently used in archaeological discourse yet remains somewhat amorphous in definition. In the

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late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a multitude of sociological and ethnographic studies have attempted to define the community as a geographic area, a group of people living in a particular place, an area of common life, and, in political discourse, a powerful organizing ideal (Cohen 1985; Etzioni 1995; Hoggett 1997; Suttles 1972). While the concept of community is put to different uses by scholars in various fields, the consensus seems to be that the local community is one of the most important contexts for social action, interaction, and identity formation (e.g., Boulware 2011; Mac Sweeney 2011). Most understandings of community have a sociospatial basis. Situated between domestic household groups and societies writ large, the village community is often the largest sociopolitical unit in small-scale societies (Gerritsen 2003; Williamson and Robertson 1994). Early perspectives envisioned communities as relatively static, closed, and homogeneous social units composed of household clusters, discrete activity areas, and a shared material culture, neatly compatible with archaeological definitions of “site” (Flannery 1976; Murdock 1949). Later definitions favored a functionalist and behavioralist characterization informed by theories based in political economy. In this perspective, the community serves three broad functions: social reproduction, subsistence production, and self-identification or group association, which together create a sociospatial setting against which theoretical concepts can be examined (Kolb and Snead 1997). The emergence of new perspectives on communities, both natural and imagined, has enriched our interpretive frameworks for understanding their form and function (cf. Anderson 1991; Canuto and Yaeger 2000; Isbell 2000). Rather than reify communities as static building blocks of societies, these frameworks are flexible and allow us to interrogate at various scales the relationships between settlement remains, sociopolitical and economic practices, and cultural production and reproduction. A number of authors in this volume note that shared community identities likely preceded and may have facilitated physical aggregation in the regions studied (Birch and Williamson; Haggis; Rautman; Wallace and Lindeman). Others discuss how architectural forms appropriated or extended community relationships beyond the coresidential settlement (Beck; Rodning). On the other hand, in her chapter, Alison Rautman asks the very relevant question of whether aggregated settlements can justifiably be called communities. If human communities are defined by sets of interactions that play out in a sociospatial setting (Yaeger and Canuto 2000: 5), then they are never static, but always in a state of becoming through politicized practices of negotiation and affiliation (Pauketat 2007: 107). As the title of Beck’s conference paper (2011) in the session that prompted this volume suggested, communities must be made from aggregations. My work on ancestral Wendat settlements in Ontario has shown that the construction of community-based identities does not occur immediately with aggregation but evolves over multiple generations as people adapt to new

Between Villages and Cities 7 circumstances, both internal and external to their sociospatial environment, and foster new, community-based identities (Birch 2012). Peoples do not immediately become a people. Furthermore, because people are often pressed to aggregate because of negative or immediate external pressures (Kowalewski 2006) or because aggregations were thought to be a temporary phenomenon (see Wallace and Lindeman, this volume), the creation of common, community-based identities may not have been desirous or even possible. Furthermore, while aggregation often has a macroregional basis, each community develops within a set of uniquely constituted local contingencies, and what is true for one aggregated settlement within a particular region will not necessarily be for another. As discussed below, while processes of cultural change might be visible as long-term, large-scale phenomena, to understand how those localized processes played out within individual communities we must adopt a multiscalar analytical approach that considers how local contingencies relate to cultural change writ large. Only then can we compare how community-level processes relate to regional trajectories of change and then make comparisons within and between regions. In other words, to answer big questions in anthropological archaeology we need equally big data sets.

STUDYING SETTLEMENT AGGREGATION Archaeological studies of settlement aggregation can generally be grouped into two categories: regional studies and intrasite analyses of individual settlements. Patterns of settlement aggregation are, by their very nature, often identified at the regional level. Regional studies tend to focus on documenting and explaining population movement in large areas over long periods of time, including demographic trends, changes in site size, migration, and the abandonment of large tracts of land (e.g., Baird 2006; Goring-Morris and Belfer-Cohen 2010; Hegmon et al. 1998; Hill et al. 2004; Simmons 2007). Many of these studies focus on external stimuli that are thought to have caused migration and aggregation into larger settlements. These forces include population growth (Bandy 2004; Warrick 2008), environmental and climatic factors (Adler 1996; Hill et al. 2004), warfare (Arkush 2009; LeBlanc 1999), encroachment, colonization (Ethridge and Shuck-Hall 2009), and the cycling of sociopolitical units (Anderson 1994; Parkinson 2002). The second type of study focuses on intrasite analyses of individual settlements, their histories of occupation, and the social, spatial, and temporal dynamics they encapsulate (e.g., Hodder and Cessford 2004; Kintigh et al. 2004; Riggs 2001; Rodning 2009; Stone 2000). Site-specific studies have produced a great deal of insight into the life histories of settlements and how they were physically, ideologically, and symbolically constituted. Some studies have also systematically addressed how aggregation produced organizational changes within communities (Kujit 2000; Tringham 2000). This

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is particularly true in the American Southwest, where settlement aggregation has consistently been a subject of scholarly interest (e.g., Adler 1996; Kintigh et al. 2004; Lowell 1996; Rautman 2000; Riggs 2001; Stone 2000; Wills and Leonard 1994). Respectively, regional and site-level scales of analysis provide important insights into broad settlement trajectories and intrasite dynamics. However, less has been done to reconcile these two scales of analysis. It is only by integrating insights from multiple spatial and temporal scales that we can understand the relationships between long-term processes of cultural change and the lived experience of everyday life, a relationship that is critical to an anthropological archaeology of human societal evolution (Kuijt 2000; Trigger 1967). Most archaeological models that deal with settlement growth and the development of organizational complexity treat population increases as a result of mechanical growth (e.g., Bandy 2008; Carniero 1970; Johnson 1982). But sequences of sociopolitical development and population growth can also proceed in a nonlinear fashion (e.g., Blanton et al. 1993; Flannery 1999; Warrick 2008). This assertion is supported by archaeological studies that have demonstrated how different scales and forms of human settlement have developed as the result of patterned variation, including fission, fusion, and cycling (e.g., Bandy 2004; Birch 2012; Parkinson 2002; Peterson and Drennan 2012). A substantial body of literature has developed around the idea of density-dependent conflict in human populations (e.g., Carniero 1987; Feinman 2011; Fletcher 1995; Johnson 1978, 1982). At the regional level, the increasing size of human groups has been used to explain the development of hierarchical leadership and organizational complexity as environmentally or socially circumscribed populations competed for control over critical resources and territory (e.g., Carniero 1970; Ember 1963; LeBlanc 2008). Population increases have likewise been linked to increasing levels of conflict or scalar stress within individual communities. Rappaport proposed that sources of irritation increased geometrically as population size increased, and if population increased in a linear fashion, an “irritation coefficient” could be expressed mathematically (1968: 116). This linear, logarithmic model was adopted by Johnson (1978), who approached the problem from the perspective of organizational theory and argued that as population grows, decision making becomes increasingly difficult, resulting in community fission or the development of horizontal and vertical integration. Fletcher (1995) has discussed how there is an upper limit on how much interaction people can tolerate before encountering communication stress and that the built environment can be used to constrain and control stress. Nevertheless, the ability of material barriers to manage such stress is finite, resulting in constraints on settlement growth (Fletcher 1995: 71). Dunbar (2003, 2011) has suggested a physiological explanation for density-dependent social stress, arguing that the computational capacity of the

Between Villages and Cities 9 human brain is incapable of tolerating group sizes of more than 100 to 200 persons. In order for human communities to grow beyond this threshold structured social networks and grouping patterns must be developed. Many of these formulations for estimating density-dependent stress assume that population increases mechanically over time through natural, albeit variable, growth rates. In this model, scalar stress thereby increases in a curvilinear or geometric fashion. As social and communication stress increases, social, political, material, and economic mechanisms are gradually developed and bring about organizational change. If the stress becomes more than the community can manage through existing mechanisms of social and political organization, the result is either fission into more, smaller social units (Bandy 2004; Carniero 1987), the development of suprahousehold organizations to reduce the numbers of decision-making units, or the rise of leadership hierarchies to coordinate community functions and adjudicate disputes (Carniero 1970; Johnson 1982). In cases where settlements grow as a result of aggregation or nucleation, population increases rapidly through accretion. Density-dependent conflict does not build up gradually over time. Instead, it is more immediate, necessitating the rapid development of mechanisms to manage the potential for disputes through the integration and ordering of community members, households, and suprahousehold groups. Because the creation of aggregated settlements is often rapid and deliberate, the creation of mechanisms to integrate, order, and manage tensions is also intentional. These mechanisms may be the same as those used to integrate settlements that grow slowly over time. For example, the built environment, social norms, and ritual are used to mediate social relations in most human societies. Indeed, the entities and activities that facilitate large social aggregates are rarely, if ever, created anew. They have their basis in existing cultural traditions, and political institutions (Belfer-Cohen and Goring-Morris 2011). The conscious establishment of new social and political structures plays out against a shared cultural background acquired through socialization (Blanton et al. 1996). With aggregation, these mechanisms were transformed, reconfigured, or given new emphasis in order to reproduce, transform, integrate, and order these new, larger social formations (Kowalewski 2006). Ethnographies that describe aggregated settlements provide unique insights into the lived experience of communities and how the mechanisms that maintained them played out in living social relationships—those behaviors that we, as archaeologists, seek to reconstruct. In Social Complexity in the Making (2001), Donald Tuzin describes the village of Ilahita, an Arapesh village of unprecedented size in the highlands of New Guinea. Ilahita was a very large multilingual and multiethnic village that formed in the early twentieth century and grew rapidly through the incorporation of refugees and war allies during a period of heightened conflict in the region. The questions at the center of Tuzin’s inquiry are essentially the same as ours: How did the village become so unusually large? and How did it remain

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intact? He found that the integration of Ilahita’s population was accomplished through dual organization through eight opposed and intersecting moiety systems with defined social and ritual obligations between wards and clans and the Tambaran, the central ritual institution and secret men’s cult focused on war, sacrifice, and rites of initiation, which welded the units of Ilahita society into “a cooperating, mechanical whole” (Tuzin 2001: 100). The interplay between the moiety system and the Tambaran was one of structural coherence and functional efficiency, which simultaneously integrated and ordered social life in Ilahita (Tuzin 2001: 10–14, 58). These are precisely the types of social mechanisms that make aggregated communities work by structuring social relations and integrating social units into a unified whole—the mechanisms that we, as archaeologists, must attempt to identify to understand what made aggregation possible.

COALESCENT SOCIETIES A significant point of departure for understanding how processes of settlement aggregation unfolded in communities is Stephen Kowalewski’s concept of “coalescent societies” (2006). The term coalescent society was first employed in a volume edited by Ethridge and Hudson (2002; cf. Drooker 2002; Rodning 2002; see also Lehmer 1954) to describe Southeastern American polities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such as the Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw. These social formations were composed of the remnants of Mississippian peoples who had experienced demographic collapse as a result of colonization, epidemic diseases, and the English slave trade. The responses of the native populations were varied but, by and large, involved the coalescence of new social formations in new locations with new political institutions (Kowalewski 2006: 95). Inspired by this phenomenon, Kowalewski examined other societies in the Americas and elsewhere to explore whether coalescent societies could be identified beyond the Southeast. Comparing societies described in the ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological records from Africa, New Guinea, Amazonia, Mesoamerica, and the North American Plains, Southwest, and Northeast, he found that people in other places and times did indeed come together in comparable ways and exhibited similar processes, responses, and institutions. Those processes include: The creation of larger towns or villages with multiethnic, multilingual populations; movement to new locations that provide security and resources necessary to sustain the population; collective defense; intensification of local production; changes in the social means of production; intensification of trade; elaboration of community integration by means of corporate kin groups, moieties, unilineal (often matrilineal) descent groups or clan systems; architectural planning and settlement layouts designed to promote community integration; universalizing, collective, and egalitarian ideologies and ritual practices; myths emphasizing incorporation and ordering of groups; an emphasis on collective

Between Villages and Cities 11 or corporate leadership, including councils and confederacies whereby hierarchical leadership was actively discouraged; and a macroregional cultural and political-economic context (Kowalewski 2006: 117). While similar conditions prompted comparable responses, the variability in these patterns is such that coalescent societies should not be viewed as a societal type but rather a process that occurred similarly among middle-range, pre-state societies in a variety of contexts and that brought about major social, political, and economic transformations that affected virtually every aspect of a society and its culture (Kowalewski 2007: 434). Outside of the Southeast (cf. Blitz 2010; Pluckhahn 2010), the coalescent society model has been most productively employed in the American Southwest (Hill et al. 2004). I have also effectively employed Kowalewski’s model in Northeastern North America to understand processes of settlement aggregation among late precontact Northern Iroquoian populations (Birch 2012). Much as Alfred Kidder described the Pueblo III period as one of cultural “greatness” (Adler 1996), Bruce Trigger described the fifteenth century as a period of “cultural fluorescence” for ancestral Huron societies (1985: 100). In these cases, and elsewhere, it is now apparent that the pronounced size of communities and the cultural transformations they brought about were not an apex of cultural development but rather the result of a process of macroregional coalescence. Not every instance of settlement aggregation can be explained through the coalescent society model. But many of the traits of coalescent societies are shared with the aggregated settlements discussed in this volume. Where Kowalewski’s model is of the greatest utility is in its pointing to the mechanisms through which aggregation is accomplished. Some of these are more tangible than others. For example, we stand a better chance of reconstructing settlement layouts and identifying fortifications than we do understanding prehistoric ideologies or origin myths. While large-scale patterns in settlement trends and trajectories of sociopolitical realignment may be visible at the regional scale, it is difficult to discern the actual mechanisms for sociopolitical change using such a top-down approach. Instead, through detailed examinations of microscale patterns at the local and community level, we may be able to identify changes in social practices that speak directly to the lived experience of coalescence. In this way, what we are doing here is taking Kowalewski’s model of societal coalescence down an order of magnitude to identify the material correlates of these sociocultural transformations in local contexts.

HISTORY, PROCESS, AND PRACTICE Archaeologists tend to talk about generalized histories and processes of cultural change as opposed to the lived experiences of everyday life (Barrett 1994). This is in part a product of the data we are dealing with and the

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methods we use to collect it. Different scales of analysis reveal different cycles of historical time, ranging from the short-term events and moments that make up individual lives to the medium-term cycles of economic and political change to long-term changes in ecology and evolution (Bintliff 1991; Braudel 1972). How archaeologists move between these temporal sequences has everything to do with the questions we ask, the phenomena we seek to explain, and the methods we employ. Here, our aim is to understand how the process of coming together produced localized, community-based changes in social relations and how these changes resulted in long-term, large-scale cultural transformations. To do so we need to identify the materiality of those changes at the local and community level and situate them in a macroregional context. Cultures and communities do not exist independently of the social relations that produce and reproduce them (Cohen 1985; Giddens 1984). As archaeologists, we need to seek out material evidence for social relationships and the practices through which social relations were maintained. Like Barrett (1994: 3), we are arguing “against the dichotomy which has been erected between life as lived in the immediate and the short-term, and the history of long-term social institutions” by situating explanatory power in the relationship between short-term practices and long-term processes of sociocultural change. Anthropological archaeology has recently experienced a theoretical convergence, bridging a number of theories of the recent past and present (Hegmon 2003; Pauketat 2003; Trigger 2007: 497). Archaeologists are increasingly situating explanatory power in an understanding of historical processes centered on theories of practice and structuration albeit in tangible form (Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1984). This paradigm asserts that traditions or practices are the active forces in cultural construction and transmission (Pauketat 2001, 2003; Thomas 2004). Identifying the materiality and spatiality of those practices in the archaeological record enables us to tack back and forth between various scales of analysis to document variability through time and across space and to compare genealogies of practice embodied in the material record of the populations being studied (Brumfiel 2000: 252; Lightfoot et al. 1998; Pauketat and Alt 2005: 230; Wylie 1989). By applying an approach grounded in history and practice to the archaeology of aggregated settlements, the focus of explanation shifts from questions of why people aggregate to how aggregation was accomplished (Pauketat 2001). To explore how this process played out over space and time we need to identify and interpret how material culture was utilized to mediate these new social and physical environments. Contemporary anthropologists recognize that cultures are inherently dynamic, and this is particularly so for communities undergoing processes of coalescence. As Kowalewski (this volume) notes, the archaeological cases discussed here all represent circumstances in which social structures were in the process of changing. If we acknowledge that the process of aggregation drove major transformations in sociopolitical structures and the cultural

Between Villages and Cities 13 frameworks in which they are embedded, then we must also recognize that these changes were shaped by the unique, and historically contingent, situation and composition of each community. Although, as Kowalewski pointed out in his original statement on coalescent societies (2006), processes of aggregation may involve commonly occurring responses, not all cases exhibit every feature. As such, our aim in this volume is not to produce a generalized model of settlement aggregation and community transformation but to explore the range of variation in how people altered their way of life as they came together into different social formations.

THE MATERIALITY OF COMMUNITY TRANSFORMATION: A COMPARATIVE APPROACH If our aim is to identify evidence for the changes in practice that accompanied coalescence—the tangible, material record of community transformation— we require large data sets, both at the regional and community levels, with sufficient chronological control of their components to construct settlement histories and recognize those changes over time. To identify that a particular settlement was a product of aggregation we need to have some understanding of what came before. In most cases, settlement aggregates were the result of the nucleation of non-coresidential communities that had extant relationships and affiliations. While aggregation brought about significant changes in social, political, and economic life, people did not necessarily develop entirely new cultural traits. Existing organizational structures and practices were transformed or reworked, giving materials, ideologies, traditions, and sociopolitical institutions new emphasis to meet the organizational needs of larger population aggregates. Those preexisting relations facilitated aggregation through the strengthening or exploitation of existing ties. Understanding the nature of those relationships provides a historical context for understanding how settlements and the social, political, and economic organization of their inhabitants were transformed in the context of coalescence. Each of the authors in this volume explores how built forms were used to integrate aggregated populations through the structuring and restructuring of domestic spaces, maintain separation between household and community groups, or both. Built forms are both a class of material culture and a symbolic expression of a larger cultural framework (Bourdieu 1970). From a functional perspective, architecture provides a place to shelter from the elements and store food and other necessities of life. One of the central tenets of most archaeological approaches to the built environment is that it is intrinsically linked to the society and culture of the occupants and, as such, both reflects and influences the social actions and interactions that take place in and around it (Hillier and Hanson 1984; Lawrence and Low 1990; Rapoport 1990). The ways in which these built forms are positioned relative

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to one another reflects the relationship between constituent domestic groups and the social whole. When aggregated settlements formed rapidly in new locations, the inhabitants would have had a degree of flexibility in reorganizing the built environment to suit their immediate needs. Changes in these material settings before, during, and after aggregation signal changes in those relationships and can aid archaeologists in understanding how social relations were transformed, reproduced, or maintained. The separation of different architectural units, such as households and groups of households, may be interpreted as denoting the boundaries of smaller social units within the larger group. Likewise, a lack of separation can suggest a greater degree of integration. Each chapter in this volume also considers how the construction of public buildings and demarcation of public spaces helped to both integrate and order communities. These structures and spaces served as contexts for ritual activities, secular functions, or both. Worldwide, a repetitive correlation exists between aggregation and public architecture (cf. Adler and Wilshusen 1990; Lipe and Hegmon 1989). This category includes structures such as council houses, clan houses, plazas, ritual enclosures, and men’s houses. In a cross-cultural survey of large-scale integrative facilities in tribal societies, Adler and Wilshusen (1990) found that the importance of facilities that facilitated community integration beyond the household level developed concomitantly with the stresses associated with controlling information and decision making in increasingly larger communities (cf. Johnson 1982). Beck discusses how platform mound complexes and associated ritual behaviors first structured asymmetrical relationships between social groups and subsequently allowed one group to appropriate that architecture and extend the concept of a single community identity across the Taraco Peninsula. The construction of public and domestic architecture such as the rooftop courtyards discussed by Düring, the spine walls that linked multiple domestic structures discussed by Haggis and Rautman, public buildings such as the Cherokee townhouses discussed by Rodning, and the plazas discussed by Duffy and colleagues, Rautman, and Birch and Williamson served to integrate communities through the investment of labor in community infrastructure and the interactions that took place in the context of those spaces. In the example provided by Wallace and Lindeman, while there is little integration between room-block and platform mound complexes, a ritual enclosure set apart from dwellings may have been a setting for communitywide ritual practices. The development of corporate political organization may not be immediately apparent in the archaeological record. It can often be recognized through the absence of evidence for internal differentiation that might suggest hierarchical divisions in wealth or authority. The presence of collective decision making may be made tangible through the presence of civic architecture and evidence for universalizing institutions such as those discussed by Beck, Haggis, and Rodning. Even mundane activities such as the

Between Villages and Cities 15 implementation of a community-wide waste management system at the Mantle site, discussed by Birch and Williamson, implies coordinated community planning on a scale that included the entire population. Aggregation also would have brought about changes in practices related to the production and consumption of foodstuffs and material goods. The larger populations of communities necessitated the intensification of local agricultural production (Kowalewski 2003, this volume). Furthermore, the conditions that prompted aggregation (e.g., warfare, encroachment) may have reduced people’s ability to venture afield in pursuit of a broader subsistence base. Wallace and Lindeman suggest that the incompletely aggregated community at Martinez ruin collaborated to maintain infrastructure necessary to support farming in a marginal environment; Haggis discusses the appearance of material culture which suggests that communal food preparation and consumption, and perhaps production, was an important part of community life; and Birch and Williamson discuss cooperative hunting strategies required to clothe larger coresidential populations and how presumed shortfalls in hides obtained by hunters in the community may have necessitated trade and exchange with populations to the north. Kowalewski, in the concluding chapter, draws out the relationship between settlement aggregation and labor, both in terms of the physical work related to, for example, agricultural intensification and the “social work” of cultural change through collective action.

SUMMARY This volume follows in the vein of a number of recent works that have called for a comparative archaeological approach to understanding variability in human societies at a variety of scales (cf. Bandy and Fox 2010; Drennan et al. 2012; Trigger 2003; Yoffee 2005). Anthropology is first and foremost a holistic and comparative science. As such, our aims are characterized by our goals and approach as opposed to being bound by any regional or temporal scope. Without undertaking meaningful, comparative research, we risk becoming overly involved in regionalized explanations for why and how cultures changed. By undertaking comparisons that incorporate long-term social variability and trajectories of cultural change, we can move beyond comparative studies of sociocultural types and toward a more nuanced understanding of how historical processes of change unfold in individual communities. The case studies presented in this volume are organized chronologically for no reason other than the range of time periods discussed seemed amenable to this order of presentation, although the resulting chapters do flow from the old world to the new. Taken as a whole, they provide a comparative, anthropological, and archaeological perspective on the social and cultural transformations that transpire when people come to live together in new

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social formations. Because this form of social evolution does not correspond to the usual framework for understanding transitions between sociocultural types, it requires an explanatory framework that examines how existing traditions were reproduced, transformed, and created anew. People do not conceptualize their societies and communities as rungs on an evolutionary ladder, and neither should we. Instead we must focus on how changes in human relationships and material practices at the community level can provide insights into how peoples and cultures changed on a grand scale. By doing so, we can broaden our understanding of human societies to understand the true complexity of human societies of the ancient and recent past.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to all of the participants in the session “Come Together: Regional Perspectives on Settlement Aggregation” held at the 2011 Society for American Archaeology meetings in Sacramento, California. While not all of those papers are included in this volume, they were all very helpful in refining the important themes covered here. This work was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship, which took place in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Georgia under the advisement of Stephen Kowalewski. Thanks to Stephen Kowalewski and Ron Williamson, who provided comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. Thanks also to members of the archaeology faculty and graduate students at the University of Georgia for meeting to discuss this topic as a group. All errors or omissions are my responsibility alone.

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Between Villages and Cities 17 Baird, Douglas. 2006 The History of Settlement and Social Landscapes in the Early Holocene in the Çatalhöyük Area. In Çatalhöyük Perspectives: Reports from the 1995–99 Seasons, edited by Ian Hodder, pp. 55–74. Çatalhöyük Research Project Volume 6. British Institute at Ankara Monograph No. 40. Ankara. Bandy, Matthew S. 2004 Fissioning, Scalar Stress and Social Evolution in Early Village Societies. American Anthropologist 106: 322–333. ———. 2008 Global Patterns of Early Village Development. In The Neolithic Demographic Transition and its Consequences, edited by Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel and Ofer Bar-Yosef, pp. 333–357. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht. Bandy, Matthew S., and Jake R. Fox (editors). 2010 Becoming Villagers: Comparing Early Village Societies. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Barrett, John C. 1994 Fragments from Antiquity: An Archaeology of Social Life in Britain, 2900–1200 BC. Blackwell, Oxford. Beck, Robin A., Jr. 2011 Making Communities of Aggregations in the Formative Lake Titicaca Basin. Paper presented at the 76th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Sacramento. Belfer-Cohen, Anna, and A. Nigel Goring-Morris. 2011 Becoming Farmers: The Inside Story. Current Anthropology 52(S4): S209–S220. Bintliff, John L. (editor). 1991 The Annales School and Archaeology. Leicester University Press, Leicester. Birch, Jennifer. 2012 Coalescent Communities: Settlement Aggregation and Social Integration in Iroquoian Ontario. American Antiquity 77(4): 646–670. Blanton, Richard E., Gary M. Feinman, Stephen A. Kowalewski, and Peter N. Peregrine 1996. A Dual-Processual Theory for the Evolution of Mesoamerican Civilization. Current Anthropology 37(1): 1–14. Blanton, Richard E., Stephen A. Kowalewski, Gary M. Feinman, and Laura Finsten. 1993 Ancient Mesoamerica: A Comparison of Change in Three Regions. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Blitz, John H. 2010 New Perspectives in Mississippian Archaeology. Journal of Archaeological Research 18: 1–39. Boulware, Tyler. 2011 Deconstructing the Cherokee Nation: Town, Region and Nation among Eighteenth-Century Cherokees. Gainesville, University Press of Florida. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1970 The Berber House or the World Reversed. Social Science Information 9: 151–170. ———. 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Braudel, Fernand. 1972 The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. 2 vols. Fontana/Collins, London. Brumfiel, Elizabeth M. 2000 On the Archaeology of Choice: Agency Studies as a Research Strategem. In Agency in Archaeology, edited by Marcia-Anne Dobres and John Robb, pp. 249–255. Routledge, London. Canuto, Marcello A., and Jason Yaeger (editors). 2000 The Archaeology of Communities: A New World Perspective. Routledge, New York. Carniero, Robert L. 1970 A Theory on the Origin of the State. Science, New Series 169(3947): 733–738. ———. 1987 Village Splitting as a Function of Population Size. In Themes in Ethnology and Culture History: Essays in Honor of David F. Aberle, edited by L. Donald, pp. 94–124. Archana Publications, Meerut. Cohen, Anthony P. 1985 The Symbolic Construction of Community. Ellis Horwood, Chichester. Conkey, Margaret W. 1980 The Identification of Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Aggregation Sites: The Case of Altamira. Current Anthropology 21(5): 609–630. Cordell, Linda S. 1994 Introduction: Community Dynamics of Population Aggregation in the Prehistoric Southwest. In The Ancient Southwestern Community:

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Lightfoot, Kent G., Antoinette Martinez, and Ann M. Schiff. 1998 Daily Practice and Material Culture in Pluralistic Social Settings: An Archaeological Study of Culture Change and Persistence from Fort Ross, California. American Antiquity 63: 199–222. Lipe, William D., and Michelle Hegmon. 1989 Historical and Analytical Perspectives on Architecture and Social Integration in the Prehistoric Pueblos. In The Architecture of Social Integration in Prehistoric Pueblos, edited by William D. Lipe and Michelle Hegmon, pp. 15–34. Occasional Paper No. 1, Crow Canyon Archaeological Centre, Cortez. Lowell, Julia C. 1996 Moieties in Prehistory: A Case Study from the Pueblo Southwest. Journal of Field Archaeology 23: 77–90. Mac Sweeney, Naoíse. 2011 Community Identity and Archaeology: Dynamic Communities at Aphrodisias and Becyesultan. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. McIntosh, Susan Keetch. 1999 Pathways to Complexity: An African Perspective. In Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa, edited by Susan Keetch McIntosh, pp. 1–30. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Mellaart, James. 1967 Çatal Hüyük: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia. Thames and Hudson, London. Morgan, Lewis Henry. 1877 Ancient Society. Henry Holt, New York. Murdock, George P. 1949 Social Structure. Macmillan, New York. O’Brien, Patricia. 1992 The “World-System” of Cahokia within the Middle Mississippian Tradition. Review, A Journal of the Ferdinand Braudel Center 15: 389–417. Parkinson, William A. 2002 Integration, Interaction, and Tribal “Cycling”: The Transition to the Copper Age on the Great Hungarian Plain. In The Archaeology of Tribal Societies, edited by William A. Parkinson, pp. 391–438. International Monographs in Prehistory Archaeological Series 15, Ann Arbor. Pauketat, Timothy R. 2001 Practice and History in Archaeology: An Emerging Paradigm. Anthropological Theory 1: 73–98. ———. 2003 Material and the Immaterial in Historical-Processual Archaeology. In Essential Tensions in Archaeological Method and Theory, edited by Todd L. VanPool and Christine S. VanPool, pp. 41–54. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. ———. 2007 Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions. AltaMira Press, Lanham. Pauketat, Timothy R., and Susan Alt. 2005 Agency in a Postmould? Physicality and the Agency of Culture-Making. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 12: 213–236. Peregrine, Peter N. 1992 Mississippian Evolution: A World-System Perspective. Monographs in World Archaeology No. 9. Prehistory Press, Madison. ———. 1996 Hyperopia or Hyperbole? The Mississippian World-System. In PreColumbian World-Systems, edited by Peter N. Peregrine and Gary M. Feinman, pp. 39–49. Monographs in World Archaeology No. 26. Prehistory Press, Madison. Peterson, Christian E., and Robert D. Drennan. 2012 Patterned Variation in Regional Trajectories of Community Growth. In The Comparative Archaeology of Complex Societies, edited by Michael E. Smith, pp. 88–137. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Pluckhahn, Thomas J. 2010 Household Archaeology in the Southeastern United States: History, Trends and Challenges. Journal of Archaeological Research 81: 331–385. Rapoport, Amos. 1990 The Meaning of the Built Environment: A Nonverbal Communication Approach. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Rappaport, Roy. 1968 Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People. Yale University Press, New Haven. Rautman, Alison. 2000 Population Aggregation, Community Organization, and Plaza Oriented Pueblos in the American Southwest. Journal of Field Archaeology 27: 271–283.

Between Villages and Cities 21 Renfrew, Colin, and Paul Bahn. 2004 Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice. 4th edition. Thames and Hudson, London. Riggs, Charles R. 2001 The Architecture of Grasshopper Pueblo. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Rodning, Christopher. 2002 Reconstructing the Coalescence of Cherokee Communities in Southern Appalachia. In The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians: 1540–1760, edited by Robbie Ethridge and Charles Hudson, pp. 155–175. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson. ———. 2009 Domestic Houses at Coweeta Creek. Southeastern Archaeology 28(1): 1–26. Schmidt, Klaus. 2011 Göbekli Tepe: A Neolithic Site in Southeastern Anatolia. The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia 10,000–323 B.C.E., edited by Sharon R. Steadman and Gregory MacMahon, pp. 917–933. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Service, Elman R. 1962 Primitive Social Organization. Random House, New York. ———. 1975 Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution. W. W. Norton, New York. Simmons, Alan. 2007 The Neolithic Revolution in the Near East: Transforming the Human Landscape. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Spielmann, Katherine A. 1994 Clustered Confederacies: Sociopolitical Organization in the Protohistoric Río Grande. In The Ancient Southwestern Community: Models and Methods for the Study of Prehistoric Social Organization, edited by W. H. Wills and Robert D. Leonard, pp. 45–54. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Stone, Tammy. 2000 Prehistoric Community Integration in the Point of Pines Region of Arizona. Journal of Field Archaeology 27: 197–208. Suttles, Gerald D. 1972 The Social Construction of Communities. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Thomas, Julian. 2004 The Great Dark Book: Archaeology, Experience and Interpretation. In A Companion to Archaeology, edited by John Bintliff, pp. 21–36. Wiley-Blackwell, Malden. Trigger, Bruce G. 1967 Settlement Archaeology: Its Goals and Promise. American Antiquity 32: 149–160. ———. 1985 Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s Heroic Age Reconsidered. McGillQueens University Press, Kingston and Montreal. ———. 2003 Understanding Early Civilizations. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ———. 2007 A History of Archaeological Thought. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Tringham, Ruth. 2000 The Continuous House: A View from the Deep Past In Beyond Kinship: Social and Material Reproduction in House Societies, edited by Rosemary A. Joyce and Susan D. Gillespie, pp. 115–134. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Tuck, James A. 1971 Onondaga Iroquois Prehistory: A Study in Settlement Archaeology. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse. Tuzin, Donald. 2001 Social Complexity in the Making: A Case Study among the Arapesh of New Guinea. Routledge, New York. Warrick, Gary. 2008 A Population History of the Huron-Petun, A.D. 500–1650. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Williamson, Ronald F., and David A. Robertson. 1994 Peer Polities Beyond the Periphery: Early and Middle Iroquoian Regional Interaction. Ontario Archaeology 58: 27–40. Wills, W. H., and Robert D. Leonard (editors). 1994 The Ancient Southwestern Community: Methods and Models for the Study of Prehistoric Social Organization. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

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Wylie, Alison. 1989 Archaeological Cables and Tacking: The Implications of Practice for Bernstein’s “Options Beyond Objectivism and Relativism.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 19: 1–18. Yaeger, Jason, and Marcello A. Canuto. 2000 Introducing an Archaeology of Communities. In The Archaeology of Communities: A New World Perspective, edited by Marcello A. Canuto and Jason Yaeger, pp. 1–15. Routledge, New York. Yoffee, Norman. 1993 Too Many Chiefs? (Or, Safe Texts for the ’90s). In Archaeological Theory: Who Sets the Agenda? edited by Norman Yoffee and Andrew Sherratt, pp. 60–77. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ———. 2005 Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

2

The Anatomy of a Prehistoric Community Reconsidering Çatalhöyük Bleda S. Düring

In the Near Eastern Neolithic, there are a number of instances where we seem to be dealing with large social agglomerations. These cases have raised the issue of how such settlements and communities can best be understood. Overall there has been a tendency to conflate size and function (Hole 2000). This chapter addresses how the large, aggregated community of Çatalhöyük was constituted. It will be argued that too little attention has been given to the social practices, mentalities, and collectivities that made up the prehistoric community at Çatalhöyük. This situation also applies more broadly to Near Eastern archaeology. I will briefly summarize the arguments put forward for Çatalhöyük, on the one hand, and a number of large sites dating to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B in Jordan, on the other, to illustrate how these sites have been interpreted in recent decades. Çatalhöyük is a Neolithic site located in central Turkey, the main sequence of which dates to the seventh millennium BC (Figure 2.1). Although the development of the Çatalhöyük settlement in the context of regional settlement trajectories is not yet completely understood (but see Baird 2005), we are fairly confident that at its peak this settlement housed between 5,000 and 8,000 people (Cessford 2005; Düring 2007; Hodder 2005; Matthews 1996). This is a sizeable population for the Near Eastern Neolithic. Settlements with no more than 300 people are reconstructed as the norm in Neolithic Cyprus, Greece, and the Balkans (Peltenburg et al. 2001: 53; Perlès, 2001: 178–180) and in Turkey, in the Lake District and Western Anatolia (Roodenberg 1999: 197). Most Neolithic sites in the Fertile Crescent would probably also have fallen into this size range (Akkermans and Schwartz 2003: 58–60). How, then, have archaeologists interpreted the relatively large social agglomeration at Çatalhöyük? First, the site has often been classified as urban (Jacobs 1969; Mellaart 1965, 1967; Rosenberg 2003; Ülkekul 1999). However, apart from its size, there are no good arguments that support this classification. The concept of urbanism is not primarily concerned with population size, but denotes a type of settlement at the apex of a differentiated settlement system, in which the urban settlement has asymmetrical relations with a hinterland of smaller settlements and is characterized by the presence of craft, religious, military, or managerial specialists depending

24 Bleda S. Düring

Figure 2.1

Early Neolithic sites in Asia Minor mentioned in this chapter.

on the produce of others for their subsistence (Emberling 2003; Hole 2000: 255; Nissen 2004; Trigger 2003: 120). There is no evidence for such specialization at Çatalhöyük, and its hinterland seems devoid of contemporary smaller settlements (Baird 2005; Düring 2007; Hodder 2005). Beyond attempts at pigeonholing Çatalhöyük as an urban settlement, which I regard as a normative category that has detracted from the study of the manner in which the community was constituted at the site, relatively little has been written on the question of how to understand this large social agglomeration. Hodder does ask “how the settlement was organized, and how this organization can inform the interpretation of the site as a village, town, or city” (2005: 126; see also 2006: 91–108). He then goes on to infer the presence of two moieties at the site on the basis of the site’s morphology—it has two summits—and notes the possibility that the settlement might have been subdivided into neighborhoods, but he moves on quickly to a detailed discussion of houses, the use of space within them, and the construction of social memories through the medium of the house. In the end, he concludes that the Çatalhöyük agglomeration was a by-product of the status differentiation of houses and the desire to remain close to the ancestral house (Hodder 2005: 137; 2006). Although there can be little doubt that houses were of central importance in the constitution of Çatalhöyük society (Düring 2007; Hodder and Pels 2010), one is left with the question of whether houses provide the complete picture of social interaction at Çatalhöyük. Approximately one in six buildings seems to have been a high-status house with a large number of subfloor burials (Düring 2007), and this gives us a hint of the social scale at which

The Anatomy of a Prehistoric Community 25 these elaborate houses would have operated in a settlement estimated to have included some 1,000 to 1,600 houses. Clearly, the Çatalhöyük community cannot be adequately understood only as a house-based society. With its size of 13 hectares, Çatalhöyük is by no means unique in the Near Eastern Neolithic: other examples include Abu Hureyra, Domuztepe, Sha’ar Hagolan, and a number of Jordanian sites of the Aceramic Neolithic (Bienert 2004: 21; Ben-Shlomo and Garfinkel 2009; Carter et al. 2003; Moore et al. 2000: 270). I would like to focus here on these Jordanian sites, which have been labeled as “megasites.” These date to the Late PrePottery Neolithic B (7500–7000 BC) and measure about 10 to15 hectares in area. This group includes the sites of ‘Ain Ghazal, Wadi Shu’aib, es-Sifiya, and al-Baseet, which have been the topic of considerable debate. First, the rise of these relatively large communities in the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B has been explained as resulting from the eastward migration of people from Palestine who had supposedly depleted their environments. Second, the demise of these large communities after the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B has similarly been interpreted as resulting from environmental depletion (Gebel 2004; Rollefson 2004; Simmons 2000). Much ink has been spilled over the issue of whether these places are best understood as large villages or urban settlements (Bienert 2004; Gebel 2004; Rollefson 2004) without reaching a satisfactory consensus. As at Çatalhöyük, these settlements seem to have been located in more or less empty landscapes, and there do not appear to have been differentiated settlement systems in which the megasites functioned as central places. Settlement size does also not seem to be correlated with sociopolitical complexity (Hole 2000). Another issue explored in various studies on the Jordanian megasites is how these large communities, estimated to have encompassed between 1,000 and 3,000 people, avoided the social stresses resulting from agglomerating. Kuijt (1999) has suggested that an increasing compartmentalization of the built environment served to create buffers that reduced the amount of social interaction and has suggested that burials and other rituals served an important role in mitigating social stress and maintaining community cohesion (see also Goring-Morris 2000; Kuijt 2000; Rollefson 2000; Simmons 2000). Nevertheless, social stresses are often held accountable for the eventual collapse of the Jordanian megasites (Rollefson 2000; Simmons 2000). Comparing the two examples of Çatalhöyük and the Jordanian Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B megasites, it is clear that, in both cases, two main interpretations have been put forward. One interpretation is that these were urban settlements, a view that is problematic in light of the absence of differentiated settlement systems and the lack of evidence for full-time specialists at these sites, which are dominated by domestic buildings. Another interpretation of these sites focuses on the social stress that results from living in large-scale agglomerations and what mechanisms people developed to reduce this stress, in particular by creating architectural barriers to reduce social interaction and through rituals and feasts that mitigated social

26 Bleda S. Düring tensions and bonded people. What is largely missing in studies of both Çatalhöyük and the Jordanian megasites, however, is a consideration of how these early communities worked and how people interacted within them. This is surprising given that we are dealing with some of the earliest and best-documented large-scale social agglomerations in the world and that their study could shed considerable light on the origins of complex societies.

SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY AND SOCIETAL ARCHAEOLOGY At this point I would like to raise the question of why reconstructions of how the societies of Çatalhöyük and the Jordanian megasites were constituted have been poorly developed in the discourse dealing with early large agglomerations. Here, we should consider archaeological interpretative frameworks more broadly. Archaeology in recent decades has overprivileged what I would call the “micro-scale” of social interaction (Bintliff 1993: 97–98; Düring and Marciniak 2005; Gerritsen 2004: 144; Kovacik 2002). Famously, Shanks and Tilley (1987: 57–58) claimed that: “society, in the sense of the social totality doesn’t exist” and “social order is the achievement of practice.” The resulting focus on issues such as gender, identity, personhood, agency, and households has, however, also led to a neglect of other levels of social association and the ways in which these are constituted (Davis 1992: 345; Garfinkel 1998: 225; Jones 2005; Soja 1996). While there can be little doubt that society is constituted through practice, it does not follow that more inclusive levels of social association do not have a real existence. The line of argumentation put forward by Shanks and Tilley is mirrored in recent years in what has been branded “social archaeology” in publications such as A Companion to Social Archaeology (Meskell and Preucel 2004), and, from 2001, the Journal of Social Archaeology. According to Meskell and colleagues (2001: 6) and Hodder (2002), social archaeology is about “identity, meaning and practice” and about being reflexive on the role of archaeology in the modern world. To differentiate between this form of social archaeology and archaeological studies focusing on the reconstruction of ancient societies, Patterson and Orser (2004: 11) found it necessary to introduce the term “societal archaeology,” which concerns itself with “the archaeology of society or social organizations.” Gosden prefers “the organization of society,” which refers to “the form, structure and pattern of relationships of people within society” (1999: 470). One important approach to the discussion of social organization in archaeology has been “neoevolutionary” studies, which classified societies in terms of the institutionalization of social inequality and range from egalitarian to stratified. A series of developmental stages were distinguished, such as Service’s (1962) fourfold classification of societies into bands, tribes,

The Anatomy of a Prehistoric Community 27 chiefdoms, and states; Fried’s (1967) distinction of egalitarian, ranked, stratified, and state societies; or Johnson and Earle’s (1987) family-level group, local group, and regional polity. What these classifications have in common is that the total spectrum of societal forms is condensed into a few types, the organizing principle of which is a relation between population size and social complexity and, more specifically, social inequality. However, the classification of societies into a few types makes it difficult to study transitional stages and changes in social structure, and the ideal types do little to elucidate the specifics of archaeological cases (Hodder 1982). The most systematic neoevolutionist study of Near Eastern archaeology is undoubtedly that of Redman (1978). Reflecting on Çatalhöyük, he notes that: “To organize a system that had increased tenfold, the mechanisms for regulating organization and flow of information had to increase more than tenfold. Hence, it is not surprising that extraordinary attention was given to ritualism and that rooms whose function were ritualistic were abundant” (Redman 1978: 186). He goes on to argue that there were scalar limits to “ritual integration” beyond which point the Çatalhöyük model failed and collapsed. This interpretation by Redman illustrates the tendency of neoevolutionary approaches to focus on scalar stress and system integration (Johnson 1982) rather than what empirical data might tell us about the nature and structure of human interactions and how these might have constituted prehistoric communities. Other archaeological studies have drawn distinctions between group and network strategies of social interaction along lines similar to Douglas’s (1982) group- and grid-oriented societies. Renfrew (1974, 2001) distinguished between group-oriented and individualizing societies, in which group-oriented societies assign little importance to prominent individuals and yet are capable of significant collective social action, whereas in individualizing societies, the elite distinguishes itself from the rest of society by means of conspicuous display and consumption. Other archaeologists such as Blanton and colleagues (1996) and Feinman (2000) have drawn a parallel distinction between exclusionary and corporate power; exclusionary power is exercised in networks of personal relations, whereas corporate power is shared across different groups and sectors of society. While these distinctions make the point that socially complex societies need not be based on social inequalities, they focus on one particular aspect of social life: the sorts of relations people have to one another.

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF SOCIAL INTERACTIONS Archaeological reconstructions of past societies largely have been focused on: first, ideal types of societies and how to recognize these; and, second, the issue of scalar stress and system integration and whether this required social stratification. Instead I argue that we should start our studies with an

28 Bleda S. Düring assessment of what our archaeological data can tell us about the types of social interactions through which societies were constituted. A useful starting point is the idea that social structure consists of “systems of human relations among social positions” (Porpora 1989: 195; see also Archer 1995). This perspective foregrounds two important issues: one, that society is structured through social interactions and, two, that these interactions are, for the most part, not random but take place between people occupying social positions that take on their content in relation to systems of human relations. These systems of human relations can refer to a class system, in which everyone will occupy a position, but may also refer to a family, in which each member also occupies a specific social position and may “motivate people to act on interests structurally built into their social positions” (Porpora 1989: 200; also Lopéz and Scott 2000: 29–31). Further, societies are best understood as sets of nested social structures (Carter and New 2004: 8). Thus, we can study past societies as multiscalar phenomena, consisting of a series of nested social structures that are constituted by regular and circumscribed social interactions by actors with particular social positions. Obviously, the form and articulation of the nested social structures is culturally specific. The aspect that is of interest to archaeologists in a perspective on social organization grounded in daily activities and interactions is that these often have a material component. Building and settlement organization structure social interaction to a significant degree, and by studying the spatial order in the built environment and contextual data that inform us about activities that took place in them, we can start to reconstruct past social organization on the basis of our data rather than starting from typologies. Such an approach has precedents in archaeology. Undoubtedly the best known is The Early Mesoamerican Village, edited by Kent Flannery (1976), where Formative Mesoamerica was studied at the scales of the household, the household cluster, the residential ward, the village, and the settlement system. For each of these analytical levels, Flannery and colleagues considered the relevant archaeological data and reconstructed the associated social structures. In this way a reconstruction of society as consisting of nested social structures could be put forward. Remarkably, despite the fame of The Early Mesoamerican Village, its approach of studying societies as series of nested social structures has had surprisingly little impact outside of American archaeology. Elizabeth Stone, however, has worked in a similar way in the Near East and has reconstructed Mesopotamian cities dating to the third and second millennia BC as a series of nested social structures (Stone 1987, 2007).

THE ANATOMY OF SOCIAL INTERACTIONS AT ÇATALHÖYÜK In the remainder of this chapter I explore the ways in which social interactions might have been structured within a nested series of social structures at Çatalhöyük. These social structures were grounded in shared activities and

The Anatomy of a Prehistoric Community 29 experiences, personal relations, and face-to-face interactions. The following discussion focuses on the articulation of households at Çatalhöyük, the ritual differentiation of houses, the Çatalhöyük neighborhoods, and, finally, the local community and how it may have interrelated with other communities. The discussions will be brief, as more extensive discussions have already been published elsewhere (Düring 2006, 2007).

Households at Çatalhöyük Households are units of economic and social cooperation commonly defined on the basis of a combination of shared residence and the pooling of economic resources (Wilk and Rathje 1982: 619–621), although these functions do not necessarily overlap (Allison 1999: 4–5; Düring and Marciniak 2005). For this reason, household studies must include an analysis of the uses to which spaces in buildings are put and how these spaces may have related to household groups. Households can range from autonomous domestic groups residing in discrete buildings where goods were stored and domestic and craft activities were performed within the residence (manifested in the presence of special-purpose activity areas and features in buildings) to households dispersed over disconnected spaces executing their domestic activities in locales not exclusively associated with any particular household. At Çatalhöyük, buildings can be distinguished readily on the basis of the articulation of their exterior walls. Despite the fact that buildings were constructed directly adjacent to one another and were often surrounded by other buildings on all sides, they generally had their own sets of outer walls. In general, the buildings differentiated in this manner are remarkably standardized and fall into a restricted size range of about 10 to 40 square meters, with an average of about 27 square meters (Figure 2.2). Buildings normally had a main room, which contained fire installations (hearths and ovens), had one or more platforms, and averaged 21 square meters in size; many also had one or more small, subsidiary rooms which often contained silos and averaged 5 square meters in size. The interior furnishings of the buildings at Çatalhöyük form a consistent set of features, including hearths, ovens, platforms, and storage features, with a very standardized spatial configuration and orientation of elements (Hodder 1990; Mellaart 1967: 56–63). In the south of the living rooms, one typically finds hearths, ovens, the ladder entrance, storage features, and a relatively dirty compartment with remnants of cooking, heating, and craft practices (Düring 2006: 180–192; Matthews 2005). The modular sizes of the buildings, the fact that they all had a main room with cooking facilities, an area devoted to rest, platforms, and a standardized set of domestic features suggests that at Çatalhöyük households were spatially discrete and economically autonomous entities. The number of persons in these households can only be tentatively estimated. Based on house sizes, Matthews (1996: 86) estimated the average household size to be four persons. The average household size at Çatalhöyük

30 Bleda S. Düring 25

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Figure 2.2

Spread of house sizes at Çatalhöyük (N = 105).

also may be modeled on the basis of the number of compartments found within the houses. Mellaart postulated that some of these compartments functioned as beds and estimated that the sleeping compartments would have accommodated a maximum of eight residents, while noting that the normal size of the group would have been more in the range of three to four (Mellaart 1967: 60). A closer analysis of these platforms has demonstrated that those in the northeast and east were the most standardized in dimensions and would have been most suitable as beds (Düring 2006: 181–182). Accordingly, it may be suggested that, in the average living room, there would have been space for between four and six people in the clean compartments in the north and east of the building. As a hypothesis, an average of about five inhabitants to a building seems plausible as an estimate for modal household size.

Ritual Differentiation in Çatalhöyük Houses Apart from features such as hearths, ovens, and storage bins—found in most buildings and related to domestic activities—there are elements such as wall paintings, molded features, and subfloor burials in some houses. These are less common and possibly relate to ritual activities. Confronted with the spectacular molded and painted imagery found in the buildings at Çatalhöyük, Mellaart (1967: 77–78) argued that many of the buildings he excavated should be interpreted as shrines rather than houses and that these spaces were devoted to cultic practices. The distinction Mellaart made between shrines and houses was found wanting by a number of scholars. Heinrich and Seidl (1969: 116) argued that Mellaart did not rigorously apply

The Anatomy of a Prehistoric Community 31 his own criteria for distinguishing between the two. Similar critiques were put forward by members of the new Çatalhöyük project (Hamilton 1996: 226; Ritchey 1996). Although initially Hodder argued that all buildings were homologous household residences imbued with symbolism, in which the same symbolic structures were celebrated and played out, as exemplified in his “domus” concept (Hodder 1990), in recent years he has shifted to the position that there is ritual differentiation between buildings. In particular, he has argued that Çatalhöyük houses have features similar to those known from house societies, in which some houses with a long pedigree became symbols of social identities of groups encompassing many households and acquired greater ritual significance in the course of their existence. This is a position first advocated by this author (Düring 2006, 2007), and subsequently taken up in the Çatalhöyük project, where the term history houses is now used to denote building with greater ritual elaboration (Bloch 2010; Hodder and Pels 2010). The best evidence for ritual differentiation of buildings takes the form of subfloor burials. Unlike the paintings and molded features, the burial data are relatively abundant (Düring 2006; Hodder and Pels 2010), and, more importantly, they are relatively reliable. In the case of the molded features, there is good evidence for their removal during the occupation of buildings, with subsequent replasterings, so that their presence or absence as found may not be very informative about building status (Hodder and Cessford 2004). Likewise, the discovery of wall paintings in buildings that may have up to 450 plaster layers (Matthews 2005: 367) is conditioned to a large degree by chance factors determining where plastered wall surfaces crack. Furthermore, wall paintings seem to be fairly ubiquitous at Çatalhöyük, and thus they are probably not a good indicator of status differentiation among the buildings (Düring 2006: 195). By contrast, the distribution of subfloor burials is markedly uneven in the houses at Çatalhöyük. About 80 percent of the buildings contain no burials at all (Düring 2006: 201–211), while only a few hold the majority of subfloor burials. For example, in the new excavations, Building 1 contained no fewer than 64 burials (Cessford 2007). If we focus on Mellaart’s level VIB at the site (Figure 2.3), which is the largest window of buildings that were fully excavated, it can be seen that burials are mainly found within four rooms that seem to have been particularly suitable for placing the deceased. In addition, some buildings have only a limited number of burials below their floors. Finally, many rooms contained no subfloor burial at all. Two arguments make it plausible to think that people from other houses were interred in buildings with high burial densities. First, many buildings were devoid of burials altogether. Second, we can make an assessment of how many people would have died in the Çatalhöyük households during the occupation of a building, and it can be demonstrated that the number of buried people in some buildings far exceeds this probable death toll. The use-life of the buildings at Çatalhöyük is generally estimated at about 60 years on the basis of radiocarbon

32 Bleda S. Düring

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data and plaster evidence (Cessford 2005; Matthews 2005: 368; Mellaart 1964: 64, 1967: 50–51). Given an estimated household size of about five people, it seems highly unlikely that the twenty-four-plus subfloor burials in some buildings derive solely from deaths within the household concerned. For example, this would have meant that one household member died once every 15 months in building 34 of level VIB. It seems, then, that burial practices were preferentially performed in specific houses considered particularly appropriate for mortuary ceremonies by larger social groups including several households. These ideas have recently been corroborated by a study of the genetically transmitted features of the buried skeletons—mostly dental evidence—which suggest “that inclusion for interment within a home was only minimally related to biological affinity. Instead, the site may have been organized by an alternate definition of kin that was not defined in terms of genetic relationships. These ‘kin’ groups could have formed for various social functions creating a more fluid definition of family” (Piloud and Larsen 2011: 527–528).

The Anatomy of a Prehistoric Community 33 Given that some buildings seem to have functioned as burial sites for multiple houses, I would argue that houses at Çatalhöyük might have been organized in “house groups,” wherein approximately six normal houses would have been associated with a history house (Düring 2006: 231). This figure fits well with ethnographic studies that suggest it is to a farmer’s advantage to form household groups of approximately this size for economic cooperation (Halstead 1999; Plog 1990: 190). It is likely that such house groups at Çatalhöyük were of dynamic and perhaps overlapping composition. In the history houses, many group rituals might have been performed, of which the burials are simply the most visible to us. In this way, households were probably embedded in larger house groups.

Neighborhoods at Çatalhöyük A neighborhood “is a residential zone that has considerable face-to-face interaction and is distinctive on the basis of physical and/or social characteristics” (Smith 2010: 139). Until recently, the neighborhood has been relatively neglected in archaeological studies (but see Chesson 2003; Keith 2003; Smith 2010; Stone 1987), probably in large part because archaeologists rarely have the broad excavated exposures required for their systematic study. This is a problem even in the case of Çatalhöyük, which, by archaeological standards, has had very large areas excavated. One of the most striking aspects of the Çatalhöyük settlement in the early levels, XII to VI, is the way in which the buildings were constructed in streetless neighborhood clusters that could be accessed only from the roof level. Streets and larger open spaces did exist at the site (Hodder and Pels 2010: 164; Matthews 1996), but they mainly served to differentiate neighborhoods from one another. A ladder from one of these open spaces would have given access to these neighborhoods, and further traffic would have taken place on the roof level. In this form of spatial organization, Çatalhöyük is not unique but is part of a settlement tradition particular to the central Anatolian Neolithic, with parallels at Asıklı Höyük, Canhasan III and I, and Erbaba (Düring 2006). This form of spatial organization was probably rooted in a particular type of social structure: that of the neighborhood community. This argument is based on, first, the uses to which the roofs were put and how that affected social interaction and, second, the fact that people would have regularly traversed the neighborhood roofscape on their way to and from their houses. The reconstruction of the neighborhood roofscapes at Çatalhöyük is fraught with difficulties, such as the fact that we know little about how much the vertical distance between roofs and floors varied. Nonetheless, we can gain a fair idea of the sort of environment these roofscapes constituted. There is now some evidence for some lightweight shelters or sheds on the roofs of the Çatalhöyük buildings (Hodder 2009), but the proposition that the Çatalhöyük buildings had substantial upper stories (Cutting 2003)

34 Bleda S. Düring can be dismissed, because the buildings could not have supported them (Düring 2006: 241). A range of activities seems to have been performed on the roofs at Çatalhöyük (Matthews 2005: 373). A fire installation was found on top of one collapsed roof, and clean and dirty roof areas were recognized, suggesting that food processing and craft activities similar to those in the houses took place on the roofs. This would probably have occurred mostly in summer, when the climate and the heat-conductive properties of mud-brick buildings are such that many activities take place in the open, a pattern that is well attested in Near Eastern ethnographies (Friedl and Loeffler 1994: 33; Peters 1982: 223). The Çatalhöyük roofs, then, would have been like a courtyard: they not only gave entrance to the building below but contained various goods and features and enabled people to carry out a range of activities during the hotter part of the year. Furthermore, people would have moved across these roofs on their way to and from their houses. Taking these latter two factors together—the use of the roofs at Çatalhöyük and the movement of people across the roofscape—it would seem clear that interaction within these neighborhoods must have been intense at times. It can be posited that people using these roofscapes formed a social structure grounded in face-to-face interaction and with people occupying various social positions. With such a perspective in mind we can return to the question of why buildings at Çatalhöyük were constructed in streetless neighborhood blocks. It is possible to argue that the spatial organization of these neighborhoods deterred nonresident people from entering them, making the area a communal rather than public arena. A parallel that presents itself in traditional Near Eastern settlements consists of a distinction between wide and straight public streets, open to the public at large and dominated by men, and narrow and winding streets within neighborhoods that were inaccessible to nonresidents, and in which women could roam more freely (Abu-Lughod 1987: 167–168; Antoun 1972; Wirth 2000). These neighborhoods appear to have been relatively autonomous. The group living within these neighborhoods often defined themselves in corporate terms (Antoun 1972; Wirth 2000), and people often were deeply involved with one other and closely monitored the behavior of other residents, while outsiders were barred from entry unless invited (Abu-Lughod 1987). For this system to work it is essential that neighborhoods do not become too large, because social control could then no longer function (Antoun 1972: 111; Wirth 2000: 377–381). This is not to argue, of course, for a continuum between Çatalhöyük and the subrecent Near East, merely an attempt to bring out a number of possible resemblances in the use of space in what are otherwise very different cultures. The scale of these neighborhoods at Çatalhöyük is difficult to establish. The most complete excavated exposure is level VIB in the South Area. Although extremely large by the standards of Near Eastern archaeology, this exposure does not include a complete bounded neighborhood. On the

The Anatomy of a Prehistoric Community 35 basis of the exposed area of level VIB, we can estimate a minimum size for this neighborhood, which includes a total of some thirty buildings with hearths, ovens, and platforms in the main room. If we take these as indices for household groups, then this particular neighborhood at Çatalhöyük would have encompassed at least thirty households. If we estimate households of about five people, this would put this particular neighborhood population at minimally 150 people. We do not need to conceive of the Çatalhöyük neighborhoods as necessarily comprising a standardized entity, with a circumscribed group of people living in a specified number of buildings. However, if neighborhoods depended heavily on personal contacts between residents, various studies might give us clues about their possible maximum size. The idea that humans can only engage directly with a finite number of other people has been posited on the basis of observations in disciplines as disparate as evolutionary psychology, geography, anthropology, and sociology. The thresholds arrived at in these studies are remarkably consistent, averaging about 150 to 250 people for close personal relations, and 400 to 600 people for more casual relations (Bintliff 1999; Birdsell 1973; Dunbar 1992; Forge 1972; Kosse 1990). These figures should be considered with due caution, because they represent a selective amalgamation of disparate phenomena. But, collectively, they suggest that face-to-face communities normally would have been no larger than about 250 people. Tentatively, then, I would suggest that the normal neighborhood population at Çatalhöyük was no larger than 150 to 250 people, although it is theoretically possible that they included as many as 600 people. The latter size would have been more stressful on residents, however, because it would have been more difficult to keep track of individual persons (faces and names) and their relationships to oneself and others.

The Local Community at Çatalhöyük The local community consists of the residential population living in a settlement. Because the size of local communities may vary considerably, they can be constituted in many ways. Whereas a small local community is a very concrete entity to people grounded in shared activities, larger local communities are more ideational in character. Not everybody will necessarily know each other firsthand in larger settlements, and such communities are usually too large for well-developed social positions in societies without overt hierarchy, although people will often be aware of other people’s identities and activities. Kosse (1990: 284) writes that in communities of up to 2,500 inhabitants, people will still be able to monitor each other on the basis of gossip. At Çatalhöyük, the maximum population has been estimated at between 5,000 and 8,000 people, which suggests that Kosse’s mechanism might not apply. Here the distinction between “natural” and “imagined” communities drawn by Isbell (2000: 245) becomes relevant. A natural community is a real and

36 Bleda S. Düring bounded entity, whereas the imagined community is primarily about identification with specific categories and is not based on face-to-face interaction. For example, being from Çatalhöyük was almost certainly meaningful to people. One way in which the Çatalhöyük neighborhoods would have been linked is in marriages. Birdsell (1973) and Wobst (1974) have argued that a group of some 500 people constitutes the minimum necessary for human biological reproduction. On the basis of a cross-cultural comparison, Adams and Kasakoff (1976: 155–158) argue that completely endogamous groups do not exist in the ethnographic record but that local communities in the range of 850 to 10,000 people will typically be about 80 percent endogamous. On the basis of such estimates, Baird (2005: 67) posits that the advantage of Çatalhöyük growing as large as it did was that the settlement could have become largely endogamous and that this might have been a strategy to enhance control over local resources. The Çatalhöyük settlement can be contrasted with the contemporary site of Erbaba, located near Lake Beyehir. Erbaba is a small site, and its population can be estimated to have been between 190 and 285 people (Düring 2006: 256–267), a size that is common throughout Neolithic Greece, Western Anatolia, and the Balkans (Halstead 1999: 89; Peltenburg et al. 2001: 53, Perlès 2001: 178–180; Roodenberg 1999: 197). Such communities would not have exceeded a face-to-face community in which everybody knew each other firsthand and are similar in scale to the neighborhoods at Çatalhöyük. Interestingly, Erbaba is one of a larger group of relatively small and comparable Ceramic Neolithic sites that are often only a few kilometers removed from one another (Mellaart 1961). Such a comparison suggests that each Çatalhöyük neighborhood was not unlike the village community at Erbaba and that the Çatalhöyük settlement represents the contraction of a regional settlement system into a single site. In its heyday, Çatalhöyük might have incorporated between twenty-seven and fifty-three of these “villagesize” neighborhoods (Düring 2006: 235). The settlement history in the Çatalhöyük area might provide part of the answer for how the site became such a large agglomeration. In the Aceramic Neolithic, multiple sites existed in the Çatalhöyük region; in the Ceramic Neolithic, Çatalhöyük seems to be the only site; and the following Early Chalcolithic period again witnesses multiple settlements. Baird (2005: 67) has argued that the initial formation of Çatalhöyük represents the clustering of a group of previously dispersed small local communities. One aspect that could help us to understand this contraction of people at Çatalhöyük is some form of place-bound ideology similar to that operating at the level of the houses. Here we might think of a corporate identity tied to a settlement. The modern world is full of such place-bound identities, but they appear to be equally important in other cultural contexts. McIntosh and McIntosh (2003: 111), for example, describe a system in firstmillennium AD West Africa in which both foundation myths and the ritual

The Anatomy of a Prehistoric Community 37 interdependence of corporate groups created the long-term cohesion of large local communities.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION Explaining large social agglomeration prior to the emergence of urban societies has not been a strength of archaeology to date, and in this sense the current volume will hopefully provide an important contribution. There has been some debate about how large preurban social agglomerations should be understood, and for the Near East I have illustrated the main positions using the cases of Çatalhöyük and Pre-Pottery Neolithic B megasites from Jordan. On the one hand, some scholars have argued that these agglomerations were, in a sense, urban, but this is to stretch the idea of urbanism beyond its heuristic value, given that these settlements are patently not urban in the sense of central settlements in which various types of nonfarming specialists resided and which depended on a hinterland of agricultural villages. On the other hand, many scholars have focused on the scalar stress that living in large communities would have created and the various means for integrating these communities, for example, through rituals. In short, the issue of how large preurban social agglomerations should be understood has often been approached from the wrong angle. Rather than focusing on size as index of social complexity (the urbanism argument) or social stress (the scalar stress and ritual integration theme), we should instead ask what social structures and strategies made these large early communities successful and allowed them to persist for six centuries, as in the case of Çatalhöyük levels XII to VI. This needs to be done by mapping the nested social structures through which these agglomerations were held together on the basis of our archaeological datasets. Basically, this means that we need to extend the excellent work done in recent decades on the microscale of social life—on topics like gender, identities, and households— to more inclusive levels of social association. Starting from the idea that social organization can best be studied as a series of nested social structures and that these consist of systems of human relations among social positions, I have attempted to chart the anatomy of social life at Çatalhöyük. First, households appear to have been relatively autonomous in their economy, occupied discrete houses, and to have been more or less equivalent entities with little sign for variability in size or wealth. Second, there is good evidence for ritual differentiation of houses at Çatalhöyük, in which some history houses—that is, houses with a long pedigree that gradually became invested with ritual significance through the course of their history—functioned as an identity nexus for a larger group of associated households, as is most clearly visible in the fact that people were preferentially buried in these houses. It appears that about one

38 Bleda S. Düring in six houses at Çatalhöyük achieved the status of a history house, which could mean that there were house groups of approximately that size that were connected through their common orientation on a history house and might have cooperated in other aspects of social life. Third, I have discussed neighborhoods at Çatalhöyük, suggesting that the typical spatial layout of the settlement would have created relatively intense social interactions and monitoring of coresidents and thus would have compartmentalized social life at the site. In other words, the clustered neighborhoods at Çatalhöyük reduced the bulk of social interaction to an arena where it was possible to keep track of all the faces and names of others, thus providing a structure that made social life viable. It is also possible that the neighborhood community would have provided a platform for reaching a neighborhood consensus that would have been of great value if matters relating to the local community as a whole needed to be resolved. Fourth, I have shown that the Çatalhöyük neighborhoods are probably equivalent to the small Neolithic villages that are more typical for the Neolithic in the Aegean, Western Anatolia, the Balkans, and much of the Near East. Thus, the Çatalhöyük settlement perhaps represents the contraction of a regional settlement system into a single site. If this reconstruction of social life at Çatalhöyük as consisting of a nested series of social structures—that is, households, history houses, and house groups—and neighborhood communities is accurate—and no doubt our understanding of many aspects of social life at Çatalhöyük will change in future years—then it means that earlier interpretations of this large preurban social agglomeration simply missed the mark. Çatalhöyük is not an urban settlement but an agglomeration of neighborhood communities without any institutions that serve the settlement as a whole—such as a central market or a town hall. Çatalhöyük inhabitants did not suffer from scalar social stress, because they did not live in a single, large community. Instead their social life was compartmentalized, and people spent most of their lives in the context of their specific neighborhood communities, identified themselves in relation to a history house and house group, and spent much of their time and work in maintaining their own households. In short, the reconstructed anatomy of social life at Çatalhöyük proposed here demonstrates that this large preurban social agglomeration is not a problem we need to solve but that people at Çatalhöyük developed a type of social organization that allowed them to live and thrive in one of earliest successful large communities in the world.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Jennifer Birch for inviting me to contribute to this volume. An earlier draft of this chapter was read and commented on by Alexander Verpoorte, who provided much-appreciated critiques. This chapter

The Anatomy of a Prehistoric Community 39 developed out of my doctoral research, and I would like to express my gratitude to Ian Hodder for welcoming me to the team during that research.

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The Anatomy of a Prehistoric Community 43 ———. 2001 Commodification and Institution in Group-Oriented and Individualizing Societies. In The Origins of Human Social Institutions, edited by W. G. Runciman, pp. 93–117. British Academy, Oxford. Ritchey, Tim. 1996 Note: Building Complexity. In On the Surface, Çatalhöyük 1993–95, edited by Ian Hodder, pp. 7–18. McDonald Institute, Cambridge. Rollefson, Gary O. 2000 Ritual and Social Structure at Neolithic ‘Ain Ghazal. In Life in Neolithic Farming Communities: Social Organization, Identity, and Differentiation, edited by Ian Kuijt, pp. 163–190. Kluwer Academic Press, New York. ———. 2004 The Character of LPPNB Social Organization. In Central Settlements in Neolithic Jordan, edited by Hans-Dieter Bienert, Hans Georg K. Gebel, and Reinder Neef, pp. 145–156. Ex Oriente, Berlin. Roodenberg, Jacob. 1999 Ilipinar, An Early Farming Village in the Iznik Lake Basin. In The Neolithic of Turkey, edited by Mehmet Özdoan and Nezih Bagelen, pp. 193–202. Arkeoloji ve Sanat Yayınları, Istanbul. Rosenberg, Michael. 2003 The Strength of Numbers: From Villages to Towns in the Aceramic Neolithic of Southwestern Asia. In From Villages to Towns: Studies Presented to Ufuk Esin, edited by M. Özdoan, H. Hauptmann, and N. Bagelen, pp. 91–101. Arkeoloji ve Sanat Yayınları, Istanbul. Service, Elman R. 1962 Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective. Random House, New York. Shanks, Michael, and Christopher Tilley. 1987 Social Theory and Archaeology. Polity Press, Cambridge. Simmons, Alan. 2000 Villages on the Edge: Regional Settlement Change and the End of the Levantine Pre-Pottery Neolithic. In Life in Neolithic Farming Communities: Social Organization, Identity, and Differentiation, edited by Ian Kuijt, pp. 211–230. Kluwer Academic Press, New York. Smith, Michael E. 2010 The Archaeological Study of Neighborhoods and Districts in Ancient Cities. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 29: 137–154. Soja, Edward W. 1996 Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-andImagined Places. Basil Blackwell, London. Stone, Elizabeth C. 1987 Nippur Neighborhoods. Oriental Institute, Chicago. ———. 2007 The Mesopotamian Urban Experience. In Settlement and Society: Essays Dedicated to Robert McCormick Adams, edited by Elizabeth C. Stone, pp. 213–234. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, Los Angeles. Trigger, Bruce G. 2003 Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Ülkekul, Cevat. 1999 An 8,200 Year Old Map, The Town Plan of Çatalhöyük. Dönence, Istanbul. Wilk, Richard R., and William L. Rathje. 1982 Household Archaeology. American Behavioral Scientist 25: 617–639. Wirth, Eugen. 2000 Die orientalische Stadt im islamischen Vorderasien und Nordafrika, Städtische Bausubstanz und räumliche Ordnung, Wirtschaftleben and soziale Organisation. Philipp von Zabern, Mainz. Wobst, H. Martin. 1974 Boundary Conditions for Paleolithic Social Systems: A Simulation Approach. American Antiquity 39: 147–178.

3

Coming Together, Falling Apart A Multiscalar Approach to Prehistoric Aggregation and Interaction on the Great Hungarian Plain Paul R. Duffy, William A. Parkinson, Attila Gyucha, and Richard W. Yerkes

Tell formation is the most visible form of prehistoric population aggregation in southeastern Europe. Tells emerged throughout the greater Balkan region during the Neolithic, Copper Age or Chalcolithic, and the Bronze Age from the seventh to second millennia BC. European tells tended to be smaller than their Near Eastern and North African counterparts, and despite superficial resemblances, systematic comparison indicates important variation in the social processes that created tells in these different parts of the world (BelferCohen and Goring-Morris 2011; Goring-Morris and Belfer-Cohen 2011; Parkinson and Gyucha 2012). Even within southeastern Europe, there is considerable variation in the process of tell formation. The tells of the Thessalian Plain of Greece, for example, were established during the Early Neolithic and are among the first examples of sustained population nucleation in Europe. Many continued to be reoccupied in later phases of the Neolithic, with some extending into the Bronze Age. In the Thessalian case, most of these sites were tells in the original definition of the word; they were artificial mounds created by the successive occupation of a spatially restricted location in the landscape. Wattle-and-daub houses leveled to the ground after the end of their uselife served as platforms for new architecture, gradually creating a stratified mound of living debris. The Thessalian pattern of continued occupation from early in the Neolithic differs considerably from that exhibited on the Great Hungarian Plain, where tells were not established until several hundred years after the occurrence of sedentary agricultural villages in the region. When they did form—during the Middle and Late Neolithic—the tells of the Great Hungarian Plain usually were part of a larger, extended settlement complex. In contrast to the Thessalian tells, most of the Neolithic tells on the Plain were abandoned around the end of the Neolithic period and were not reestablished in the region until the Bronze Age, almost 3,000 years later. Studying these dynamic processes of cyclical aggregation and the variation in settlement nucleation throughout prehistory is in many ways more interesting than simply examining the process of tell formation—or settlement nucleation—in isolation.

Coming Together, Falling Apart 45 Significant differences in contemporary tell communities also can exist within the same region, a topic we turn to in this chapter. A rigorous comparison of settlement patterns between the Late Neolithic and Middle Bronze Age on the Great Hungarian Plain reveals important similarities between the two periods (Duffy 2010: 351–374). Site size hierarchies are found across a similar size range in both periods (from less than a hectare up to dozens of hectares). Groups on the Great Hungarian Plain during the Neolithic generally are referred to as “tribal” because there is little evidence for institutionalized social inequality in funerary patterns (Siklósi 2010). During the classical Bronze Age, however, cemeteries across Eastern Europe exhibit an impressive range of social inequality, and up to 90 percent of quantifiable grave goods were interred with only 10 percent of the population (e.g., Kemenczei 1979; O’Shea 1996; Vicze 2011). Large fortified sites are thought to have controlled the production and trade of metals. For this reason, groups in the Bronze Age have generally been categorized as chiefdoms or socially stratified (Earle and Kristiansen 2010). The case may nonetheless be different in the Körös Region, where little evidence for regional political hierarchies has been found (Duffy 2010). This raises the question of whether Bronze Age tell communities in the Körös Region were more similar to the Late Neolithic societies than they were to the chiefdoms described in other parts of the Great Hungarian Plain and Europe (e.g., Chapman 2008; Earle and Kristiansen 2010; Renfrew 1974). In this chapter we review the characteristics of tell aggregation within and between the Late Neolithic and Middle Bronze Age of the Körös Region in Eastern Hungary. By comparing tells at different chronological, geographic, and social scales, we reveal some of the complexity underlying patterns of aggregation, even within a single region and period. We describe how some forms of interaction recurred in prehistory on the Plain, and what new features emerged in the Bronze Age that are not observable in the Neolithic. We discuss interaction over four spatial scales of variation—tell neighborhoods, the settlement complex, the microregional settlement cluster, and the Lower Körös Region—drawing on data from excavation, surface collection, geophysical prospection, and network theory. Although the settlement trajectory of the area might be described as “tribal cycling” (Parkinson 2002, 2006a, 2006b), modeled interaction between these periods suggests that the resumption of tell formation in the Bronze Age was not a return to the same structural pose assumed in the Neolithic. Although tell formation is related to local aggregation, it is only one component of a complex process of nucleation that can be documented archaeologically. Even in the absence of conspicuous evidence for social inequality in the Middle Bronze Age of the Körös Region, there appear to be more differences than similarities between the two periods. Rather than simply discussing when patterns of nucleation occurred on the Great Hungarian Plain, this multiscalar approach permits us to ask more nuanced questions about how settlement nucleation

46 Paul R. Duffy et al. occurred at different points in time and what the implications were for the people who lived within those societies.

ANALYTICAL DIMENSIONS AND SCALES We suggest modeling social organization along two separate but intertwined analytical dimensions—units of integration, and degrees of interaction. Integration refers to processes that incorporate individuals into specific organizational units. Interaction, on the other hand, refers to a more diffuse process that operates between these units. Smaller units of integration presuppose increased interaction (Parkinson 2002, 2006b). In this sense, societies can be envisioned as integrating into various social units—households, villages, polities, and so on. Determining how different social units interacted over space and time is best conducted by incorporating multiple geographic scales (Clarke 1972; Flannery 1976; Gamble 1999; Knappett 2011). In this chapter, we conduct such a multiscalar analysis. Our goal is to describe structural variation in nucleated communities and provide a more detailed picture of how social relationships were organized and changed over time. We compare three tells in the Körös Region of the Great Hungarian Plain, dating to the Late Neolithic and Middle Bronze Age, and the range of settlement networks of which they were part. The four spatial scales of settlement features we address are all relevant for slightly different kinds of interaction, or “practices of affiliation” (Yaeger 2000). The first spatial scale and integrative unit we examine is the tell neighborhood behind its fortification or natural moat. We restrict our study to the tells not because we think they necessarily were the center of ancient regional systems but because they are, for the most part, the only sites in these periods with detailed archaeological records. We use excavation data from houses, platforms, and other structures that reveal the nature of social interaction and integration of the communities living on the tells. The second spatial scale encompasses the settlement complex: the tell and the surrounding habitation areas. To discuss the relationship between tells and the external settlement, we draw upon recent surface collection data, geophysical survey, and shovel tests. The third scale, the microregional settlement cluster, includes sites within 5 kilometers of the tell and sites within 5 kilometers of those sites. Finally, we offer a regional perspective on variation. For this, we examine the range of local settlement clusters in the time periods under consideration and compare continuity and connections between periods using network theory. Regional comparisons allow us to expand beyond the three tell sites examined here to a broader understanding of settlement patterns in the Körös Region and the social configurations characterized in each period.

Coming Together, Falling Apart 47 BACKGROUND—THE GREAT HUNGARIAN PLAIN IN PREHISTORY The Great Hungarian Plain is among the largest alluvial plains in Europe and is drained by the Danube and Tisza Rivers. The relative geographical uniformity of the region and the great stability of the environment make it a virtual laboratory for studying cultural change in prehistory. The Körös Region, highlighted here, is characterized by complex river systems as well as their extended marshy areas. It has been systematically field-walked since the 1960s in the framework of the Magyarország Régészeti Topográfiája (MRT) project, and over the past decade has become one of the most intensively studied prehistoric landscapes on the continent (e.g., Bóka and Martyin 2008; Bökönyi 1992; Duffy 2010; Ecsedy et al. 1982; Giblin 2009; Gyucha 2009; Hoekman-Sites 2011; Jankovich et al. 1989, 1998; Parkinson 2002, 2006a; Parsons 2012; Salisbury 2010; Sherratt 1997; Whittle 2007). A strong degree of settlement nucleation, coincident with tell settlements, characterizes two periods (or cycles) on the Great Hungarian Plain: the later Neolithic (the Szakálhát Phase of the Middle Neolithic and the TiszaHerpály-Csszhalom Phase of the Late Neolithic period; ca. 5400–4500 BC), and the Early-Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2150–1400 BC). In this analysis we focus on the latest phase of occupation within each aggregative cycle represented by the Late Neolithic Tisza culture (ca. 5000–4500 BC) and the Middle Bronze Age Gyulavarsánd complex (ca. 1750–1400 BC). In both the Late Neolithic period and the Middle Bronze Age, the vast majority of sites were not tells on the Great Hungarian Plain. The intervening periods, the Copper Age through the Early Bronze Age (4500–2150 BC), include several different settlement patterns, but most are characterized by small, dispersed settlements. During the later Copper Age, several thousand burial mounds (kurgans) were built across the Plain, as well as some large settlements, but there were no tells (Parkinson 2002; Parsons 2011, 2012; Sherratt 1997). Although the regional settlement data were systematically collected, precise site size by period is rarely recorded, and therefore regional settlement pattern analysis must remain somewhat general. The principle sites in the Körös Region (Figure 3.1) that we discuss in this chapter are located about 10 to 20 kilometers from one another. All of them have several components, dating from the Middle Neolithic to the medieval period. However, the two dominant habitation periods are the later Neolithic and the Middle Bronze Age. Szeghalom-Kovácshalom has Neolithic layers but no Bronze Age occupation (Bakay 1971). Békés-Várdomb has a Bronze Age component but no Neolithic settlement (Banner and Bóna 1974; Duffy 2010). Vészt-Mágor, on the other hand, has both Neolithic and Bronze Age occupations (Hegeds and Makkay 1987; Makkay 2004; Parkinson et al. 2010). All three sites have been excavated to varying extents. Recently, however, all have been revisited with new questions and investigated with new

48 Paul R. Duffy et al. archaeological techniques, including shovel testing, systematic surface collection, and geophysical surveys. Szeghalom-Kovácshalom currently provides the most detailed data, with systematically collected artifacts across 55 hectares of the surface, about 37 hectares of magnetometer survey, and the partial excavation of five structures outside the tell.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD SCALE: THE TELL Most of the tells are quite small (Figure 3.1). Békés-Várdomb covers only 0.25 hectare; Szeghalom-Kovácshalom, 0.8 hectare; and Vészt-Mágor, the largest, 3.9 hectares. Neolithic and Bronze Age tell sites were frequently fortified with artificial ditches or a natural moat, with the highest accumulation of settlement debris behind them. Excavations at Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in Hungary and adjacent regions almost invariably exposed large horizontal areas in the center of the tells. The investigations indicate that during the Late Neolithic, the tell interior also included special-purpose communal areas. In addition to domestic features at sites such as Vészt-Mágor, Berettyóújfalu-Herpály, Para, and Polgár-Csszhalom, features interpreted as altars, ritual buildings, and sacrificial pits commonly occur (Kalicz and Raczky 1984; Lazarovici et al. 2001; Raczky et al. 2007). These all suggest an integrative function for the tell itself, which was built into the residential community structure. By contrast,

Figure 3.1

Tells to scale with extent of horizontal settlement around them.

Coming Together, Falling Apart 49 there is no evidence for plazas, courtyards, or community houses behind tell fortifications during the Bronze Age in the Körös Region. Excavations at Gáborján-Csapszékpart, Berettyóújfalu-Herpály, Bakonszeg-Kádárdomb, Túrkeve-Terehalom, Békés-Várdomb, Gyulavarsánd-Laposhalom, and others indicate only dense housing with narrow alleyways (Banner and Bóna 1974; Csányi and Tárnoki 1994; Duffy 2010: 169; Popescu 1956; Roska 1941; Sz. Máthé 1984, 1988).

THE LOCAL SCALE: THE SETTLEMENT COMPLEX The next scale we consider is that of the tell and its associated settlement complex. The tells and distributions of archaeological surface material dating to the same periods in their vicinity are illustrated in Figure 3.1. The density of cultural material at these three sites is generated from different data sets with different spatial resolutions as a result of the different methods employed to answer different research questions. The boundary for Vészt-Mágor is the area inside the ditches observable in the magnetometer data that also coincides with the extent of the tell itself (Parkinson et al. 2010). Although the site is located in a national park and the grass covering the area precludes systematic surface collection, the magnetometer data show a virtual absence of anomalies outside and beyond the ditches. On the other side of the ancient river meander, where there are plowed fields, no Neolithic or Bronze Age material was discovered during the MRT surveys (Ecsedy et al. 1982: 183–187). Bronze Age material was identified through field walking and trench excavation off the tell of Békés-Várdomb (Banner and Bóna 1974; Jankovich et al. 1998). A small area beside the tell was systematically surface-collected for a sample of diagnostic ceramics and then the entirety of the settlement complex was shovel tested to provide an upper size limit for the site (Duffy 2010: 440–449). Two sherds or more in a 20-liter plow zone shovel test unit was considered “habitation,” and if there were one or two sherds, the test was considered part of a “low-density scatter” consistent with manured garden areas. This distinction is important primarily for estimating population, but it also gives a sense of how the exclusion of this low-density debris changes the definition of site size. Surface collection units by the Körös Regional Archaeological Project at Szeghalom-Kovácshalom were 10-by-10- or 20-by20-meter units, collected for about 10 minutes regardless of density. Contour intervals generated by inverse distance weighting of collection point values were used to estimate site size (details on this process can be found in Duffy 2010: 440–449). While Neolithic Szeghalom-Kovácshalom and Bronze Age Békés-Várdomb each have extensive settlements around the tell, the Neolithic and Bronze Age tell of Vészt-Mágor does not. When both settlement and possible manured areas are added together, Békés-Várdomb is 25 hectares and SzeghalomKovácshalom is at least 28.7 hectares. Both sites actually cover substantially

50 Paul R. Duffy et al. larger areas if empty zones between the scatters are included. The systematic surface surveys and the magnetometer data for Szeghalom-Kovácshalom suggest that the maximum extent of the Neolithic settlement complex, including several more or less contemporary farmsteads, might have exceeded 70 hectares. At the same time, settlement at Vészt-Mágor remained restricted to the 3.9-hectare tell.

THE MICROREGIONAL SCALE: THE SETTLEMENT CLUSTER The next scale we consider is the larger microregional settlement cluster. The ties forming social networks include overlapping and nonoverlapping alliances, and geographic closeness of sites within a microregion can serve as a proxy for them. Closeness would have been important for fulfilling kinship obligations, participation in important group rituals, forming labor parties to harvest crops, or joining together to form war parties. There is no direct correspondence between spatial distance and social distance (Barth 1969; Keesing 1975), however, and these settlement cluster models remain only hypotheses that must be evaluated with other lines of archaeological evidence. By analyzing the geographic relationship between sites at this scale, it is nonetheless possible to model variation in social interactions. We employ a network approach rather than a strictly spatial statistic for identifying settlement clusters (for reviews of network approaches in archaeology, see Brughmans 2010; Isakson 2008; Johansen et al. 2004; Knappett 2011; Mizoguchi 2009). Networks are defined by nodes and ties and can be more revealing than traditional spatial analysis, because the node’s position in a network helps to determine the constraints and opportunities it encounters (Burt 2005). For this analysis, a distance matrix was generated using SpatialEcology’s Geospatial Modelling Environment, and networks were produced using Analytic Technologies network software UCINET 6 (Borgatti et al. 2002). Euclidean distance and a connectivity threshold of 5 kilometers were used to establish networks. This distance is far enough to be away from that mother’s brother you can’t stand but close enough that you can be over in an hour to help deliver his heifer’s calf if the need arises. Euclidean distances between sites do not consider the travel costs of slope, but the Körös Region is extremely flat, rising only an average of 5 to 6 centimeters per kilometer in the study area (Gyucha et al. 2011: 396). At this microregional scale, the settlement complexes found at SzeghalomKovácshalom and Békés-Várdomb have been collapsed into a single settlement node. In Figures 3.2 and 3.3, the settlements within 5 kilometers of one another are linked. At the microregional scale during the Late Neolithic, the Szeghalom-Kovácshalom and Vészt-Mágor tells were not so different. Each of them had a single satellite site less than 2 kilometers away, and nothing else. Each tell, and the surrounding settlement at Szeghalom, was almost a social island unto itself, suggesting that face-to-face interaction

Coming Together, Falling Apart 51 Legend Telsrte

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Microregional patterns in the Late Neolithic.

at these sites occurred primarily between the small number of people who lived nearby. In the Middle Bronze Age, the network pattern of the Vészt microregion remained essentially unchanged (Figure 3.3). The only difference is that instead of one satellite, it had two. Békés-Várdomb, by contrast, was part of an extensive settlement network located in the Békés microregion, and the tell itself was less than 5 kilometers away from six sites. This is a big difference in the number and potential variety of people with whom the inhabitants of the tell could be in contact very quickly. The emergence of large flat sites during these tell periods is another highly visible form of population aggregation, and in Figures 3.2 and 3.3 these sites are labeled differently than small flat sites, which are generally under 5 hectares. In the Late Neolithic, the large flat sites and the tells both may have served as regional “gathering places” (Parkinson 2002, 2006a, 2006b). The large flat sites have not been studied extensively on the Great Hungarian Plain, but in many Late Neolithic cases they are up to (or even over) 10 hectares in size (Duffy 2010: 352–356; Kalicz and Raczky 1987: 16). In the Middle Bronze Age of the Körös Region, large flat sites seem to have even exceeded Neolithic site sizes (Duffy 2010: 356–362). At this point we are unable to discuss the relationship between large flat sites and their extended networks, but we can continue to explore the

52 Paul R. Duffy et al. Legend TelJ$J1&

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Microregional patterns in the Middle Bronze Age.

tells in microregional contexts for each studied period. A slightly different comparison is required to assess whether similar patterns of local networks were found in the Late Neolithic or if this was only a pattern that developed during the Bronze Age.

THE REGIONAL SCALE: THE LOWER KÖRÖS BASIN Variation in the microregional connectivity of settlement clusters can be modeled using network cohesion measures, with a single value representing how connected members are through direct or indirect ties. The more cohesive a network, the more likely that information can travel through social ties to all members and that activities can be coordinated among network members (Borgatti et al. 2002; Entwisle et al. 2007; Graham 2006; Krackhardt 1994). In network parlance, when nodes connect to one another but do not connect to others, different groups called “components” are created. Nodes that do not connect to anything are called “isolates.” In the Late Neolithic settlement data set, there are twelve components with more than one node, and several isolates (Figure 3.2). The Szeghalom and Vészt microregional pattern, with very few sites in the microregion, is not the only pattern for the Late Neolithic. Instead, there is a range of microregional component sizes,

Coming Together, Falling Apart 53 and both Szeghalom and Vészt are lower than the average component size of four and a half nodes. In the Bronze Age data set, there is less diversity in component size and more connectivity, with a much higher variance compared to the Late Neolithic (Figure 3.3). Part of this pattern is explained by the location of sites closer to one another, but there also is an overall increase in the number of sites in the Bronze Age. The combined result is two very large components, five very small components, and a number of isolates. Spatially, communities have shifted upriver to the east. We also compare isolates and the connectedness of larger village communities. In the Neolithic, 7 percent of all sites are isolates. The percentage of populous sites that are isolates is no different, at 8 percent (one large flat site out of thirteen). In the Bronze Age, the story is similar. Ten percent of the sites are isolates, but 18 percent of the larger villages—one tell and one populous flat settlement—are isolates (two out of seventeen), which is in the same ballpark in terms of similarity. When all the components are treated as individual groups, we can compare how reachable components were in different periods. The network measure we use for this is Krackhardt’s “connectedness” value, which is defined as the proportion of pairs that can reach each other (Borgatti 2006; Krackhardt 1994). It is solved using the formula

⎡ ⎤ V ⎥ Connectedness = 1 − ⎢ ⎢⎣ N(N − 1) / 2 ⎥⎦ for a matrix where N is the number of nodes, and V is the number of pairs of points that are not mutually reachable (Krackhardt 1994: 96). Where all nodes are reachable from all others, the network connectedness is 1. Where all nodes are isolates, network connectedness is 0. Using this measure, the Late Neolithic has a value of 0.0992 versus a value of 0.3123 for the Middle Bronze Age (Table 3.1).

Table 3.1 Age.

Characteristics of site networks for the Late Neolithic and Middle Bronze

% Average Percentage Number Number of component Standard Percentage of tell/large Network of sites components size deviation of isolates flat isolates connectedness

Late Neolithic Middle Bronze Age

58

12

4.5

3.6

7

8

0.0992

107

8

12.4

18.7

10

18

0.3123

54 Paul R. Duffy et al. According to this network measure, Middle Bronze Age settlements were much more connected. Despite the overall pattern, Vészt in the Bronze Age remains as unconnected as it was in the Late Neolithic. Békés, on the other hand, is part of the main component, a size not seen in the Late Neolithic. This subnetwork contains 54 of the 107 sites. For travelers moving between different nodes in such a microregional subnetwork, information could travel more quickly, and warriors could be more easily assembled for defense or attack. In both periods, tell sites themselves may have been part of large components or in close spatial proximity to only one or two other settlements.

DISCUSSION This chapter has taken tell formation, a familiar indication of settlement aggregation on the Great Hungarian Plain, and considered several related settlement and population changes that occurred alongside it. Although tell formation is the most conspicuous sign of population aggregation on the Plain, these other facets of aggregation and settlement location are less well understood and are rarely treated systematically. A comparison of aggregation in the two periods of prehistory in question illustrates both similarities and differences (Table 3.2). Our analysis indicates that there are a number of settlement cluster sizes at the microregional scale in the Neolithic and Bronze Age. The two specific Neolithic settlement clusters investigated here are very small, but there are other, larger components within the Lower Körös Basin at the same time. Within both periods, one can find small settlement clusters, denser aggregations of flat sites surrounding tell occupations, large flat settlements, and Table 3.2

Summary of settlement measures. Scale Regional

Site Békés

Period Bronze Age

Vészt Vészt

Neolithic

Network cohesion in the Lower Körös Basin

Microregional

Local

Integrative unit Settlement cluster

Settlement complex

Tell

More

Large

Extended

Dense housing

connected

Small

Restricted Dense housing

Less

Small

Restricted Integrative

connected Szeghalom

Neighborhood

features Small

Extended

Housing

Coming Together, Falling Apart 55 a percentage of isolated, densely populated settlements similar to isolated small sites. The presence of these large settlement complexes results in comparable site size hierarchies for both periods (Duffy 2010: 251–370). The general picture for both periods is diversity of microregional component size. This structural diversity likely corresponded to social diversity within the region during both periods. Yet it is here where the similarities in aggregation in these two periods end. Although the interior of the tells were superficially similar, Bronze Age tell complexes held densely packed houses and did not include the integrative features found in the Neolithic. In the Neolithic, there is mounting evidence that length of occupation does not explain the extended settlement at the local scale, as Vészt-Mágor and Szeghalom-Kovácshalom were occupied for similar lengths of time (about 500 years; although this estimate is based on a limited number of absolute dates, see Luthern 2012; Yerkes et al. 2009). In the Bronze Age, some tells were fortified early (in the Ottomány phase, 2150–1650 BC) and grew to include an extended settlement only later (in the Gyulavarsánd phase, ca. 1750–1400 BC). Yet it is unclear whether tells without extended settlement in the Bronze Age were occupied for shorter lengths of time. The ontogeny of tell settlement complexes in both periods is still poorly understood. An additional difference is that microregional settlement forms two large daisy chains in the Bronze Age, increasing the size range of clusters. The size of the Békés-Várdomb cluster might expand even further if sites outside of the survey region were included, as a similar and contiguous settlement array is known from the Berettyó Valley to the northeast (Dani and Fischl 2009). At the regional scale, the network pattern differs substantially between periods, with sites more fragmented from one another in the Neolithic than they were in the Bronze Age. All else being equal, it would have been more difficult to pass a message or move a trade item through the Neolithic network than it would have been in the Bronze Age. Although tells are physical evidence of people coming together for prolonged periods of time, the variation demonstrated even in the small sample investigated here indicates that tells may not have always been central nodes in the regional systems. Many are part of small components located away from the majority of the region’s inhabitants. Population sizes at some flat sites were probably in some cases larger than those at tell sites, and they may have been equally or more important in connecting settlements of the region. As we continue to learn about settlement and network variation in prehistory, tells may turn out to be less significant as markers of aggregation than the extended settlements around them, the large flat sites throughout the region, or the dense networks of smaller settlements found in both periods of prehistory. In a general way, the organization of tell communities varied within each period, but these aggregated communities—and this includes large flat sites—seem to have different orientations between the Neolithic and the

56 Paul R. Duffy et al. Bronze Age. Whereas large populations can be found locally aggregated in both periods, the Late Neolithic settlement networks focused inward to local settlement clusters, whereas Bronze Age tells more often connected outward to an expanded chain of settlements. The Late Neolithic microregional network clusters were small, and where information exists, ritual activities were concentrated at sites of dense aggregation. In the Bronze Age, when tell occupation reemerged, there is little evidence for group rituals in the Körös area, perhaps due to the establishment of more long-distance connections and increased trade, population interaction with other areas, and mobility. From a network perspective, the increase in component size and variance also may suggest that social and economic opportunities for villagers in the Körös Region were much more unequal in the Bronze Age than they were in the Neolithic. At the same time, the “multiplier effects” of increasing social complexity in the Bronze Age (Renfrew 1973) were not experienced universally in a single region, as a leap in component size occurred only in some areas. The outcome of such disproportionate participation in trade networks, population aggregation, and regional interaction seems to have been an increasingly diversified mosaic of opportunity and socioeconomic complexity. Parkinson (2002, 2006a,b) has used the idea of tribal cycling to describe the major structural reorganization of settlement and interaction during the end of the first tell occupation period and the onset of the Early Copper Age. The settlement pattern of the Middle Bronze Age is in some ways the completion of a cycle of dispersal and a return to settlement nucleation. Nucleation in the Bronze Age may have been the product of similar social pressures to those found at the beginning of the Late Neolithic, but its manifestation differed in several quantifiable ways. Our understanding of this vacillation between different social forms cannot ignore, or underestimate, the ratcheting potential of culture. At the same time, if hereditary inequality at populous Bronze Age settlements was one of the reactions to scalar stress and population aggregation in the Körös Region during the Middle Bronze Age (Parkinson 2006a: 54), we also should point out that it was no more successful than the social response in the Neolithic. The evidence for social inequality during the Middle Bronze Age in the Körös Region remains elusive, and the large settlements that emerged at this time did not last longer than their Late Neolithic forbearers.

CONCLUSIONS: COMING TOGETHER AND FALLING APART In this discussion we hope to have made several points about the organization of prehistoric societies on the Great Hungarian Plain, specifically with regard to how people integrated and interacted with each other when they chose to live in more nucleated social environments. We have not addressed here the various causes that likely brought people together in the Körös

Coming Together, Falling Apart 57 Region during the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, but the overall homogeneity of the landscape suggests that there was more likely a pull to these specific sites for social reasons rather than economic or environmental advantages, or a push due to climate or environmental changes. There are, for example, no obvious variations in the spatial distribution of raw materials such as obsidian within the Körös Region that would have attracted more nucleated settlements to specific spots on the landscape. There are no significant differences in the spatial distribution of soils or other natural features, such as hills, that would have provided benefits that were unavailable elsewhere in the Körös Region. Instead, it seems that the decision to come together at certain places had more to do with being part of critical nodes within microregional and regional networks of social interaction. In both periods discussed here, there appears to have been some social gravity that attracted people to sites like Szeghalom-Kovácshalom, Vészt-Mágor, and Békés-Várdomb. Our goal was to use the prehistory of the Körös Region to examine differences in how nucleated communities in this region were organized during the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. To that end, we have found it useful to differentiate between the intertwined analytical dimensions of integration and interaction at different social and geographic scales. By providing a detailed and explicit analysis of these ancient nucleated communities from two different periods on the Great Hungarian Plain, we have tried to demonstrate a method that can be used to compare these results with nucleated communities from other regions in different time periods across the globe. We join the chorus of archaeologists who argue that systematic comparison of archaeological data remains one of the hopes for understanding the emergence of more complex societies (e.g., Drennan et al. 2010; Lillios 2011; Smith 2012). In our own study, we were able to draw out interesting lines of similarity and difference in social organization between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. In this modest first attempt to compare Late Neolithic and Middle Bronze Age aggregation with multiple lines of evidence, interaction between people in the Neolithic seems to have focused on a smaller scale of integrative units before collapsing into the dispersed settlement system of the Early Copper Age (Gyucha 2009; Gyucha et al. 2009; Parkinson 2006a). When populations aggregated again in substantial numbers during the Bronze Age, the integrated units may have been larger, the individual settlements oriented more outwardly through connectedness with other sites, and less centered on public ritual at densely settled tell sites. Despite this cyclical process of aggregation, however, even after the end of the Middle Bronze Age, social inequalities remain modest and regional hierarchy seems absent, unlike many other regions of the world where population centralization occurred (Drennan and Peterson 2006; Peterson and Drennan 2012). Quite predictably, the next steps in this comparative research require a refinement of questions about the observed variability and attention to archaeological data that rarely have been the subject of systematic research.

58 Paul R. Duffy et al. In addition to understanding the differences in ontogeny of tell settlement complexes between periods, we need to focus on how aggregation at large flat sites differed from them. It is possible that large flat sites were equivalent to densely settled tell sites in both periods, but evidence for public ritual areas and defensive features remains elusive. Such data would help us further evaluate whether people were aggregating at these sites for defensive reasons, ritual concerns, or, as seems to be the case with Late Neolithic tells, both. We also must attempt to evaluate the network constructs presented here with archaeological data. Although Bronze Age networks seem to expand outwardly with a connectedness beyond that seen in the Late Neolithic (as many Bronze Age experts might expect), increases in the amount of material traded and the intensity of mobility and interaction during the Bronze Age need to be quantified. Comparing percentages of foreign ceramics identified through ICP-MS paste analyses is a promising avenue for understanding differences in extraregional trade between periods (Hoekman-Sites et al. 2006). Stable strontium isotope characterization of mobility in mortuary populations provides an additional way to assess the degree to which people were regionally connected (Giblin 2009). While these are ambitious goals, the several thousand years of local cultural histories combined with the complexity of population nucleation as a general process assures us that understanding the coming together and falling apart of aggregated villages even in a single region is a lifelong pursuit.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Early drafts of this chapter were presented at the 17th annual meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists and the 77th annual meeting of the Society of American Archaeologists while Duffy was supported by the Center for Comparative Archaeology at the University of Pittsburgh and later as a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Thanks to Justin Jennings for useful comments on a previous draft and to Jennifer Birch for the invitation to contribute to this volume.

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4

Social Organization and Aggregated Settlement Structure in an Archaic Greek City on Crete (ca. 600 BC) Donald C. Haggis

Settlement aggregation is a normative, culturally conditioned, and adaptive process in the Aegean from the Neolithic period on, seeing several phase transitions that resulted in village-size communities; middle-range settlements, such as towns and cities; and political or ritual centers of state-level configurations, such as palace- and city-centered territorial states. Aggregation and nucleation are perhaps interchangeable terms, though in many cases the actual material components and spatial organization of nucleated sites—especially those derived through surface survey—are not sufficiently understood to present the details or form of aggregation. The recurrence and ubiquity of nucleated sites in the Greek landscape are probably related to kinship structures and concepts of the household; social and cultic connections to places; exchange patterns; and land use and subsistence practices. The motives and processes involved in periodic aggregation, as Jennifer Birch points out in the introduction to this volume, have perhaps received more attention in the context of regional surveys than in detailed site-level analysis of intracommunity organization. Even though work in the Aegean commonly addresses details of settlement organization, architecture, and spatial syntax, especially when they are relevant to culture- or period-specific questions (e.g., Glowacki and Vogeikoff-Brogan 2011; Westgate et al. 2007), because aggregation is both scale-sensitive and variable, and perhaps simply accepted as a normative settlement structure, it has not received as much critical attention or analytical focus as has the study of broad historical trends of settlement patterns. Even recent studies of Greek urbanization tend to apply broadly construed regional data and perspectives of landscape archaeology, marginalizing the form of aggregation and actual structure of urban settlements in their earliest forms (eighth to sixth centuries BC) (e.g., Branigan 2001; Cullen 2001; Morgan and Coulton 1997; Osborne and Cunliffe 2005; Owen and Preston 2009). While urbanization per se is not, properly speaking, the focus of this collection, I think that the small scale of Aegean cities in the Archaic period (seventh to sixth centuries BC), their variable sizes, organizations, and hinterlands, and the problems in defining their earliest forms, especially on Crete, suggest that looking at aggregation from the ground up could be a useful analytical tool for

64 Donald C. Haggis visualizing the emergence of the new kinds of settlements in the Archaic period. The purpose of this chapter is to present an example of settlement aggregation on Crete in the context of Archaic-period urbanization. Over the past two decades, the publication of a number of archaeological surveys in the Aegean has contributed compelling regional histories and considerable discussion of the sociopolitical and economic meanings of settlement patterns, while significantly shaping the direction of Greek archaeology and prehistory into the twenty-first century (e.g., Alcock and Cherry 2004; Bennet and Galaty 1997; Branigan 2001; Cullen 2001; Kardulias 1994). That said, our focus on the region as the highest-order or effective analytical scale, and the increasing cost and logistical complexity of excavation—as well as commonplace methodological skepticism and philosophical ambivalence (e.g., Cherry 2011)—have gradually steered us away from detailed site-level analyses, and indeed the close evaluation of data sets that we should be using to assign functions to units of artifacts on the ground. We may need to take a step back from the mosaic of sherd densities and site hierarchies (the collages of dots and smudges on the map) and think critically about what aggregation means at the site level and on various spatial and organizational scales, perhaps reconsidering entirely our uncritical and broadly conceptual and spatial definitions of houses, hamlets, villages, towns, and cities. Generally speaking, in most Aegean surveys, site hierarchies tend to predict degrees of regional complexity (e.g., Driessen’s 2001 overview), with settlement dispersal correlating to strong integration—that is, the expansion of numerous small sites into a hinterland whose structure and carrying capacity are evidence for territoriality, sociopolitical cohesion, and economic complexity (as in Bintliff 1982). Understanding aggregation as both process and structure should be critical in determining the meaning of such sites as well as in developing models of social and political organization based on settlement data. The so-called hamlets and villages of dispersed regional patterns are often presented as merely the lower-level in-filling of the countryside (Cavanagh 1991: 108; Morris 1998: 16; Watrous, Hadzi-Vallianou, and Blitzer 2004); that is, the result of political and economic changes accompanying the centralization of resources and institutionalization of power in larger aggregates that comprise the upper end of sociopolitical or economic hierarchies. In short, settlement dispersal is visualized as a socioeconomic configuration directly dependent on the development of bigger aggregated sites and more complex systems, the end result of centrifugal integration rather than a form of primary settlement development. In other words, rarely do Aegean surveys encounter primary dispersal (lots of little villages or hamlets), giving way, through time, to aggregation in precisely the way described in Birch’s introduction: “people abandoning a regional pattern of small, dispersed settlements in favor of aggregation into larger, more nucleated settlements.” Even when these kinds of dominant village patterns appear in Greek prehistory, such as in certain phases of Neolithic Thessaly, Early Bronze Age Crete, or Middle Bronze Age or Early Iron Age Greece,

Social Organization and Aggregated Settlement Structure 65 they can reflect long-lived and stable communities and remarkably complex and integrated systems of interregional economic and social organization. Thus, a dispersed pattern of villages correlates no more to subsistence, simplicity, or intraregional isolation than nucleation or large-scale aggregation does to complexity, integration, and regional interdependence. Strictly speaking, the Aegean data present situations that may not be precisely comparable to those of some other case studies in this volume. What constitutes periodic shifts in settlement behavior in the Aegean—nucleation and dispersal in the parlance of survey—might be better construed as changes through time in the configuration, scale, replication, and distribution of aggregated sites or perhaps the culturally specific kind of aggregation: changes in the size, scale, form, location, and function of nucleated sites rather than, strictly speaking, a clear shift from small, dispersed hamlets or villages to larger more complex aggregations. Although the issue of aggregation in any cultural context should be, of course, dependent on scale and regional context as well as a myriad of environmental and historically specific cultural variables, an Aegean example may offer the present discussion some resolution on the process of aggregation itself, addressing a central theme of how such processes “played out at the community level” (Birch, this volume). I present here a brief case study of the site of Azoria, located near the modern village of Kavousi in eastern Crete (Figure 4.1), which generally fits Birch’s conceptual outline of aggregation as set forth in the introduction (Haggis et al. 2004, 2007a, 2007b, 2011a, 2011b). The settlement history encompasses the transition from the Early Iron Age (ca. 1200–700 BC) to the Archaic periods (ca. 700–500 BC). The picture derived from both survey and excavation shows a protracted period of fairly static settlements, a cluster of dispersed villages in the Early Iron Age (about ten to twenty houses each), remaining stable for a period of some 400 to 500 years (Haggis 1993, 2001, 2005). A change at the end of the seventh century BC evidently involved both abandonment of the long-lived village pattern as well as the movement and nucleation of population to the site of Azoria, which expanded to at least 15 hectares in size (Figure 4.2). What we see about 600 BC is a very different idea and configuration of settlement structure, economy, and arenas for intrasite interaction compared to what the settlement had been before. Azoria became a large aggregate by the sixth century BC (Figures 4.2 and 4.3)—broadly speaking, fitting the chronology, form, and process of urbanization as we understand it in the Aegean. The regional pattern of nucleation at the end of the seventh century, combined with a radical reorganization and increase in the scale of public and domestic space, have suggested to us that Azoria had become an urban center of a protopolis (a nascent city-state), consisting of a community that grew out of preexisting Early Iron Age village clusters (Figure 4.2). We propose that the population of the region had literally come together, relocating population as well as social, political, and economic consciousness and activities from initially dispersed villages and hamlets in the wider region to the South

66 Donald C. Haggis

Figure 4.1

Map of the Kavousi area of northeastern Crete.

Acropolis of Azoria (Haggis and Mook 2011a) (Figure 4.2). This chapter explores the sociopolitical implications of this aggregation.

BACKGROUND OF ARCHAIC AGGREGATION: THE EARLY IRON AGE VILLAGE PATTERN ON CRETE In the Early Iron Age on Crete, a village pattern was the norm for several centuries, from as early as Late Minoan (LM) IIIC (ca. 1200–1100 BC) to as late as the Orientalizing period (ca. 700–600 BC). During this protracted period, the settlement structure, not dissimilar from other areas of the

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Northern Gabel compound at the Martinez Hill Ruin.

the focus on adobe architecture and sparse use of rock reinforcement, they may be invisible on the surface. Replicated platform mound/courtyard units plus variations in the orientation of rooms and room blocks lead us to tentatively identify six social units in this complex (Figure 7.5). We suspect the two easternmost ones, lacking platform mounds, date to the Tanque Verde phase, while the others extended into the Tucson phase. The Tucson phase social units at the Martinez Hill Ruin collectively incorporate a very large number of households. The Gabel compound is comparable to Casa Azul, likely bearing 60 to 100 structures at a minimum given the evidence for rooms on the exterior of the compound wall (Gabel 1931: 34). Collectively, the other Tucson phase components probably house at least 200 to 250 structures with a combined total at Martinez Hill Ruin of 260 to 350 structures. Thus, the population of the Martinez Hill Ruin could be in the neighborhood of 1,350 to 1,750 persons, an impressive figure for a Tucson Basin settlement. Add in Casa Azul, and there may well have been more than 2,000 people living in the vicinity of Martinez Hill.

SOCIAL STRUCTURAL IMPLICATIONS The process of aggregation at the Martinez Hill site complex was not sudden, but it may well have transpired within a generation or two, and it underwent several stages. It was initiated sometime in the thirteenth century and was fully developed early in the fourteenth century.

Competition and Cooperation 145

Tucson Phase Social Units

Probable Tanque Verde Phase Social Unit

Martinez Hill Ruin Estimated Social Units Platform Mound Meters

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Figure 7.5 Estimated social units consolidated in the Martinez Hill Ruin south of Martinez Hill.

The first step in the consolidation of population in the Martinez Reach was the resettling of households and larger social units during the Late Rincon and Tanque Verde phases both north and south of Martinez Hill in the locations that would later become the focal points of fourteenthcentury occupation. Some of these households built walled enclosures or

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compounds, while others remained in discrete unwalled residential areas, similar to the manner in which they had been living in the tenth and eleventh centuries. This process did not happen overnight, and it may have proceeded in several steps, with resettlement in other areas along the Reach prior to the ultimate relocation to Martinez Hill. The second step of consolidation occurred sometime in the late thirteenth century. At that point, population merged into a limited number of walled (and perhaps some unwalled) tightly packed residential loci. Although there had been special communal-use or politically important dwellings prior to that time in the thirteenth century, sometime after AD 1275, small platform mounds were constructed in most residential units, sometimes atop the prior communal-use rooms. We suggest that the complex of settlement at Martinez Hill represents the coalescence of six villages living along the Martinez Reach in the eleventh century Middle Rincon phase. As noted above, the settlements along the Martinez Reach, which includes the ballcourt village at Martinez Hill, were ceremonially, economically, socially, and affinally tied in the eleventh century, sharing a common identity. Water rights and land tenure was maintained, even during the period of disruption and coalescence between the Middle Rincon and Tucson phases based on the distribution of field houses and evidence of use of the floodplain in the Tanque Verde phase cited earlier. Of interest is that at least three of the other Tucson phase villages, University Indian Ruin, Downtown Tucson, and AZ AA:12:32/Furrey’s Ranch, are found at or near reach boundaries and probable headgate locations, suggesting that similar phenomena were operating in other locations. The integration of diverse social units, each representing anything from a lineage to a moiety to a village, faced significant obstacles that were not well resolved prior to the ultimate abandonment of the sites. Rather than true integration into a larger social structural unit, only partial integration is evident. People were willing to live in close proximity, but each petty leader still wanted his display of elevated status and power atop his tiny platform. Each social unit also had its own small courtyard/plaza. While several of the platform mounds are significantly larger than others, there is no clear evidence that the social units with them were in any way more special than others. Notably lacking at the site is any sign of a communal integrative facility. The social units are not arrayed around a central plaza, and there is no compound bearing a great house or other such facility within the settlement that might be interpreted as an integrative device that served the community as a whole. The configuration at Martinez Hill, with its consolidated corporate groups, many of which bore traces of leadership and/or ritual centers (i.e., the platform mounds), differs from that seen in many portions of the Hohokam world in the thirteenth century. For example, the concentrations of settlement at large centers such as Pueblo Grande (Mitchell 1994) and Los Muertos (Haury 1945) had clear political/ritual focal points, with certain

Competition and Cooperation 147 compound enclosures bearing very large platform mounds and/or great houses. Indeed, in some locations, such as at some Tonto Basin and lower San Pedro Valley sites (Doelle et al. 1995; Rice et al. 1998), the platform mound compounds were the village, and single mounds were obvious integrative devices within them. The implication is that aggregation was viewed by the residents of the Martinez site complex as a necessary but temporary solution to some societal problem or problems. This is somewhat similar to the time much earlier in the Hohokam sequence when population coalesced into villages in the early Pioneer period (Wallace and Lindeman 2003, 2012). At that time, there were no compound walls, but there may as well have been. Leaders of the various social units maintained overt displays of their social standing in the form of very large houses bordering plazas. It took several hundred years for these houses to disappear and integration of the social units to develop into something more cohesive. The key difference at the Martinez Hill complex is that within the village there is no central plaza, no great house, and no communal cemetery to reinforce a community ethos. At least from what we can now observe, at Martinez, there was no intent to remain together and become an integrated sociopolitical entity, whereas, at the stage of early village formation in the Pioneer period, people consciously chose a path toward integration that was clearly visible in the archaeological record. One might wonder, then, what exactly was holding the aggregated settlements together. Perhaps most important is that the villages coalescing at these sites from the Martinez Reach had been part of a community in the Middle Rincon phase prior to the processes of population movement and aggregation that developed during the Late Rincon and Tanque Verde phases. This social community was formed five to six centuries before their physical aggregation through the shared desire to construct and maintain a canal system or systems that traversed the length of the Martinez Reach and supplied water for crops and sustenance along the way. Intermarriage, interlinked land and water rights, and a shared desire to maintain agricultural production provide plenty of tools and social desires to maintain strong and close ties between the social units that united at Martinez Hill. Nevertheless, one can argue that there would have been a need, at a minimum, for communal rituals or other mechanisms to facilitate critical decision making. Communal ritual atop Martinez Hill, itself located in the center of the Tucson phase settlement complex, appears to have been the solution chosen in this instance. Atop the hill is a complex of walls, structures, clearings, petroglyphs, and a large enclosure that would not have served a typical or mundane purpose. Its size is suggestive of a communal plaza. None of the masonry features there have been dated; however, it is safe to assume that they were either constructed in the Tanque Verde or Tucson phases, or they were present then and available for use. A Tucson phase design on one of the petroglyph panels indicates ritual use of the hilltop at the time in question. Martinez Hill also may have served another more profane role, offering

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both a vantage point to observe potential attackers and a refuge if attack was imminent. As such, the population in the vicinity of Martinez Hill did indeed possess a communal, integrative facility on the hilltop which they utilized for ritual purposes but was distinct from the settlement at Martinez Hill Ruin, where separate, and perhaps competing, social units characterize the built environment.

CONCLUSIONS The Tucson phase aggregated settlement in the vicinity of Martinez Hill represents one of the densest concentrations of population in the prehistory of southern Arizona, but, inexplicably it is also one of the least integrated settlement complexes we have seen. We suggest that the social groups coalescing at Martinez Hill were bound by long-standing social and economic relationships but came from different villages along the Martinez Reach. Existing ties brought the people together, but differences between social groups are still evident in the multiple platform mounds, lack of uniform planning in the construction of compound enclosures, and lack of cohesive facilities. We do not know the history that led to this circumstance, but we can say that it is not typical for the Hohokam region at large even though it may be typical for the Tucson Basin. It is almost as though those in power in the southern Tucson Basin in the thirteenth century were able to delay the wave of change sweeping through the Southwest to a point later than most of the rest of the Hohokam region and thereby, when forced to aggregate, did so reluctantly, retaining as much of their prior social structure as possible. It is by no means clear what happened when the Martinez Hill sites were depopulated or even when this occurred. Post–AD 1300 ceramic types are present at both Casa Azul and the Martinez Hill Ruin, though they are not common on the surface of the sites. What exactly this means is uncertain, because we have no basis for determining in what quantity we should expect these types to occur in this portion of the Tucson Basin. We know that there were field houses and burials in the adjacent floodplain dating to the Tucson phase and Protohistoric period (approximately AD 1450 to 1697) (Ravesloot 1987) and that there was likely continuous Protohistoric and Historic occupation across the river at San Xavier. It would not be surprising if a second wave of aggregation occurred at the beginning of the Protohistoric period which resulted in the very large population observed by Eusabio Kino when he visited the area in the late seventeenth century (Doelle 1984). By all appearances, the settlements at Martinez Hill were built to be temporary. However, the density of refuse and indications of considerable complexity in the constructions at the sites are signs that the residents may have found it necessary to stay longer than they had expected.

Competition and Cooperation 149 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors would like to express appreciation to the Tohono O’odham Nation and in particular to Tony Burrell and Austin Nuñez for their cooperation and interest in the project. We also thank Bill Doelle and Desert Archaeology, Inc. for providing funding and support, and Catherine Gilman and Tyler Theriot for their assistance with field-mapping and map preparation for this chapter. REFERENCES Bradley, Bruce A. 1980 Excavations at Arizona BB:13:74, Santa Cruz Industrial Park, Tucson, Arizona. CASA Papers No. 1. Complete Archaeological Service Associates, Oracle, Arizona. Clark, Jeffery J., M. Kyle Woodson, and Mark C. Slaughter. 2013 Those Who Went to the Land of the Sun: Puebloan Migrations into Southeastern Arizona. In Between Mimbres and Hohokam: Exploring the Archaeology and History of Southeast Arizona and Southwest New Mexico, edited by H. D. Wallace, in press. Anthropological Papers No. 51, Archaeology Southwest, Tucson. Craig, Douglas B. 1988 Archaeological Testing at the Dakota Wash Site, AZ AA:16:49 (ASM). Technical Report No. 88-5. Institute for American Research, Tucson. Crown, Patricia L., and Timothy A. Kohler. 1994 Community Dynamics, Site Structure, and Aggregation in the Northern Rio Grande. In The Ancient Southwestern Community, edited by W. H. Wills and R. D. Leonard, pp. 103–117. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Doelle, William H. 1984 The Tucson Basin during the Protohistoric Period. The Kiva 49: 195–211. ———. 1985 Excavations at the Valencia Site, a Pre-Classic Hohokam Village in the Southern Tucson Basin. Anthropological Papers No. 3. Institute for American Research, Tucson. ———. 1987 A View of the Avra Valley from the Southern Tucson Basin. In Archaeological Studies of the Avra Valley, Arizona, for the Papago Water Supply Project, edited by A. Dart and J. Altschul, pp. 321–372. Anthropological Papers No. 9. Institute for American Research, Tucson. Doelle, William H., David A. Gregory, and Henry D. Wallace. 1995 Classic Period Platform Mound Systems in Southern Arizona. In The Roosevelt Community Development Study: New Perspectives on Tonto Basin Prehistory, edited by M. D. Elson, M. T. Stark, and D. A. Gregory, pp. 385–440. Anthropological Papers No. 15. Center for Desert Archaeology, Tucson. Doelle, William H., and Henry D. Wallace. 1986 Hohokam Settlement Patterns in the San Xavier Project Area, Southern Tucson Basin. Technical Report No. 84-6. Institute for American Research, Tucson. Ellis, G. Lain, and Michael R. Waters. 1991 Cultural and Landscape Influences on Tucson Basin Hohokam Settlement. American Anthropologist 93: 125–137. Fish, Suzanne K., and Paul R. Fish. 1994 Multisite Communities as Measures of Hohokam Aggregation. In The Ancient Southwestern Community: Models and Methods for the Study of Prehistoric Social Organization, edited by W. H. Wills and R. D. Leonard, pp. 119–130. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Gabel, Norman. 1931 Martinez Hill Ruins: An Example of Prehistoric Culture of the Middle Gila. Unpublished master’s thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson.

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Harry, Karen G., and Stephanie M. Whittlesey (editors). 2004 Pots, Potters, and Models—Archaeological Investigations at the SRI Locus of the West Branch Site, Tucson, Arizona: Vol. 1. Feature Descriptions, Material Culture, and Specialized Analyses (CD-ROM). Technical Series No. 80. Statistical Research, Inc., Tucson. Haury, Emil W. 1945 The Excavation of Los Muertos and Neighboring Ruins in the Salt River Valley, Southern Arizona. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology Vol. 24(1). Harvard University, Cambridge. Haynes, C. Vance, Jr., and Bruce B. Huckell. 1986 Sedimentary Successions of the Prehistoric Santa Cruz River, Tucson, Arizona. Open File Report No. 86-15. Arizona Geological Society, Tucson. Heidke, James M. 2000 Middle Rincon Phase Ceramic Artifacts from Sunset Mesa. In Excavations at Sunset Mesa Ruin, edited by Michael W. Lindeman, pp. 69–118. Technical Report No. 2000-02. Desert Archaeology, Inc., Tucson. ———. 2010 Prehistoric Pottery Containers from the Julian Wash Site, AZ BB:13:17 (ASM). In Craft Specialization in the Southern Tucson Basin: Archaeological Excavations at the Julian Wash Site, AZ BB:13:17 (ASM): Part 1. Introduction, Excavation Results, and Artifact Investigations, edited by Henry D. Wallace, pp. 263–294. Anthropological Papers No. 40. Center for Desert Archaeology, Tucson. Heidke, James M., Melissa K. Markel, and Carlos P. Lavayen. 2008 Native American Ceramics from the Parque de Santa Cruz Project. In The Parque de Santa Cruz Project: Life on the Northern Margin of the Valencia Community, edited by Michael W. Lindeman and Helga Wöcherl, pp. 123–176. Technical Report No. 2008-02. Desert Archaeology, Inc., Tucson. Helms, Mary W. 1998 Access to Origins: Affines, Ancestors, and Aristocrats. University of Texas Press, Austin. Huckleberry, Gary. 2009 Irrigation Canals at Parque de Santa Cruz. In The Parque de Santa Cruz Project: Life on the Northern Margin of the Valencia Community, edited by Michael W. Lindeman and Helga Wöcherl, pp. 251–267. Desert Archaeology, Inc., Tucson. ———. 2011 Alluvial Chronology for the Martinez Hill-Sentinel Peak Reach of the Santa Cruz River in Southwest Tucson, Arizona. In Craft Specialization in the Southern Tucson Basin: Archaeological Excavations at the Julian Wash Site, AZ BB:13:17 (ASM): Part 2. Synthetic Studies, edited by Henry D. Wallace, pp. 629– 650. Anthropological Papers No. 40. Center for Desert Archaeology, Tucson. Huntington, Frederick W. 1986 Archaeological Investigations at the West Branch Site: Early and Middle Rincon Occupation in the Southern Tucson Basin. Anthropological Papers No. 5. Institute for American Research, Tucson. LeBlanc, Steven A. 1999 Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Lindeman, Michael W. (editor). 2003 Excavations at AZ BB:13:74 (ASM): An Examination of Three Middle Rincon Phase Loci. Technical Report No. 2000-01. Desert Archaeology, Inc., Tucson. Lindeman, Michael W. 2009 Households, Villages, and Irrigation Communities. In The Parque de Santa Cruz Project: Life on the Northern Margin of the Valencia Community, edited by Michael W. Lindeman and Helga Wöcherl, pp. 287–301. Technical Report No. 2008-02. Desert Archaeology, Inc., Tucson. Lindeman, Michael, and James Heidke. 2011 Community Disintegration: The Valencia Community During the Eleventh Century. Journal of Arizona Archaeology 1(2): 148–161. Lindeman , Michael W., Gary Huckleberry, and Henry D. Wallace. 2010 The Martinez Hill to A-Mountain Irrigation Community. Poster presented at the 75th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, St Louis. Lindeman, Michael W., and Deborah Swartz. 2007 Results of Phase 1 Data Recovery within a Sewer Alignment along Sindle Place within the West Branch Site, AZ

Competition and Cooperation 151 AA:16:3 (ASM), Pima County, Arizona. Technical Report No. 07-113. Desert Archaeology, Inc. Tucson. Lindeman, Michael W., and Helga Wöcherl (editors). 2009 The Parque de Santa Cruz Project: Life on the Northern Margin of the Valencia Community. Technical Report No. 2008-02. Desert Archaeology, Inc., Tucson. Lipe, William D., and Michelle Hegmon. 1989 Historical Perspectives on Architecture and Social Integration in the Prehistoric Pueblos. In The Architecture of Social Integration in Prehistoric Pueblos, edited by W. D. Lipe and M. Hegmon, pp. 35–52. Occasional Paper No. 1. Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, Cortez. Mabry, Jonathan B. 1999 Summary and Interpretations. In Prehistoric Uses of a Developing Floodplain: Archaeological Investigations on the East Bank of the Santa Cruz River at A-Mountain, edited by Jonathan B. Mabry, Michael W. Lindeman, and Helga Wöcherl, pp. 88–98. Technical Report No. 98-10. Desert Archaeology, Inc., Tucson. Mitchell, Douglas R. (editor). 1994 The Pueblo Grande Project: Vol. 2. Feature Descriptions, Chronology, and Site Structure. Publications in Archaeology No. 20. Soil Systems, Inc., Phoenix. Ravesloot, John C. (editor). 1987 The Archaeology of the San Xavier Bridge Site (AZ BB:13:14), Tucson Basin, Southern Arizona. Archaeological Series No. 171. Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona, Tucson. Ravesloot, J. C., and M. R. Waters. 2004 Geoarchaeology and Archaeological Site Patterning on the Middle Gila River, Arizona. Journal of Field Archaeology 29: 203–214. Rice, Glen E., and Steven A. LeBlanc. 2001 Deadly Landscapes: Case Studies in Prehistoric Southwestern Warfare. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Rice, Glen E., Charles L. Redman, David Jacobs, and Owen Lindauer. 1998 Architecture, Settlement Types, and Settlement Complexes. In A Synthesis of Tonto Basin Prehistory: The Roosevelt Archaeology Studies, 1989–1998, edited by G. E. Rice, pp. 55–83. Roosevelt Monograph Series No. 12, Anthropological Field Studies No. 41. Office of Cultural Resource Management, Department of Anthropology, Arizona State University, Tempe. Slaughter, Mark C. 1996 Occupation of the Gibbon Springs Site: Summary and Concluding Thoughts. In Excavation of the Gibbon Springs Site: A Classic Period Village in the Northeastern Tucson Basin, edited by Mark C. Slaughter and Heidi Roberts, pp. 523–534. Archaeological Report No. 94-87. SWCA, Inc., Tucson. Swartz, Deborah L. (editor). 2005 Results of Phase 2 Data Recovery at the Southern Margin of the West Branch Site, AZ AA:16:3 (ASM), Pima County, Arizona (Draft). Technical Report No. 2005-01. Desert Archaeology, Inc., Tucson. Wallace, Henry D. 1995 Archaeological Investigations at Los Morteros, a Prehistoric Settlement in the Northern Tucson Basin. Anthropological Papers No. 17. Center for Desert Archaeology, Tucson. Wallace, Henry D. (editor). 2010 Craft Specialization in the Southern Tucson Basin: Archaeological Excavations at the Julian Wash Site, AZ BB:13:17 (ASM): Part 2. Synthetic Studies. Anthropological Papers No. 40. Center for Desert Archaeology, Tucson. Wallace, Henry D. 2011 What Is a Prehistoric Hohokam Community? In Craft Specialization in the Southern Tucson Basin: Archaeological Excavations at the Julian Wash Site, AZ BB:13:17 (ASM): Part 2. Synthetic Studies, edited by Henry D. Wallace, pp. 651–681. Anthropological Papers No. 40. Center for Desert Archaeology, Tucson. ———. 2012 Honey Bee Village and the Valley of Gold in the Scheme of Things Hohokam. In Life in the Valley of Gold: Archaeological Investigations at Honey Bee Village, a Prehistoric Hohokam Ballcourt Village, Part 2, edited by H. D. Wallace, pp. 783–827. Anthropological Papers No. 48. Archaeology Southwest, Tucson.

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Wallace, Henry D., and William H. Doelle. 2001 Classic Period Warfare in Southern Arizona. In Deadly Landscapes: Case Studies in Prehistoric Southwestern Warfare, edited by Glen E. Rice and Steven A. LeBlanc, pp. 239–287. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Wallace, Henry D., and James P. Holmlund. 1984 The Classic Period in the Tucson Basin. The Kiva 49: 167–194. Wallace, Henry D., and Michael W. Lindeman. 2003 Valencia Vieja and the Origins of Hohokam Culture. In Roots of Sedentism: Archaeological Excavations at Valencia Vieja, a Founding Village in the Tucson Basin of Southern Arizona, edited by Henry D. Wallace, pp. 371–405. Anthropological Papers No. 29. Center for Desert Archaeology, Tucson. Wallace, Henry D., and Michael W. Lindeman. 2012 Hohokam Village Formation in the Phoenix and Tucson Basins. In The Foundations of Southwest Communities: Variation and Change in Pithouse Villages between AD 200–900, edited by L. C. Young and S. A. Herr, pp. 34–44. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Wallace, Henry D., and Deborah L. Swartz. 2012 Human Remains and Funerary Practices at Honey Bee Village, AZ BB:9:88 (ASM). In Life in the Valley of Gold: Archaeological Investigations at Honey Bee Village, a Prehistoric Hohokam Ballcourt Village, Part 2, edited by H. D. Wallace, pp. 635–689. Anthropological Papers No. 48. Archaeology Southwest, Tucson. Waters, Michael R. 1988 The Impact of Fluvial Processes and Landscape Evolution on the Archaeological Sites and Settlement Patterns along the San Xavier Reach of the Santa Cruz River, Arizona. Geoarchaeology 3: 205–219. Waters, Michael R., and C. Vance Haynes, Jr. 2001 Late Quaternary Arroyo Formation and Climate Change in the American Southwest. Geology 29: 399–402. Wilcox, David R., and Charles Sternberg. 1983 Hohokam Ballcourts and Their Interpretation. Archaeological Series No. 160. Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona, Tucson.

8

Organizational Complexity in Ancestral Wendat Communities Jennifer Birch and Ronald F. Williamson

Understanding how changes in practice at the community level relate to cultural change writ large requires reconciling long-term processes of historical development with the lived experience of everyday life. Doing so necessitates the integration of multiple archaeological data sets, including regional settlement patterns, large-scale excavations, and the patterning of material culture therein. During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the Northern Iroquoian societies of northeastern North America experienced a process of widespread settlement aggregation. In southern Ontario, Canada, dozens of small villages came together into fewer large, nucleated settlements with populations of up to 1,500 to 2,000 individuals. The formation of these coalescent communities resulted in the development of new forms of social, political, and economic organization. Traditional models of seventeenthcentury Wendat society describe it as essentially egalitarian with consensual decision making and well-integrated mechanisms to ensure equality (e.g., Trigger 1976: 54–59). The period during which those mechanisms were developed has only recently been subject to rigorous archaeological investigation. Evidence for enhanced community integration and coordinated decision making suggest that the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was a time when new organizational structures and mechanisms developed to coordinate social, political, and economic functions. The complexity of those practices has been somewhat masked by reliance on static historic period accounts of Wendat sociopolitical organization.

IROQUOIAN ARCHAEOLOGY AND ETHNOHISTORY The temporal resolution of the archaeological record of Iroquoian peoples is ideally suited to exploring how communities were transformed during processes of settlement aggregation. Iroquoian village sites were occupied for approximately 15 to 30 years before being abandoned, usually due to depleting agricultural yields and exhaustion of resources such as firewood and wild plants in the immediate vicinity (Heidenreich 1971; Trigger 1990: 31). New

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villages were usually constructed within 5 kilometers of the previous site, and in the same drainage (cf. Birch and Williamson 2013; Pearce 1996; Snow 1995; Tuck 1971), although longer migrations also took place. Numerous site relocation sequences have been constructed which represent hundreds of years of occupation by contiguous community groups. In south-central Ontario, more than three decades of cultural resource management–driven archaeology has resulted in the excavation of dozens of complete ancestral Wendat village sites. Each site represents a snapshot of the activities of a single generation. By tracking changes in the materiality and spatiality of these communities over time, we can observe changes within populations before, during, and after coalescence and relate them to historical processes in the lower Great Lakes more broadly. To some extent, neoevolutionary, materialist paradigms retain a foothold in Northern Iroquoian archaeology, with precontact sites being seen as stages in the development of the historic Wendat way of life. In the same way, rich ethnographic descriptions of Wendat culture by early European explorers and missionaries (Biggar 1922–1936; Thwaites 1896–1901; Wrong 1939) and syntheses of these accounts by ethnohistorians (Tooker 1964; Trigger 1976, 1990) have at times led archaeologists to seek out analogous or intermediate forms of those cultural traits in the archaeological record, hampering the application of new theoretical approaches and interpretations of precontact Iroquoian life (Birch 2008; Ramsden 1996). This problem is compounded when village sites are conceptualized as static units as opposed to dynamic and historically constituted communities. Recent perspectives on the ethnogenesis of ancestral Iroquoian populations have shown that the development of Iroquoian societies was not a one-branch evolutionary path (Engelbrecht 2003: 112–113; Hart and Engelbrecht 2012). In the same vein, our recent appraisal of numerous community relocation sequences in south-central Ontario demonstrated that ancestral Wendat communities did not all develop or operate in the same way (Birch and Williamson 2013). Instead, there were multiple occasions where social, cultural, political, technological, and linguistic developments converged and/or separated during the Late Woodland period.

ORGANIZATIONAL COMPLEXITY When archaeologists talk about “complex societies” they usually mean societies possessing a list of traits including powerful leaders, social classes, differences in wealth, craft specialization, and other qualities traditionally associated with chiefdoms and states (cf. Earle 1991; Fried 1967; Service 1962). More recently, new definitions of complexity have emerged that eschew categorical models tied to evolution and directionality (cf. Chapman 2003; Crumley 1995; Nelson 1995; Yoffee 2005). In a recent volume on complexity in ancient North America, Susan Alt promotes an alternative

Organizational Complexity in Ancestral Wendat Communities 155 means of measuring complexity accomplished through multiscalar analyses of “fine-grained sequences, object biographies, and genealogies of practice enmeshed in relational webs” which privilege history and “the complexities of enactment and social experience” (2010: 4). In other words, complexity as practiced, not as achieved. In that community-level construction programs as well as strategies for feeding and clothing larger populations would have necessitated communitywide organization, we can conclude that there were mechanisms that cut across kinship groups to ensure that the necessities of life were met. We further suspect that these systems belie an organizational complexity hitherto hidden from view and that represent a glimpse into an evolving process between the organization necessary in a small fourlonghouse village and that of the historic Wendat communities and political confederacy described by the early European observers—a process in which aggregated settlements played a pivotal role. Bruce Trigger has been the central influence in our understanding of the organizational complexity of the Wendat (Trigger 1976: 54–59) and Ontario Iroquoian studies more generally (Pearce et al. 2006; Warrick 2012). His description of the historic period Wendat as an egalitarian, tribal society has influenced and perhaps unintentionally muted questions about changes in the social and political organization of precontact populations. In the preface to the second edition of The Huron: Farmers of the North (1990), he acknowledges that the first edition (1969) was written at a time when neoevolutionism was at the peak of its influence in anthropology, leading him to interpret any suggestion of nonegalitarian behavior as “evidence of an incipient development towards a ranked, or even a stratified, level of social organization” (1990: vii) and that additional research conducted over the next 20 years had convinced him that this approach misrepresented the nature of Huron (Wendat) society. More than 30 years of archaeological excavation and analyses combined with a rereading of the ethnographic record have convinced us that ancestral Wendat societies underwent complex changes in their social organization. As Susan Jamieson has suggested, “it is time that we opened our minds to a range of socio-political organizational possibilities beyond those assumed and consolidated in Trigger’s impressive construct of early seventeenth century Wendat society” (2011: 7, emphasis in original). Here, we are discussing organizational complexity—how, with the formation of larger coresidential groups, the social, political, and economic organization of communities became considerably more complicated. Recent detailed analyses of the aggregated community that occupied the Draper and Mantle sites, discussed at length below, have allowed us to look beyond overly generalized explanations of the development of complexity to understand how these processes played out, particularly with respect to economic concerns. Importantly, modeling of the agricultural field systems and hunting territories required to sustain larger communities have permitted a better understanding of the organization of production and consumption.

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This, together with insights about the changing internal social and political dynamics of communities undergoing processes of coalescence, help us to understand how processes of cultural change at the local level relate to large-scale, long-term geopolitical change, such as the formation of “tribal” nations and confederacies. In this chapter we provide a brief review of the history of settlement aggregation in precontact Iroquoia, focusing on the coalescent communities of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. We then explore how this process of coalescence unfolded for the community that occupied the Draper and Mantle sites, including changes in community integration, decision making, production and consumption, and interactions between local and distant populations. Our conclusions suggest that settlement aggregation created social settings that led to a dramatic increase in organizational complexity.

SETTLEMENT AGGREGATION IN THE IROQUOIAN WORLD Aggregation was a deeply rooted cultural phenomenon in northeastern North America. Large occupation sites with dense artifact distributions situated by lakes or major rivers appear in the later Early and Middle Woodland periods. Most scholars believe that they were used by seasonal aggregations of bands (Spence, Pihl, and Molto 1984) and facilitated heightened social relations, including the exchange of marriage partners, information, and materials, and allowed for communal ceremonialism. These interactions may have led people to value a greater degree of sedentism, later made possible by the growing of food surpluses. The earliest Iroquoian communities, occupied around AD 1000 to 1300, were base camps for groups practicing a limited amount of horticulture and following a semisedentary settlement-subsistence pattern (Williamson 1990). Early Iroquoian settlements were small, covering approximately half a hectare, and were occupied intermittently for as long as 50 to 100 years, resulting in settlement patterns composed of multiple, overlapping structures commonly surrounded by a single-row palisade (cf. Kenyon 1968; Timmins 1997). Population estimates for these communities are in the range of 75 to 200 people, leading Trigger to suggest that they may have developed from similarly sized Middle and Transitional Woodland territorial band aggregations (1976: 134). Sites are found in regional clusters that appear to have been occupied by two or more contemporary communities that shared a common resource base. Ceramic design sequences and decorative motifs differed between clusters and were more similar within them (Williamson 1990). Over time, populations seem to have increased their investment in village sites and their surrounding areas and drainages, which may have led to a greater concern for the maintenance of social and territorial boundaries. The transition to agriculture was gradual for Early Iroquoian populations, who continued to practice a semisedentary way of life until about

Organizational Complexity in Ancestral Wendat Communities 157 AD 1300, when we see the appearance of sedentary village life, full-time dependence on maize cultivation, integrative social practices, and distinctive material culture that is, for the first time, consistently “Iroquoian” in character. Villages and houses increase in size, and settlement plans exhibit less rebuilding and structural change (Dodd et al. 1990). The settlement patterns of a number of well-excavated fourteenth-century villages, including the Uren (Wright 1986), Myers Road (Williamson 1998), and Alexandra sites (ASI 2008; Birch and Williamson 2013: 30) indicate the amalgamation of two or more previously distinct communities. The reasons proposed for this initial aggregation have included localized warfare based on a substantial palisade at the Uren site (Wright 1986: 62), although evidence for widespread hostilities during this period is limited (Dodd et al. 1990: 357–358; Williamson 2007), and population increase and regionalization in the early fourteenth century resulting in rapid culture change (Pearce 1996; Warrick 2008: 181–185). That change involved, at least in some regions, agricultural intensification. Detailed isotopic analysis of human remains from the late-thirteenth-century ancestral Wendat Moatfield ossuary, for example, indicates that, for at least one generation, maize comprised 70 percent of the diet. The intensification of agricultural production and consumption may have been a necessary, albeit temporary, response to population concentration within a newly amalgamated settlement (van der Merwe et al. 2003). There was a great deal of variability in the size and structure of villages occupied between AD 1300 and 1450. Some villages were comprised of single clusters of three or four aligned longhouses, other sites contain two or more clusters of houses, while others contained less structured house groups (Birch and Williamson 2013). For the most part, villages were not palisaded, although some contained internal fence lines or the strategic placement of longhouses, which effectively set apart or separated segments of the community. Some fourteenth-century sites may have been inhabited by as many as 400 to 500 individuals, suggesting that there may have been the need to develop more formal mechanisms of social and political organization. The relatively large size of some fourteenth-century longhouses, together with their alignment into house clusters, has been interpreted as indicating the beginnings of formal matrilineages and clan organization (Engelbrecht 1985: 174; Trigger 1985: 92–94; Warrick 2000: 439–440). Village councils may have been necessary to coordinate decision-making functions in some settlements; however, the variable nature of site size and spatial organization suggests that while communities may have been linked within networks of interregional interaction, the development of community life was a multilinear, differentiated process. Unlike the regional clustering of material culture traits in the Early Iroquoian period, there is a relatively homogeneous distribution of material culture on fourteenth-century sites in southern Ontario (Dodd et al. 1990; Warrick 2000: 441; Williamson and Robertson 1994). This may have been the result of the

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emergence of segmented matrilineal clans practicing village exogamy and a heightened degree of interregional interaction. The development of new mechanisms for integrating and ordering social segments within communities and facilitating ties between regional populations include semi-subterranean sweat lodges (MacDonald and Williamson 2001), an elaborate smoking pipe complex (Smith 1992), and ossuary burial (Williamson and Steiss 2003). During the late fourteenth to early fifteenth centuries, population growth and increasing social circumscription continued to transform the lower Great Lakes region. Gary Warrick’s demographic history of the Wendat and their neighbors, the Tionontaté (Petun), demonstrates that between 1330 and 1420, the population of south-central Ontario increased from approximately 10,000 to 24,000 persons (Warrick 2008: 141–142, 182). This demographic surge resulted in larger villages, group fissioning, and the establishment of new villages, together with migration of groups from south-central Ontario north into Simcoe County—historic Huronia—and east into the Trent Valley. This “population explosion” (Warrick 2008: 181) appears to have ultimately played a role in the coalescence of ancestral Wendat populations on the north shore of Lake Ontario. In the early fifteenth century, village sites on the north shore of Lake Ontario more than doubled in number and began to cluster along the major drainages flowing southeast into Lake Ontario, foreshadowing the large community aggregates that formed during the next half-century.

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY COALESCENCE AND CONFLICT From the mid-fifteenth through the early sixteenth centuries, Northern Iroquoian societies experienced a period of rapid and widespread settlement aggregation that corresponds to increasing evidence for violent conflict and regionalization representing the initial development of “tribal” groupings or nations. In many ways, these processes reflect Stephen Kowalewski’s formulation of coalescent societies (2006), but at a scale which has led us to refer to them as coalescent communities. While these phenomena appear to have occurred throughout the Iroquoian world, there is evidence that settlement aggregation began somewhat earlier in south-central Ontario than in New York State or the St. Lawrence Valley (Birch and Williamson 2013: 21, 159). On the north shore of Lake Ontario, where we have a relatively complete picture of the precontact settlement landscape, dozens of small early-fifteenth-century villages came together to form a smaller number of large, heavily palisaded settlements. They include the Parsons (Williamson and Robertson 1998) and Damiani sites (ASI 2012a; Birch and Williamson 2013: 39) on the middle and upper Humber River, the Keffer site on the Don River (Birch and Williamson 2013: 36; Finalyson et al. 1987), and the Draper site on West Duffins Creek (Finlayson 1985) (Figure 8.1). All of these sites have been fully or partially

Organizational Complexity in Ancestral Wendat Communities 159

Figure 8.1 Map of the north-central shore of Lake Ontario indicating key sites mentioned in the text.

excavated and show evidence of village expansion whereby palisades were dismantled and extended to incorporate additional clusters of longhouses, thought to represent previously distinct villages. We consider them formative village aggregates because they represent initial sites of large-scale community coalescence. Warfare between neighboring or distant populations appears to have played a central role in these developments. The north shore of Lake Ontario contains some of the earliest evidence for violent conflict in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Parsons produced hundreds of pieces of burned human bone interpreted as evidence for prisoner sacrifice (cf. Williamson 2007), including two isolated crania that were morphologically similar to those buried in the Uxbridge ossuary located roughly 80 kilometers to the northeast (Dupras and Pratte 1998; Pfeiffer 1983). Parsons may have engaged in hostilities with that population, with other adjacent communities on the north shore of Lake Ontario, including Draper or Keffer, where significant quantities of human bone—including high percentages of skull fragments indicative of trophy-taking—were also recovered. It is also possible that

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communities on the north shore were engaged in conflicts with both distant and adjacent populations (Williamson 2007). As such, it may be that the increasing militarization of a few communities led to a cycle of raiding and retaliation that spread throughout the lower Great Lakes (Birch and Williamson 2013: 159–160). By the late fifteenth century, evidence for violent conflict is apparent throughout Iroquoia (cf. Engelbrecht 2003), and artifacts made of human bone, including human skull rattles, peak in the archaeological record at this time (Jenkins 2011; Williamson 2007). As we have discussed elsewhere (Birch and Williamson 2013: 160–161), once processes of settlement aggregation began in some areas, adjacent populations may have been compelled to follow suit or be displaced or absorbed by larger, more aggressive groups. By the early sixteenth century, for example, we see the displacement of at least two populations in southern Ontario. On the north shore of Lake Ontario, the occupants of the Don River Valley seem to have been displaced or absorbed by the larger communities forming to the west and east, in the Humber and Duffins Creek drainages. The lower St. Lawrence Valley was likewise abandoned, with distributions of St. Lawrence Iroquoian-style artifacts suggesting these populations were incorporated into the Trent Valley, the Toronto area, and the eastern Iroquois nations. It should be noted, however, that settlement aggregation was a strategy adopted by only some Iroquoian populations, particularly those ancestral Wendat groups on the north shore of Lake Ontario and the ancestral Onondaga and Oneida of eastern New York State (Tuck 1971). In some parts of western New York State and northern Simcoe County, Ontario, it would appear that the preference was to form clusters of villages located a few kilometers from one another, perhaps in an effort to avoid stressing local resources too quickly (Engelbrecht 2003: 113). Although without more extensive excavations of sites in both of these regions, these patterns are difficult to confirm. By the early sixteenth century, quantities of modified human bone on sites in south-central Ontario drop off sharply, suggesting the cessation or decline of violent conflict, possibly as a result of alliance building between consolidated community aggregates. On the Humber River and West Duffins Creek, at least two of these formative village aggregates remained intact into the sixteenth century through subsequent village relocations. Seed-Barker (Burgar 1993) on the Upper Humber River and Mantle (Birch and Williamson 2013) on West Duffins Creek exhibit highly organized settlement plans and do not show evidence of expansion, leading us to consider them consolidated aggregates that had undergone significant social and political integration (Birch 2012). While these trends characterize Iroquoian settlement trajectories during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it is clear that processes of settlement aggregation played out differently for each village based on their own unique historical contingencies, both in terms of the internal composition and the local and distant trade and social relationships of the communities that contributed to their formation.

Organizational Complexity in Ancestral Wendat Communities 161 COALESCENT COMMUNITIES: THE DRAPER AND MANTLE SITES The formation of community aggregates created larger coresidential populations that necessitated new means of regulating sociopolitical organization and economic production. An in-depth analysis of the well-excavated and analyzed Draper and Mantle sites provides unique insights into the challenges and transformations that accompanied coalescence for one specific community group. In the mid-fifteenth century AD, as many as eight small communities inhabiting the West Duffins Creek drainage came together at the Draper site (Finalyson 1985; Warrick 2008: 136–137). Ties engendered by the proximity of villages, their associated field systems, shared resource extraction areas and trail systems, kinship, intermarriage, and possibly trade and communal defense would have existed between early-fifteenth-century communities and likely influenced and helped to facilitate their amalgamation (see also Haggis; Rautman; Wallace and Lindeman, this volume). Intermarriage may have been a particularly important mechanism if these small villages were inhabited by single clan segments that practiced clan exogamy, as was the case for Wendat and Wyandot clans in the historic period (Tooker 1964: 126). The Draper site was fully excavated in the late 1970s, revealing the total village plan (Figure 8.2). Finlayson (1985) produced a detailed report of these settlement patterns. Unfortunately, the material culture analyses were undertaken separately and never fully integrated with the settlement patterns. Future reappraisals and syntheses of these data will be essential for untangling the complex relationships that existed between village segments and constituent household groups at the site. As described elsewhere (Birch 2012; Birch and Williamson 2013: 58–62; Finalyson 1985), following the construction of the original palisaded village core, the Draper site underwent a total of five expansions whereby new longhouses were constructed and the palisade extended around them. These multiple palisade expansions indicate that coalescence was not a one-time event. Instead, smaller communities joined the growing Draper village in a process of aggregation that unfolded over many years. As each new house cluster was added, they were deliberately constructed in such a way as to keep each group spatially distinct, even when it would have been more practical, in terms of the additional palisade that needed to be constructed, to arrange them parallel within the palisaded enclosure. Each house cluster also contains one or more “long” longhouses. Exceedingly long houses appear in the fourteenth century AD and reach their greatest length during the mid-fifteenth century (Dodd 1984; Warrick 1996). The development of very large longhouses may reflect rivalry whereby large households were those of prominent lineages who played important roles in guiding community affairs, although there is no archaeological evidence that some households were wealthier than others (Trigger 1990: 126). While there is no evidence for economic inequality in the precontact period, that

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Draper site, late fifteenth century

Mantle site, early sixteenth century

o

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Figure 8.2 Draper and Mantle site plans. Draper site plan reproduced from Finlayson (1985); Mantle plan shows the early phase of occupation.

does not preclude the fact that there may have been asymmetrical power relations between some individuals, lineages, or clans. It is known from the historic record, for example, that some lineages and their heads “owned” various trade routes and that permission and the provision of gifts was required to use them (Thwaites 1896–1901, 10: 223–225).

Organizational Complexity in Ancestral Wendat Communities 163 As the Draper village grew, the number of face-to-face interactions between village inhabitants would have increased, stressing the existing mechanisms regulating communication and interaction within coresidential populations (Dunbar 2011; Fletcher 1995). They also would have had to develop mechanisms for group decision making within the growing community. Relationships between community members, households, and larger social units such as clans and their representatives would thus have developed over time with repeated negotiations, which may have become more complex as new social groups were added. This was likely facilitated by the village council, with all of its attendant rules, rankings, and protocols. The small precoalescent villages may have consisted of single clan segments that had perhaps first formed at the turn of the thirteenth century with the first phase of coalescence. New councils would likely have had to accommodate headmen from each of these clan segments (see also Trigger 1976: 54). Warfare may have provided one means of ordering new village councils. It is known that warfare provided an avenue for young men to accrue prestige (Trigger 1976: 68–69; see also Birch 2010a; Snow 2007) and increase their influence in clan and village affairs. In historic Wendat society, a village council consisting of the civil headmen of clan segments appears to have met daily to discuss matters of public administration while other clan headmen were predominantly concerned with military affairs and relations between communities (Trigger 1976: 56–57). In that the raising of headmen was lineage- or clan-based, it is likely that women were influential in these decisions, although they did not attend the meetings (Trigger 1976: 55). There are no clear central places or obvious public structures or spaces at the Draper site; many of the open spaces or plazas identified by Finlayson were actually filled with extensive refuse deposits. The emphasis on retaining the spatial separation of longhouse groups, and that each contained one or more long longhouses, which Finlayson suggested were chief’s houses (e.g., 1985: 175–176; see also Thwaites 1896–1901, 10: 181), suggests that the inhabitants of each longhouse group retained distinct identities and sociopolitical functions within the formative aggregate. As such, the Draper site can be interpreted not as a single village community but rather as a settlement composed of multiple small communities sharing a palisaded enclosure and learning to live together. In this way, the physical aggregation of this community preceded its social integration. It was not until the next known iteration of the village plan that a new, integrated community identity materialized (Birch 2012; Birch and Williamson 2013: 61, 82). Based on their similar sizes, ceramic assemblages, calibrated radiocarbon dates, and agricultural field modeling, we believe that the Draper community relocated to the largely unexcavated Spang site around 1480 and then again to the Mantle site around the turn of the sixteenth century. The Mantle site was excavated in its entirety by Archaeological Services Inc. between 2003 and 2005. Its settlement plan and the materials recovered have been the subject of detailed analyses (ASI 2012b; Birch 2010b, 2012;

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Birch and Williamson 2013), making it one of the most-studied and wellknown Iroquoian village sites excavated to date. When the community that had previously inhabited the Draper site relocated to the Mantle site, there was a dramatic change in the structure of the built environment. The early phase of the village plan exhibits a preplanned layout with no obvious divisions or house groups. Instead, houses were arranged in a radial alignment, with parallel and paired rows arrayed around a single open area (Figure 8.2). This plaza area is a unique example of a clear central and public space on an Iroquoian village site. Cross-cultural comparisons of large public facilities in middle-range societies indicate that plazas commonly served as a context for both sacred and secular activities and fulfilled integrative functions (Adler and Wilshusen 1990; Lipe and Hegmon 1989; Rautman, this volume), encouraging communication between households and facilitating activities and events that would have been important in constructing a collective identity. In the historic period, the Wendat are known to have held regularly scheduled councils and regional assemblies, either in the cabin of the village chief or in the “midst of the village” (Thwaites 1896–1901, 10: 251). Houses 15 and 20 have been identified as the cabins of chiefly lineages. They are the longest on the site, and their high wall post densities indicate numerous rebuilding episodes, suggesting that they endured throughout the village’s occupation and may have been available for meetings and assemblies of the village council (Birch and Williamson 2013: 70, 83). While the egalitarian nature of decision making that is reflected in the seventeenth-century ethnographic record might be assumed for this earlier period, the actual council structure and the issues they addressed can be inferred on the basis of both the ethnographic and archaeological records. This has not previously been possible since the postcoalescent period has only now been illuminated, at least for this community, through extensive excavation and analysis. We imagine those issues to include the construction and maintenance of public areas and shared features in the village, economic production, and foreign affairs—issues that no doubt became a great deal more complex in the context of coalescence.

MANAGING MANTLE: PLANNING AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Public Building Programs—Construction and Maintenance In addition to the creation of a large public space or plaza during the first phase of the site’s construction, Mantle, like Draper and all other post–AD 1450 communities on the north shore of Lake Ontario, is surrounded by a formidable multirow palisade. The Mantle palisade was contracted twice. The contraction was evident since houses associated with the early village

Organizational Complexity in Ancestral Wendat Communities 165 were subsequently obscured or overlain by later phases of palisade construction and by a borrow trench that surrounded the third and final phase of palisade construction (Figure 8.3). In some sections there appear to be as many as seven rows of palisade posts, although this is the result of maintenance and successive phases of palisade construction as any more than three rows would have been unnecessary (Engelbrecht 2009: 180). Analysis of the settlement pattern indicates that the palisade complex consisted of more than 30,000 posts throughout the site’s occupation, a considerable effort with stone tool technology. In the historic period, houses were constructed by groups of men, with each lineage or clan segment responsible for its own (Wrong 1939: 78), although those village inhabitants who found themselves without houses were the beneficiary of communitywide work parties authorized and organized by council (Wrong 1939: 81). Men were also responsible for the construction of the village defensive system, including palisades and earthworks. The minute amount of human bone recovered from nonburial contexts at the Mantle site, however, suggests that the effort expended on palisade construction was not in proportion to the actual levels of violent conflict. The earliest phase of the village was surrounded by a palisade that was comprised of between one and four rows of posts and seemingly constructed prior to most of the houses. A section of the southeastern palisade was contracted soon after its initial construction to strengthen a particular weak area underlain by poor, gravelly soils. After the village had been occupied

Figure 8.3 Section of Mantle site settlement plan indicating three phases of palisade construction and borrow trench.

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for a decade or so, the palisade was entirely rebuilt. A trench was excavated around the palisade’s perimeter, the fill presumably used to create a strengthening embankment at its base. While any evidence for earthworks at Mantle was obscured by nineteenth- and twentieth-century plowing, the earthworks of one of the villages that succeeded Mantle survived into the twentieth century, resulting in its historic description as a ringed fort (Emerson 1954: 165). The construction of the site’s new palisade and earthworks would have required a significant investment of time and effort, with implications for the organization of space, access to the village interior, and the allocation of communal labor. The rebuilding of the defensive system, for example, required the dismantling of a number of structures and appears to have put a new premium on space within the village precincts. Over time, the plaza area was filled with new structures, resulting in the abandonment of the original village plan. While the chiefly Houses 15 and 20 and some associated structures retained their position on the highest ground, other longhouses were dismantled and relocated or repositioned. Many of the houses along the western side of the site were rebuilt entirely, whereas others were completely dismantled and new houses with different orientations built in their place. It would appear that this work program, at least in part, was necessitated by the departure of a community segment occupying the houses in the northernmost portion of the village. It is not clear what led to the departure of a substantial segment of the community’s population—on the order of the size of a precoalescent community—but it was coincident, whether as a cause or consequence, of the structural reorganization of the village. Whatever the reason, it points to the fragility of the community’s integration and also to the fact that while regional hostilities had led to coalescence, the absence of violent conflict presumably allowed for a negotiated new home for that particular community segment. All of these changes would no doubt have required substantial discussion among all the clan segments in the community. In the absence of coercion, however, clan leaders and their constituents must have been free to leave or stay; it is also possible that they were asked to leave. However it occurred, the impact of the palisade contraction affected houses throughout the community, and the new design must have originated with a council decision.

The Necessities of Life—Food and Clothing Once communities reached the size of Draper and Mantle, planning for village maintenance and relocation would have included ongoing assessments of present defensive fortifications, residences, agricultural field systems, and hunting and fishing strategies. While thousands of felled saplings and sheets of elm and cedar bark were constantly required for constructing and covering houses, their supply was likely coordinated with expanding agricultural fields due to ever-decreasing soil fertility. Hundreds of acres of new

Organizational Complexity in Ancestral Wendat Communities 167 agricultural fields would have been cleared, planted, tended, and harvested annually to provide the more than 1,500 pounds of maize required daily to feed the population. While substantial quantities of nonagricultural food were obtained through hunting, fishing, and gathering activities, maize was the most important component in the Wendat diet. There would have been considerable concern over crop failure, leading to the regular production of surpluses, which were also used to trade with northern Algonquians or other Iroquoian groups. Bean, cucurbit (squash), sunflower, and tobacco were also cultivated by the Mantle community. While the cultural geographer Conrad Heidenreich (1971) suggested maize contributed about 65 percent of the diet for the historic Wendat, initial isotope research suggested that the diet of most southern Ontario Iroquoians consisted of about 50 percent maize (Schwarcz et al. 1985). The degree to which maize contributed to diet would, of course, differ among various communities at different times depending on the pressures for intensification of production brought about by amalgamating populations (see Kowalewski, this volume). The isotope data recovered from testing a sample of loose teeth recovered from within the Mantle village and its associated cemetery were evaluated in the context of the established estimated food web fractionation of 13C and 15N (Pfeiffer et al. 2013; see also Birch and Williamson 2013: 95). It was estimated that maize comprised approximately 60 to 65 percent of the diet of the Mantle inhabitants, a value that, while consistent with other regional early-sixteenth-century Iroquoian sites, is higher than Middle Iroquoian or historic Wendat values. Heidenreich (1971: 162–164) suggested the Wendat were consuming about 1.3 pounds of maize per day per person at 65 percent of the diet. This figure was used to model the field systems for the precoalescent, Draper, Spang, and Mantle villages in the Duffins Creek drainage (Birch and Williamson 2013: 95–103). Using population estimates for those sites, Heidenreich’s basic model (1971: 189–195), and adjusting for soil regimes and steadily decreasing soil fertility in the immediate vicinity of the sites, climatic data, and modeling for surplus retention, we found that at its twentieth year of occupation, Mantle required 2,000 acres of maize, which entailed a walk of almost 2 kilometers to the edge of the field system. The precoalescent villages with populations of about 300 people required about 400 acres of fields with a distance to field edge of about 700 meters. The extended family seems to have been the primary unit of production and consumption, although in times of scarcity the harvest was shared with others in the clan segment and even the village (Heidenreich 1971: 168–171; Trigger 1976: 36). The fields appear to have been available to any family if they were not being used, since land was apparently common property (Wrong 1939: 103). Wendat women planted, tended, and harvested the corn and other crops. Men removed trees and brush from the fields with stone tools and by girdling and burning large trees. But with thousands of acres of

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forest to clear, it is clear that coordinated field clearance by work parties was necessary, a fact noted by Champlain (Biggar 1922–1936: 156). If unused land was cleared by work parties, it seems reasonable that decisions regarding agricultural field systems were subject to council authority. This would be especially true since scarcity and trade required the growing of surpluses on behalf of the entire population. This was thought by Sagard to be as much as 2 to 3 years’ supply (Wrong 1939: 103); the Jesuit Jean de Brébeuf claimed Huronia was the granary of their Algonquian neighbors (Thwaites 1896–1901, 8: 115). Clearly, in newly formed coalescent villages, where the distribution of foodstuffs was previously left to the individual family or small clan segments, these were substantial issues subject to considerable discussion and coordinated implementation. Moreover, with daily walks of 1 to 2 kilometers to fields, one wonders who had rights to the stillfertile fields closest to the village. While the agricultural field systems would have required the expenditure of significant effort at clearing forested areas by men and planting, tending, and harvesting crops by women and children, in addition to gathering wild plant stuffs, the subsistence system of the site inhabitants also included the exploitation of animal resources for meat protein, hides for the manufacture of clothing, and bone for making tools. Our analyses indicate that coalescence also required changes in decision-making processes related to the coordination of these activities. The faunal sample from the Mantle site was dominated by mammals (87 percent) with fish comprising 6 percent, birds 2 percent, and all other classes comprising 1 percent or less each (Needs-Howarth 2012; also Birch and Williamson 2013: 114–115). With regard to fishing practices, far higher percentages of fish bone have been documented in precoalescent villages on the north shore of Lake Ontario, ranging from 30 to 50 percent of excavated early-fifteenth-century assemblages (Birch and Williamson 2013: 106). Fish represented 8 percent of the animal bone from Draper and 6 percent at Mantle, indicating that fishing was not as important an activity for the aggregated community as it had been previously. Salmonidae (Atlantic salmon, lake trout, whitefish), identified mainly from their vertebrae, comprise about 50 percent of the identified fish remains and suggests that the fall lake fishery remained the focus of the community’s limited fishing activities. In the historic period, the fall lake fishery went on for about 2 months and involved a cooperative effort at the village level (Thwaites 1896–1901: 13: 115; 15: 57–59; 8: 87–89). As the Mantle fishery was carried out a distance of 30 kilometers from the site, it no doubt would have been coordinated by the village’s domestic council. Yet, despite the emphasis on the fall fishery reflected in the fish portion of the faunal assemblage, the mean nitrogen isotopic value of 10.5 taken on a sample of fourteen teeth from Mantle indicates that the contribution of lake fish to the diet of the Mantle inhabitants was minimal by comparison with earlier precoalescent north shore sites or later contact period

Organizational Complexity in Ancestral Wendat Communities 169 Wendat populations, which have significantly higher values, reflecting their historically recorded reliance on lake fish for protein (Pfeiffer et al 2013; Birch and Williamson 2013: 110). For some reason, these recently coalesced populations decided to expend their coordinated efforts in ways other than fishing. We suspect the draw away from their previous reliance on fish was the requirement for animal hides to provide clothing for 1,500 individuals. Where traditionally village hunters were accustomed to providing hides for 200 to 400 individuals, in large, aggregated villages, the numbers of hides and the hunting territories required expanded dramatically. While the mammal portion of the Mantle faunal assemblage contains twenty-three unique taxa, it is overwhelmingly dominated by deer (61 percent). Small mammals were present in insignificant numbers, and larger fur-bearing species were also targeted (Needs-Howarth 2012; Birch and Williamson 2013: 111–112), although none was well-represented in the assemblage. This pattern was also true for the preceding Draper site. The precoalescent sites, on the other hand, all have well less than 35 percent deer in the identified mammal component. The percentages of mammals, fish, and birds at Draper and Mantle are very similar but considerably different from earlier sites, where fish and small mammals dominate. From these data, it is evident that the focus in hunting strategies shifted considerably with the formation of aggregated villages. The hunting of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and wapiti (Cervus canadensis) by the site inhabitants for hides, meat, and bone for making tools, therefore, must have been one of the most important economic considerations and planned seasonal activities. In terms of the caloric contribution of deer meat to the diet, Heidenreich (1971: 163) estimated that deer represented about 6 percent of the caloric requirements of the historic Wendat, although the ethnographic record indicates that meat of any nature was rare in times other than during the fall seasonal hunt (e.g., Biggar 1922–1936: 126; Thwaites 1896–1901, 17: 142; Wrong 1939: 82, 106–107). This also may have been true for ancestral Wendat populations on the north shore given the probable scarcity of deer in the vicinity of villages and the competition for deer among neighboring communities. While deer are solitary for most of the year, they are found in larger herds groups in mast-producing forest in the autumn and winter, when they may congregate or “yard” in stands of white cedar. Their hides and antler would have been in better condition at these times of the year, and their weight would have been optimal for meat (see also Stewart 1991: 25). The historic Wendat certainly participated in fall and early winter deer drives or group hunts at some distance from their villages, with 400 to 500 individuals in one case (Biggar 1922–1936: 60–61) and 25 in another, the latter involving a deer surround that resulted in the capture of 120 deer over a 38-day period (Biggar 1922–1936: 83–86). Archaeological evidence of such a drive and camp was found at the Early Iroquoian Little site in southwestern Ontario, where

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a 17-meter-wide surround and blind was documented along with a feature containing 10,000 bones of at least eight deer (Williamson 1990: 314–316). In our attempt to identify the requirements for deer hides and the hunting territory of Mantle, we considered the estimated annual requirement for hides per family, the regional habitat for deer at the time of the site’s occupation, and estimates of their densities as well as the availability of other animal hides through hunting and/or trade to meet the requirements (see Birch and Williamson 2013: 113–120). To estimate the number of deerskins necessary to clothe a Wendat person, we examined descriptions of Wendat clothing and hide working by Champlain and gleaned insights into the hide requirements for manufacturing breeches, shirts, capes, and moccasins as well the use-life of those items from Morgan Baillargeon, a curator of Plains ethnology at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and David Christiensen, a historical reenactor. Hides were also required for the manufacture of tobacco pouches and game bags and for wrapping bodies or offerings at death (Thwaites 1896–1901, 10: 265–279; Wrong 1939: 59, 102), the latter of which they considered of paramount importance even to the detriment of their own warmth in cold conditions. For a family of four, it would seem that twenty hides per year were required. Michael Gramly (1977) had previously calculated that an average historic Wendat person would require three and a half hides annually for moccasins and clothing. Taking other uses for hides into account leads to an annual requirement of four and a half to five hides per person, which, for a population of 1,500 people, would require approximately 6,750 to 7,500 deer. Using an estimate of an annual requirement of 7,000 deer for the Mantle community and a relatively high density figure of 15 deer per square kilometer, after considering the environmental characteristics of the region in relation to past and present recorded and estimated deer densities and assuming a 35 percent predation rate to sustain populations (Bolstad and Gragson 2008), we concluded the Mantle occupants would have required 1,428 square kilometers of hunting territory. Visualized as an umland around the community, it would have a radius of 21 kilometers and would certainly have overlapped with the required deer territories of concurrently occupied villages on the north shore of Lake Ontario. Modeling the hunting territories of these villages using the watersheds within which the communities were located resulted in the realization that the hunting territories of these or their predecessor communities would have overlapped to the extent that coterminous occupation of Parsons, Keffer, and Draper would have been impossible without negotiated boundaries, as was likely true for the successor villages of Seed Barker and Mantle, despite the absence of an intermediate community in the Don Valley by the time of their occupation (see Birch and Williamson 2013: 118–120). Regardless of how the villages mediated these intercommunity tensions, the Mantle villagers would certainly have mounted several mass capture hunting expeditions each fall and early winter at some distance from their

Organizational Complexity in Ancestral Wendat Communities 171 village, likely involving hundreds of hunters. The absence of evidence of deer drives and their associated camps yielding large quantities of processed deer bone in the archaeological record of the north shore suggests they traveled some distance, perhaps northward to undertake these hunts to avoid encountering hunting parties from other villages. The Mantle occupants no doubt also traded shelled maize for hides with northern Algonquians, as the ethnography of the historic Wendat indicates.

DISCUSSION With the constant infrastructure program, agricultural system, and largescale hunting and fishing expeditions undertaken at some distance away from the Mantle community, the need for ongoing detailed administration and planning would have been considerable. Maize provided well over half of the calories to the community’s diet, constituting the major ongoing economic activity at the site. While modest overlapping of the field systems between sequential communities would have resulted in the most productive fields being closest to the new village, thereby reducing the initial land clearance at the time of village relocation, the planning involved in village relocations would have been enormous and an ongoing concern in that community members would have been well aware of the need to relocate the village once every generation. In that the trees felled in clearing fields would have been used in the construction and maintenance of houses and palisade walls and their limbs and branches dried and used for firewood, the planning for activities obviously overlapped considerably. While planting, tending, and harvesting crops for ongoing consumption may have been lineage-based responsibilities as recorded in the ethnography, planning for the production of surpluses for trade and times of scarcity would have necessitated coordination among different lineages and clan segments, particularly with aggregation into larger coresidential settlements. Sharing was clearly an equalizer for families experiencing economic difficulties and contributed to the importance of an egalitarian ethos underlying social and political organization, but the creation of surpluses was likely organized by a planning authority or council that exercised considerable influence. Once chosen from among the leaders in each clan, the councilors made and implemented the necessary decisions to manage a sophisticated economy. It should also be noted that, whereas the Draper site was characterized by numerous midden deposits located throughout the village, refuse at the Mantle site was channeled into a single hillside midden, indicating the ability of this population to implement, or at least adhere to, communitywide management strategies (Birch and Williamson 2013: 85). While competition for fields is unlikely to have been a contributor to intercommunity tension, overlapping hunting territories may have been. Once work parties cleared the necessary annual acreage to support the

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agricultural system, they no doubt turned their attention to fishing and, more importantly, acquiring sufficient hides through hunting and trading. Given the numbers of hunters required for mass capture methods, however, its coordination would have been undertaken by the planning and scheduling authority as other activities had to be undertaken concomitantly. Indeed, there would have been careful consideration given to leaving sufficient men behind to guarantee the safety of the village and surrounding fields and to carry on with other domestic activities such as infrastructure maintenance. This represents a substantial shift that involved transitioning from individual family or even lineage-based organization at the precoalescent community level to those organized at the coalescent community level through the formation of focused work groups of individuals from multiple lineages and clan segments. Daily village councils would have been required with members capable of reaching decisions in the absence of large-scale public consultation. Regardless of the success of the mass capture events, many hides would almost certainly have been acquired through trade either with other Iroquoian communities or with northern Algonquian bands in return for surplus maize. While this is a recorded feature of historic Wendat life, our modeling indicates that such trade must have been in place at least a century earlier. Those trading relationships and interaction networks would have contributed to a more diverse-looking material culture, possibly through the introduction of marriage partners or adoptees. Trigger (1990: 46–47) notes that visits from trading partners were occasions for several days of feasting, speech making, and the formal exchange of gifts. These exchange systems also would have been crucial in defining the routes by which European trade items first made their appearance in the lower Great Lakes Region. The recovery of an iron tool featuring Basque forge marks as well as two beads of European copper at Mantle (Birch and Williamson 2013: 149–152; Carnevale et al. 2012) probably arrived through the same routes with northern Algonquians via other Iroquoianspeaking groups inhabiting the St. Lawrence valley.

CONCLUSIONS Settlement aggregation in the late precontact Iroquoian world was prompted by a period of social upheaval caused by conflict and uncertainty. With the merging of several communities, it also would have been unsettling in the sense that coresidential communities would have necessitated the development of new social relationships and the creation, willingly or reluctantly, of a new community identity. One’s homeland also may have been attenuated by having to leave behind ancestral landscapes and moving northward into unclaimed land. All of these tensions may have been mitigated by the increasing importance of clans, which eclipsed household-based lineages in

Organizational Complexity in Ancestral Wendat Communities 173 structuring village governance and may have included efforts to attract new members from neighboring and distant communities. The structure of clan leadership allowed a means of moving forward where multiple communities with their own former leaders could participate in the selection of new clan leaders, who, in turn, would form and contribute to the village council. In this way, as organizational complexity increased at the village level, so too did the authoritative structure. The egalitarian, group-centered ethos described by Trigger’s model certainly characterized traditional values, which helped to maintain coalescent communities, but day-to-day planning authority also evolved with increasing economic complexity. Previous models of decision making, while based on the ethnographic accounts, have perhaps failed to recognize the importance of concepts such as work parties for clearing land or hunting parties of hundreds of individuals, all of which required detailed organization. In ignoring this complexity, we have been left with a sense of consensual management that perhaps masks the fact that leaders from all clan segments in the community met daily to manage these sites and that parallel structures were in place to address external tensions and trade. This, in our opinion, is a complex management structure and unlikely to have always been one of consensual decision making. While differences in wealth are not visible in the ancestral Wendat archaeological record, the ability to manage, direct, and implement successful construction programs and resource procurement and management strategies would no doubt have elevated certain individuals to positions of higher status. As such, we believe that the needs of aggregated settlements gave rise to both consensual and hierarchical social relations (cf. McGuire and Saitta 1996; Plog 1995). In this chapter we have focused on understanding how large, aggregated communities would have had to develop more complex organizational structures to obtain the necessities of life. Yet these same structures—clan segments and village councils—also would have needed to attend to the management of internal tensions, external relations, and even the relationships between humans and the supernatural realm to ensure the spiritual wellbeing of community members. Changes in the Mantle site settlement plan indicate that village life was dynamic. Organizational structures—social, political, and economic—were adopted, adapted, and, perhaps, abandoned not in a linear fashion but according to the changing needs and composition of the community.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to thank the team at Archaeological Services, Inc., especially Andrew Clish, Andrea Carnevale, Marty Cooper, Jonas Fernandez, John Sleath, Debbie Steiss, Aleksandra Pradzynski, Dave Robertson, and Rob

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Wojtowicz. Thanks also to Suzanne Needs-Howarth for her faunal analyses and discussions regarding hide procurement and to John Steckley for his insights on Iroquoian clans. REFERENCES Adler, Michael A., and Richard H. Wilshusen. 1990 Large-Scale Integrative Facilities in Tribal Societies: Cross-Cultural and Southwestern U.S. Examples. World Archaeology 22(2): 133–134. Alt, Susan M. 2010 Considering Complexity: Confounding Categories with Practices. In Ancient Complexities: New Perspectives in Precolumbian North America, edited by Susan M. Alt, pp. 1–7. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. ASI (Archaeological Services Inc.). 2008 Report on the Stage 3–4 Salvage Excavation of the Alexandra Site (AkGt-53) Draft Plan of Subdivision SC-T20000001 (55T-00601), Geographic Township of Scarborough, Now in the City of Toronto, Ontario. Report on file at the Ontario Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Sport, Toronto. ———. 2012a Report on the Stage 3–4 Mitigative Excavation of the Damiani Site (AlGv-231), City of Vaughan, Regional Municipality of York, Ontario. Report on file at the Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and Sport, Toronto. ———. 2012b The Archaeology of the Mantle Site (AlGt-334) Report on the Stage 3–4 Mitigative Excavation of the Mantle Site (AlGt-334) Part of Lot 22, Concession 9, Town of Whitchurch-Stouffville, Regional Municipality of York, Ontario. Report on file at the Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and Sport, Toronto. Biggar, Henry P. (editor). 1922–1936 The Works of Samuel de Champlain. 6 vols. Champlain Society, Toronto. Birch, Jennifer. 2008 Rethinking the Archaeological Application of Iroquoian Kinship. Canadian Journal of Archaeology 32: 194–213. ———. 2010a Coalescence and Conflict in Iroquoian Ontario. Archaeological Review from Cambridge 25(1): 29–48. ———. 2010b Coalescent Communities in Iroquoian Ontario. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, McMaster University, Hamilton. ———. 2012 Coalescent Communities: Settlement Aggregation and Social Integration in Iroquoian Ontario. American Antiquity 77(4): 646–670. Birch, Jennifer, and Ronald F. Williamson. 2013 The Mantle Site: An Archaeological History of an Ancestral Huron-Wendat Community. AltaMira Press, Lanham. Bolstad, Paul V., and Ted L. Gragson. 2008 Resource Abundance Constraints on the Early Post-Contact Cherokee Population. Journal of Archaeological Science 35: 563–576. Burgar, Robert W. C. 1993 The Archaeological Resource Management Program of the Metropolitan Toronto and Region Conservation Authority: The 1992 Field Season. Annual Archaeological Report, Ontario 4 (New Series): 58–62. Carnevale, Andrea, Ronald F. Williamson, Martin S. Cooper, and Jennifer Birch. 2012 Hidden from View: The Story of an Early Sixteenth Century Iron Tool in Eastern North America. Paper presented at the 77th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Memphis. Chapman, Robert. 2003 Archaeologies of Complexity. Routledge, London. Crumley, Carole L. 1995 Heterarchy and the Analysis of Complex Societies. Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 6(1): 1–5. Dodd, Christine F. 1984 Ontario Iroquois Tradition Longhouses. Archaeological Survey of Canada Paper No. 124, National Museum of Man Mercury Series, Ottawa. Dodd, Christine F., Dana R. Poulton, Paul A. Lennox, David G. Smith, and Gary A. Warrick. 1990 The Middle Ontario Iroquoian Stage. In The Archaeology of

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Organizational Complexity in Ancestral Wendat Communities 177 Stewart, Frances L. 1991 Faunal Remains from the Keffer Site (AkGv-14), a Southern Ontario Iroquois Village. Museum of Indian Archaeology Research Report No. 21, Museum of Indian Archaeology, London. Thwaites, Rueben G. 1896–1901 The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. 73 vols. Burroughs Brothers, Cleveland. Timmins, Peter A. 1997 The Calvert Site: An Interpretive Framework for the Early Iroquoian Village. Archaeological Survey of Canada, Paper No. 156, National Museum of Civilization Mercury Series, Gatineau. Tooker, Elisabeth. 1964 An Ethnography of the Huron Indians, 1615–1649. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 190. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington. Trigger, Bruce G. 1976 The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Kingston and Montreal. ———. 1985 Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s Heroic Age Reconsidered. McGillQueen’s University Press, Kingston and Montreal. ———. 1990 The Huron: Farmers of the North. 2nd edition (1969). Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York. Tuck, James A. 1971 Onondaga Iroquois Prehistory: A Study in Settlement Archaeology. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse. van der Merwe, Nikolaas J., Ronald F. Williamson, Susan Pfeiffer, Stephen Cox Thomas, and Kim Oakberg Allegretto. 2003 The Moatfield Ossuary: Isotopic Dietary Analysis of an Iroquoian Community, Using Dental Tissue. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22(3): 245–261. Warrick, Gary. 1996 Evolution of the Iroquoian Longhouse. In People Who Lived in Big Houses: Archaeological Perspectives on Large Domestic Structures, edited by Gary Coupland and Edward B. Banning, pp. 11–26. Prehistory Press, Madison. ———. 2000 The Precontact Occupation of Southern Ontario. Journal of World Prehistory 14(4): 415–466. ———. 2008 A Population History of the Huron-Petun, A.D. 500–1650. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ———. 2012 Ontario Archaeology and Bruce Trigger. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Archaeological Association, Montreal. Williamson, Ronald F. 1990 The Early Iroquoian Period of Southern Ontario. In The Archaeology of Southern Ontario to A.D. 1650, edited by Chris J. Ellis and Neal Ferris, pp. 293–320. Occasional Publication of the London Chapter of the Ontario Archaeological Society, London. ———. (editor). 1998 The Meyers Road Site—Archaeology of the Early to Middle Iroquoian Transition. Occasional Publication No. 7. Ontario Archaeological Society, London. ———. 2007 “Ontinontsiskiaj ondaon” (The House of Cut-off Heads) The History and Archaeology of Northern Iroquoian Trophy Taking. In The Taking and Displaying of Human Body Parts as Trophies, edited by Richard J. Chacon and David H. Dye, pp. 190–221. Springer, New York. Williamson, Ronald F., and David A. Robertson. 1994 Peer Polities Beyond the Periphery: Early and Middle Iroquoian Regional Interaction. Ontario Archaeology 58: 27–40. Williamson, Ronald F., and David A. Robertson (editors). 1998 The Archaeology of the Parsons Site: A Fifty Year Perspective. Ontario Archaeology 65/66. Williamson, Ronald F., and Debbie A. Steiss 2003 A History of Iroquoian Burial Practice. In Bones of the Ancestors: The Archaeology and Osteobiography of the Moatfield Ossuary, edited by Ronald F. Williamson and Susan Pfeiffer, pp. 89–132. Mercury Series Archaeology Paper 163. Canadian Museum of Civilization, Gatineau.

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Community Aggregation through Public Architecture Cherokee Townhouses Christopher B. Rodning

An aggregation is a collection of diverse components, such as a group of households, lineages, clans, or members of different ethnic groups. From an ecological perspective, an aggregation is a spatial arrangement of individuals within a species that is more concentrated and more clustered than a random dispersion. This chapter considers the role of Cherokee public structures (known as townhouses) as an “architecture of aggregation” for Cherokee towns in the southeastern United States. The period considered spans the centuries just before and after European contact, from the fifteenth through early eighteenth centuries AD (Figure 9.1; Boulware 2011; Dickens 1976, 1979, 1986; Goodwin 1977; Hatley 1993; Keel 1976; Marcoux 2010; Schroedl 2000, 2001, 2009). Townhouses were landmarks for towns (Schroedl 1978, 1986a; Smith 1979), they connected Cherokee towns to particular points within the southern Appalachian landscape (Riggs 2008; Rodning 2002b, 2010a), they created public spaces shared by local members of different clans and households, and they manifested community spaces in which the living and the dead—or, alternatively, descendants and ancestors within specific towns—were connected with one other (Rodning 2001b, 2011b). The shapes and sizes of Cherokee towns varied according to local topography and the numbers of households (from 10 to 60) and people (between 100 and 600) in them (Schroedl 2000), but within each Cherokee town was a townhouse that linked local households together as a community (Riggs 2008: 3). Cherokee towns were composed of matrilocal households, whose core members were members of one of seven matrilineal Cherokee clans (Gilbert 1937, 1943; Mooney 1900: 212–213; Perdue 1998: 41–59). Cherokee townhouses and adjacent plazas created spaces for public life within a community composed of people from many different clans and many different households (Gearing 1958, 1962; Persico 1979; Schroedl 1978). Townhouses as an architectural form were both permanent and portable, in that they rooted towns to specific points on the landscape, but when towns moved, they could anchor themselves to new places by building new townhouses. Archaeologists in the Southeast have focused less on the topic of aggregation than have archaeologists in other areas of the United States, especially

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Figure 9.1 Selected archaeological sites and Cherokee town areas in the southern Appalachians (after Rodning 2009a: 628, 2011b: 132). Sites that are known or thought to have townhouses are listed in italics: (1) King, (2) Ustanali/New Echota, (3) Ledford Island, (4) Great Tellico/Chatuga, (5) Mialoquo, (6) Tuskegee, (7) Tomotley, (8) Toqua, (9) Chota-Tanassee, (10) Citico, (11) Tallassee, (12) Chilhowee, (13) Kituhwa, (14) Birdtown, (15) Nununyi, (16) Ravensford Tract, (17) Tuckasegee, (18) Alarka Farmstead, (19) Cowee, (20) Joree, (21) Whatoga, (22) Nequassee, (23) Echoee, (24) Coweeta Creek, (25) Dillard/Old Estatoe, (26) Peachtree/Great Hiwassee, (27) Spike Buck/Quanasee, (28) Brasstown Valley, (29) Nachoochee/Echota, (30) Chattooga, (31) Keowee, (32) Seneca, (33) Chauga, (34) Tugalo, (35) Estatoe, (36) Garden Creek, (37) Biltmore Mound, (38) Warren Wilson.

the Southwest. Environmental changes, social conflict and instability, and widespread cases of site abandonment and community movement in the Puebloan landscape of the northern Southwest led to the development of large, socially diverse pueblos, for example. These developments shaped the development of plazas and kivas as integrative architectural spaces, and they shaped the formation of the pueblos that were present in the Southwest during the period of early Spanish contact, many of which have endured and are still present. Following episodes of environmental change, regional abandonments, and resettlements, ancestral Pueblo groups in the northern Southwest formed large, aggregated communities from the 1100s through the 1400s (Adler et al. 1996; Graves et al. 1982; Kohler and Sebastian 1996; Rautman 2000, this volume; see also Wallace and Lindeman, this volume). Architectural adaptations to aggregation in the Puebloan Southwest during this

Community Aggregation through Public Architecture 181 period include compact multistory room blocks, large outdoor plazas, and semi-subterranean ceremonial structures known as kivas. Plazas and kivas created venues for the forms of community interaction and ceremonialism that sustained community identity within conditions of geopolitical instability and environmental uncertainty. Within the Hohokam area of the southern Southwest, ballcourts and platform mounds were settings for integrative events in communities connected to networks of canals (Adler et al. 1996: 406; Craig 2007; Crown 1991; Gregory 1991; Hunt et al. 2005; Lindauer and Blitz 1997; Wilcox 1991). As settings for community events, ballcourts and mounds were enduring symbols of Hohokam community identity. These integrative architectural spaces materialized community relationships for Hohokam households residing near ballcourts and mounds, and at sites in surrounding areas. Townhouses and plazas at Cherokee settlements in the southern Appalachians were broadly comparable to Hohokam ballcourts in Arizona and the plazas and kivas at late prehistoric pueblos in the northern Southwest in the following respects. Hohokam ballcourts and plazas at pueblos in the northern Southwest were broadly accessible to many people, as were plazas in Cherokee towns, where large public events took place during the eighteenth century. Kivas are broadly comparable to Cherokee townhouses in that they were nonresidential structures and were settings for ceremonial events involving people from local communities. Clear architectural thresholds separated the spatial and social realms inside kivas and townhouses and the spatial and social realms of domestic life. Kivas were enclosed spaces and settings for events involving only some segments of Puebloan communities. Townhouses were broadly accessible to all people within Cherokee towns and visitors from other towns, but periodic events were accessible to smaller groups within those towns, and the single entryways to townhouses formed significant thresholds between the spaces inside townhouses and the outdoor spaces in adjacent plazas. Like kivas, townhouses and the fires kept inside townhouse hearths were visible manifestations of the vitality of the Cherokee towns surrounding them. The symbolism of Cherokee townhouses derived in part from hearths and burials in them and sequences of townhouses present at some sites. During consultations with Cherokee elders in western North Carolina during the late nineteenth century, James Mooney (1889, 1891, 1900) recorded many Cherokee oral traditions, some of which shed light on the cosmological significance and animate nature of townhouses (see Harrison-Buck 2012). One historical myth recorded by Mooney (1900: 395–397), entitled “The Mounds and the Constant Fire: The Old Sacred Things,” outlines ancestral practices of building earthen mounds and townhouses. First, a circle of stones was placed on the ground, and a fire was lit at its center. Burials of recently deceased community leaders were then placed in the ground. These burials and the artifacts placed in the ground with them were thought to protect the town and its townhouse against the threat of attack in the

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future. Then, a mound was built above the burials and the stones, creating a platform on which a townhouse was then built. The placement of the fire determined the placement of the townhouse hearth, and a male elder known as a firekeeper kept that fire burning constantly, throughout the life of the town. The fire in this hearth was the source of war fires transported by warriors on the war path and the source of new fire for hearths in household dwellings in Cherokee towns, and the “everlasting fires” kept in townhouses on large mounds such as Kituhwa and Nequassee may have been sources of fire for other Cherokee towns. This description of Cherokee townhouses emphasizes references to the past in public architecture, and there are archaeological parallels to these aspects of townhouses at several sites, including the Coweeta Creek site in southwestern North Carolina (Figure 9.2). The historical myth recorded by Mooney refers to hearths, burials, and earthen surfaces that were symbolic elements in Cherokee townhouses. The archaeology of late prehistoric and postcontact townhouses in the southern Appalachians demonstrates continuity in the placement of hearths and roof support posts; associations between burials and townhouses; and cycles of building, burying, and rebuilding townhouses in place. Townhouses represent an architecture of aggregation in that they were public structures that created common space for members of several clans and households. Another sense in which townhouses were an architecture of aggregation is that they brought together successive generations of towns and townhouses at particular points within the landscape.

LATE PREHISTORIC AND PROTOHISTORIC SOCIETIES OF THE SOUTHEAST Several historic Native American societies of the Southeast—including the Choctaws (Galloway 1994, 1995, 2002), Chickasaws (Atkinson 2004; Ethridge 2010), Catawbas (Merrell 1989; Moore 2002), and the myriad towns that comprised the multiethnic Creek confederacy (Braund 2008; Knight 1994; Smith 1987, 2000)—formed through the coalescence of different groups during the aftermath of European contact and colonialism in the New World (Ethridge 2006, 2009; Kowalewski 2006). Within the Creek confederacy, people spoke several Muskogean languages, and some Creek towns included people of diverse linguistic and geographic backgrounds. During the 1700s, if not before, the Upper Creek and Lower Creek town divisions formed, and factionalism developed within and between these groups with respect to trade, diplomacy, and warfare with Spanish, French, and English colonists. Eighteenth-century Chickasaw settlements in northern Mississippi can be traced back to the sixteenth-century chiefdom and province of Chicaza, which hosted and harassed the Hernando de Soto expedition in 1541 and 1542 (Johnson et al. 2008). Eighteenth-century Choctaw towns in Mississippi can be traced back to sixteenth-century towns in neighboring areas,

Community Aggregation through Public Architecture 183 but the Choctaw homeland, as such, may have been largely unoccupied during late prehistory and the 1500s (Carson 1999: 8–25; Voss and Blitz 1988: 133). Closer to Cherokee towns, some areas of the Savannah and Etowah valleys were abandoned during the 1400s (Anderson 1994; King 2003). Much of the Oconee Valley, in northern Georgia, was abandoned during the late 1500s, following Spanish entradas in the Southeast (Williams and Shapiro 1996). By contrast, archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence exists for continuity of settlement from late prehistory through the eighteenth century along the headwaters of the Savannah River, in northwestern South Carolina, southwestern North Carolina, and northeastern Georgia (Anderson et al. 1986, 1995; Hally 1986, 1994; Hudson 1986, 1997: 190–199, 2005: 94–109; Wynn 1990). Given the greater continuity of settlement in the southern Appalachians from late prehistory through the 1700s than elsewhere in the Southeast, there may have been less social diversity within Cherokee towns than in Catawba, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek towns. Still, several groups were represented within Cherokee towns, specifically households and clans. Most Cherokee towns, or at least large towns like Seneca, Keowee, Quanasee, Tanasee, and Chota, probably included people from all seven traditional Cherokee clans. These clans thereby created social ties connecting people from different towns (Perdue 1998), although there was no overarching mechanism of governance encompassing Cherokee towns (Persico 1979). The core members of Cherokee households were women belonging to the same clan, and clans structured domestic life and spatial layouts of Cherokee towns (Perdue 1998). Documentary evidence indicates that Cherokee townhouses during the eighteenth century were octagonal structures, with benches along seven walls for each of the seven clans, and the eighth wall reserved for the doorway that connected the townhouse to the plaza and domestic structures around the plaza (Anderson et al. 2010a: 34, 221, 264; Anderson et al. 2010b: 46, 145; Mooney 1900: 212–213). With these points in mind, and given connections between the fires kept in the hearths of townhouses and household dwellings, townhouses can be seen as an architectural form through which clans and households were aggregated within Cherokee towns (Chambers 2010). During the 1700s there were five major groups of Cherokee towns, including the Lower, Out, Middle, Valley, and Overhill settlements (Dickens 1979; Duncan and Riggs 2003; Goodwin 1977; Hill 1997; King 1979). Townhouses were present in each of these town areas, including some thought to have been built on earthen mound summits, such as those at Stecoe, Whatoga, Nequassee, and Cowee (King and Evans 1977; Waselkov and Braund 1995: 74–85). Earthen mounds are present at the likely sites of the Lower Cherokee settlements of Chauga, Tugalo, Estatoe, and Echota (the Nacoochee mound in Georgia), but no direct archaeological evidence exists of townhouses dating to the 1700s on these mound summits, partly because of modern disturbances of late mound stages. Other townhouses

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were built off mounds, including those at Overhill Cherokee settlements in eastern Tennessee, even the two sequential townhouses at Toqua, neither of which was built on the two late prehistoric earthen mounds at that site (Polhemus 1987; Schroedl 1978). Some of the largest known Cherokee townhouses date to the late 1700s, reflecting, probably, increasing numbers of people within Cherokee towns, as the total number of towns was declining (Schroedl 1986a; Smith 1979).

ARCHITECTURE AND EMPLACEMENT IN THE SOUTHERN APPALACHIANS Townhouses derive from a long tradition of public and monumental architecture in the southern Appalachians that includes platform mounds, large posts, and earthlodges. A Middle Woodland mound was present at the Garden Creek site (Chapman and Keel 1979; Keel 1976; Walthall 1985), along the Pigeon River, and the Biltmore mound near the French Broad River dates to the sixth or seventh century AD, within the Middle Woodland period (Kimball et al. 2010). Both mounds were built on top of earlier midden deposits, both were built in two or more stages, and both include fired floors. A very large, deeply set post was placed on the summit of the Biltmore mound, probably as a landmark for the setting of periodic rituals and social gatherings by small-scale hunter-gatherer societies (Kimball et al. 2010). These mounds and posts represent an early form of permanent, public architecture in the southern Appalachians, at the point at which permanent villages and monuments were forming in some areas of the Deep South (Pluckhahn 2003, 2010). Dating to the early second millennium AD, timber-frame earthcovered structures known as earthlodges were present at several sites in the southern Appalachians, including Garden Creek, the Beaverdam Creek and Macon Plateau sites in Georgia, and probably the Peachtree mound in North Carolina (Dickens 1979; Larson 1994; Rudolph 1984; Setzler and Jennings 1941). Earthlodges were settings for community events and rituals, and at Garden Creek, the collapsed remnants of paired earthlodges were covered with thick mound stages that created mound summits on which elite residences or temples were built (Ward and Davis 1999: 175–178). Sequences of platform mound stages covering collapsed earthen structures are present at the Tugalo and Chauga sites in northeastern Georgia and northwestern South Carolina, where, as at Garden Creek, structures were placed atop mound summits (Anderson 1994; Kelly and Neitzel 1961). Direct evidence of historic Cherokee townhouses is not present at the Tugalo and Chauga sites, nor at the nearby Estatoe and Nacoochee mounds, but it is possible that these mounds supported Cherokee townhouses during the 1600s and early 1700s (Anderson 1994; Duncan and Riggs 2003; Heye et al. 1918; Kelly and de Baillou 1960). Geophysical survey of the Kituhwa mound in the area of the historic Cherokee Out towns has revealed the remnants of one or more

Community Aggregation through Public Architecture 185 townhouses (Riggs 2008; Riggs and Shumate 2003). Although there have been no published reports of specific investigations of townhouses at Cowee, Nequassee, Nununyi, Birdtown, and Spike Buck, townhouses may well have been built on those mound summits, and perhaps even at Garden Creek (Dickens 1978; Duncan and Riggs 2003; Greene 1999; Waselkov and Braund 1995). Across the southern Appalachians, there is evidence for a sequence of public architecture spanning almost a millennium, from mounds and large posts from the first millennium AD, to earthlodges and platform mounds of the early second millennium AD, to the townhouses seen at archaeological sites from the period just before and after European contact in the Southeast. These architectural forms all marked community centers within the landscape, and they created settings for civic and ceremonial events. Late prehistoric townhouses are known from the Toqua and Ledford Island sites in eastern Tennessee (Koerner et al. 2011; Lewis et al. 1995; Lewis and Kneberg 1946; Polhemus 1987, 1990; Sullivan 1987, 1995) and from the King site in northwestern Georgia (Hally 2008). One of the mounds at Toqua includes a sequence of structures that spans the entire period of Mississippian settlement at the site. Some of these structures may represent elite residences rather than public buildings, but the forms of late prehistoric architecture at Toqua are clear precursors to townhouses, including the pairing of structures that is typical for many townhouses dating from the protohistoric period and the 1700s. Eighteenth-century townhouses at Toqua were octagonal, perhaps including seating for each of the seven Cherokee clans along each of seven walls, as described above (Riggs 2008: 44). Neither of the eighteenth-century Cherokee townhouses at Toqua were built on mounds, perhaps because those mound summits were not large enough to accommodate the large townhouses typical of eighteenth-century Cherokee towns (Schroedl 1986a), or perhaps because there was not a direct ancestral relationship between the late prehistoric town at Toqua and the Cherokee community situated at the site during the 1700s (Schroedl 1986b). Another late prehistoric townhouse has been found at Ledford Island, in the Hiwassee River Valley in eastern Tennessee (Sullivan 1987). A large structure—similar to domestic structures at the site but much larger than household dwellings—was situated beside a plaza. As many as five stages of this structure were built and rebuilt in place, probably during the late 1400s or early 1500s. There were clusters of burials beside the plaza but not directly beside the townhouse itself. A large post was placed in the middle of the plaza, perhaps representing a town post comparable to written accounts of posts beside eighteenth-century Cherokee townhouses (Schroedl 1986a). The pattern of a public structure, plaza, and clusters of burials mirrors the model for layouts of domestic architecture on a larger scale (Schroedl 1998: 84–85; Sullivan 1987; see also Cable and Reed 2000; Cable et al. 1997). Broadly similar patterns are seen at the King site in northwestern Georgia, dating to the sixteenth century, following early Spanish entradas in the Southeast (Hally 2008). A large public structure and clusters of burials were

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placed near the northern edge of a town plaza. The townhouse was built in a basin, and it was probably surrounded by an earthen embankment, composed of dirt removed from the basin when the structure was built. This structure is comparable to townhouses at both historic Cherokee and Creek townhouses. Nearby was a smaller structure that may have been a residence or a small public structure of some kind. The plaza was surrounded by domestic architecture and activity areas, and the entire settlement was enclosed by a log stockade and a ditch. A large post was placed in the plaza as a component of the public architecture and public space marking the symbolic center of the community. Public structures similar to the townhouses at Ledford Island and King are known from the Coweeta Creek and Chattooga sites—the former on the upper Little Tennessee River in southwestern North Carolina, the latter on the Chattooga River in northwestern South Carolina (Riggs 2008; Rodning 2002a, 2007, 2009a, 2010a, 2011a; Schroedl 2000). The Lower Cherokee town of Chattooga dates from the mid- to late 1600s until the 1730s, when several Lower Cherokee settlements were abandoned as many people moved west to Overhill Cherokee settlements in Tennessee (Baden 1983; Russ and Chapman 1983; Schroedl 1986a, 2000). The sequence of townhouses at Coweeta Creek date from the early to mid-1600s until the early 1700s, when this Middle Cherokee settlement was abandoned (Rodning 2008, 2009b, 2010b, 2011b; Ward and Davis 1999: 183–190). Not surprisingly, given the temporal overlap and the close proximity of these sites, there are many similarities in architecture and material culture at Coweeta Creek and Chattooga. On the other hand, there are some differences between the townhouses at these sites that are significant to the consideration of Cherokee townhouses as an architecture of aggregation. Each of the five stages of the Chattooga townhouse was square with rounded corners, comparable to domestic structures from this period. The first two of four superimposed townhouses at Chattooga ranged from 14 to 16 meters square, and each of these two stages had four major roof support posts around the central hearth. The third and fourth stages of this townhouse were 17 meters across, and this larger size necessitated eight major roof support posts around the hearth. The growth of the Chattooga townhouse (presumably reflecting the growth of the town) and the shift from four to eight roof support posts replicates the pattern seen at the eighteenthcentury Chota-Tanasee site in Tennessee (Schroedl 1986a). Beside the main Chattooga townhouse was a covered pavilion, roughly 4 to 5 meters wide by 12 meters long. This pairing of structures replicates the pairings of “winter townhouses” (square, octagonal, or round) and “summer townhouses” (rectangular pavilions or ramadas with roofs but not walls) at eighteenthcentury Chota-Tanasee, Mialoquo, Toqua, and Tomotley (Baden 1983; Russ and Chapman 1983; Schroedl 1978, 1986a). Beside the townhouse was a plaza, covered at least partly with gravel, and discrete areas representing household dwellings were located around the plaza.

Community Aggregation through Public Architecture 187 townhouse

earthen embankment

pits

later entryway

10 feet 3 meters

plaza ramada

Figure 9.2 Early stages of the townhouse at the Coweeta Creek site in southwestern North Carolina (after Rodning 2009a: 642, 2011b: 140).

At least six stages of a winter townhouse and an adjacent summer townhouse were built and rebuilt in place at the Coweeta Creek site (Figure 9.2). This history of building and rebuilding the townhouse in place formed a mound composed of the burned and buried remnants of those townhouses, its central hearth and roof support posts, deposits of white clay and river boulders near the entryway to late stages of the townhouse, pits that may have contained ashes and embers removed from the townhouse hearth, and burials placed both inside the townhouse and outside its entryway (Rodning 2001a, 2009a, 2011a, 2011b). Each stage of the Coweeta Creek townhouse was broadly comparable to its successors and predecessors—square with rounded corners, with a central hearth kept in place throughout the sequence, and an entryway along the southeastern wall or at the southernmost corner or of the structure. The first stage of the townhouse was built in a basin, and the presence of paired entrance trenches for the entryway is evidence that the townhouse was surrounded by an earthen embankment (following Hally 2008: 68–78). The original structure was built with its corners facing the cardinal directions—not unlike the alignment of the four

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corners of the earth island in the Cherokee cosmogonic myth, “How the World was Made” (Mooney 1900: 239–240)—and the original entryway was placed in the middle of the southeastern wall. The angle of the original entryway was slightly adjusted, and in later stages of the Coweeta Creek townhouse, the entryway was placed at the southernmost corner of the structure, although its alignment paralleled the original doorway. Given references to thin earthen coverings on historic Cherokee townhouses, and the presence of earth and daub between successive floors of the Coweeta Creek townhouse, it is likely that the roof of the Coweeta Creek townhouse was built with some amount of earth, perhaps in addition to bark and thatch (see Dickens 1976: 100–101; Hally 2008: 92–96; Schroedl 1986a). The first four stages of the Coweeta Creek townhouse were roughly 14 to 15 meters square, and the fifth and sixth stages were slightly larger, at about 16 meters square. Although there were some changes from the first to last stage of the Coweeta Creek townhouse, each stage referenced the placement and alignment of its early stages, and, indeed, each stage was built directly atop the burned and buried remnants of its predecessors. Not only were burials placed in the ground when the first townhouse was standing—or perhaps even before it was built, following the account of traditional townhouse construction in the Cherokee historical myth, “The Mounds and the Constant Fire” (Mooney 1900: 395–397)—but successive stages of the townhouse itself were buried in this architectural sequence. One characteristic that sets the Coweeta Creek townhouse sequence apart from other archaeological examples of townhouses—including those at King, Ledford Island, and Chattooga—is that there are burials inside and beside its early stages (Figure 9.2). Burials at the northern edge of the King site plaza probably were placed there in reference to the townhouse and plaza (Hally 2008), like the concentrations of burials on opposite sides of the plaza at Ledford Island (Sullivan 1987), but at Coweeta Creek, burials were placed in areas between the townhouse entryway and its hearth, between the hearth and the back wall, and outside the townhouse along the path of movement into and out of the entryway (Figure 9.2). Some burials are associated with the eighteenth-century Chota-Tanasee townhouse (Schroedl 1986a), but not as many as those in the Coweeta Creek townhouse (Rodning 2011a), and there are no burials associated with the Overhill Cherokee townhouses at Toqua, Mialoquo, and Tomotley. Most burials inside the Coweeta Creek townhouse were situated between the entryway and the hearth, creating associations between these burials and movement into and out of the townhouse. The burials just outside the Coweeta Creek townhouse were placed on both sides of the original and later entryways, flanking paths of movement into and out of the townhouse. Moving from the plaza into the townhouse, and moving from the townhouse to the plaza, made spatial references to these burials and the ancestors buried within them. Of the burials at Coweeta Creek with grave goods—including shell beads, shell pendants, knobbed shell pins, smoking pipes, and chipped stone

Community Aggregation through Public Architecture 189 projectile points—most are situated inside or beside the townhouse (Rodning 2001a, 2011b; Rodning and Moore 2010). This pattern may reflect, at least in part, mortuary practices marking achieved or ascribed statuses of adults (O’Shea 1984), and ascribed or associative statuses of children and adolescents (O’Shea 1996: 20). Based on his experiences living in Cherokee towns during the early eighteenth century, the South Carolina trader Alexander Longe wrote that grave goods were buried with the deceased so that the dead could give them to ancestors in the afterlife (Corkran 1969: 26–27). In the Cherokee myth, “The Mounds and the Constant Fire” (Mooney 1900: 395–397), several artifacts—including glass beads with specific colors—are said to have been buried with the recently deceased community leaders whose burials were placed in the ground before a fire was lit and a townhouse was built above them. The version of this myth recorded by James Mooney also indicates that a priest would “conjure” these offerings so that they would protect the townhouse and the town in the future. With these points in mind, the burials and the grave goods in early stages of the Coweeta Creek townhouse may represent sacred possessions of the town and cultural deposits that connected successive stages of the townhouse and successive generations of the community. Such connections are also manifested in the hearth inside the Coweeta Creek townhouse, which was kept in place from its first through last stages. “The Mounds and the Constant Fire” refers to the fire that was lit when a townhouse was first built, the male elder chosen to keep that fire burning constantly in the townhouse hearth, and the presence of everlasting fires in the mounds of large Cherokee towns such as Kituhwa and Nequassee (Mooney 1900: 396). This continuity is evident in the consistent placement of the Coweeta Creek townhouse hearth from its first to last stages. Alexander Longe wrote that the Cherokee did not allow fire from townhouse hearths to be taken out of those townhouses, except when ashes were removed from townhouse hearths during periodic rituals and placed in carefully selected places outside townhouses (Corkran 1969: 36–37) and when fire was taken from townhouse hearths to rekindle the fires in household dwellings (Mooney 1900: 396). Like burials associated with early stages of the townhouse, grave goods in them, and burned and buried remnants of several stages of the townhouse itself, the hearth in the Coweeta Creek townhouse formed a tangible connection spanning several generations of the town. As evident at Coweeta Creek, Chattooga, and Ledford Island, townhouses experienced cycles of birth, life, death, and renewal, in the form of periodic burning, abandonment, burying, and rebuilding. This architectural cycle created an aggregation of sorts, in that it brought together remnants of past and present generations of a town at a single point. This cycle is clearly evident at Coweeta Creek, where burials of people were encompassed within the townhouse mound, along with remnants of the townhouse, its hearth, and deposits of clay and boulders along at least one edge. At Ledford Island

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and King, burials were placed in discrete areas within plazas rather than inside and beside townhouses themselves, but, nevertheless, burials were placed within public spaces at these towns. That is not the case at Chattooga, where no burials have been identified inside or beside the townhouse. The spatial pattern at Coweeta Creek of a townhouse, an adjacent ramada or pavilion, concentrations of burials, and an adjacent plaza replicates the spatial pattern of protohistoric Cherokee households represented by sites in the Brasstown Valley, along the upper reaches of the Hiwassee River in northern Georgia (Cable and Reed 2000; Cable et al. 1997). Within the Brasstown Valley are several discrete loci with square structures paired with rectangular ramadas, domestic activity areas, and concentrations of burials nearby. No archaeologically known townhouses exist in this area, although it is possible that dispersed households in the Brasstown Valley did maintain a public structure and community center of some kind. The spatial model of domestic structures in the Brasstown Valley is comparable to Ledford Island, where public architecture and public space were differently scaled manifestations of domestic architecture and domestic space (Schroedl 1998; Sullivan 1987). The same architectural template was applicable at the scale of a household and at the scale of a larger community. The townhouse and plaza at Coweeta Creek housed the local community as a whole, and membership within that town may have included households residing at other sites in surrounding areas (Baker 1982). The seventeenthcentury Alarka Farmstead site, for example, includes a winter house and a summer house for a single Cherokee household, which probably maintained an affiliation with a town and townhouse nearby (Shumate et al. 2005). Several discrete loci within the Ravensford Tract, in the area of the Cherokee Out towns, probably represent dwellings of households who were members of the Cherokee town centered at the nearby Nununyi mound (Greene 1999; Webb 2002). The basic architectural template of Cherokee households— winter house, summer house or ramada, domestic activity area or plaza, and cemetery—created the venue for public life within a town and a landmark to the presence of a town within the landscape.

CONCLUSIONS Townhouses created attachments between Cherokee towns and particular points in the southern Appalachian landscape, in both synchronic and diachronic dimensions. They were settings for events and symbolism that connected local households and members of different clans within a community. Townhouses also demonstrate “temporal aggregation” in that they brought past and present generations of towns together at single points within the landscape. At the Coweeta Creek site, this temporal aggregation is manifested in several forms, including burials placed inside and beside early stages of the townhouse, continuity in the placement of the hearth and

Community Aggregation through Public Architecture 191 roof support posts, and the accumulation of burned and buried remnants of successive stages of the townhouse (Rodning 2009a). Burials were placed near the townhouse at the sixteenth-century King site, but, although this structure was probably burned down, it was never rebuilt (Hally 2008). At other sites, such as Chattooga and Ledford Island, there were no concentrations of burials inside or beside townhouses, but evidence does exist for architectural continuity spanning several generations of those public structures (Schroedl 2000; Sullivan 1987). At the eighteenth-century ChotaTanasee site, the second townhouse was built directly atop the remnants of the first, and several burials—including of Oconostota, one of the most influential leaders from the Overhill Cherokee towns—were placed in the ground outside the entrance (Schroedl 1986a). From these perspectives, townhouses were both permanent and portable. Townhouses anchored towns to particular points in the landscape, especially in cases in which there had been cycles of burying and rebuilding townhouses in place and in cases in which burials were placed in the ground inside and beside these public structures, as at Coweeta Creek. Townhouses could have been built wherever towns chose to build them, and they probably were, as towns moved from one locale to another. Several Lower and Middle Cherokee towns are known to have relocated to the Overhill Cherokee settlement areas of eastern Tennessee during the 1700s (Baden 1983: 11–17; Boulware 2011; Russ and Chapman 1983: 18). During the late 1700s, the Cherokee town of Ustanali moved to a location near the confluence of the Oostanaula, Conasauga, and Coosawattee Rivers in northern Georgia, and from 1825 to 1838, this site was the location of New Echota, the capital of the Cherokee Republic, whose principal landmark was a large townhouse (de Baillou 1955; Smith 1992). The site of Toqua may provide another example of the phenomenon of community emplacement through constructing a townhouse at a new location (Polhemus 1987). Townhouses were built at Toqua during the eighteenth century, but not on the summits of late prehistoric mounds at that site (Schroedl 1978), perhaps because the people of the eighteenth-century town of Toqua were not direct descendants of the late prehistoric residents of the site. Another possible example of such movement and emplacement is the case of the Lower Cherokee town of Chattooga, which abandoned its location in northwestern South Carolina during or before the 1730s (Schroedl 2000: 216). If the Lower Cherokee town of Chattooga represents the same group of people as the Overhill Cherokee town of Chatuga (Mooney 1900: 536), which appears on maps dating to the 1750s and later (Smith 1979: 56), it was necessary for this town to emplace itself in its new location by building and maintaining its own townhouse. The town of Chatuga was located adjacent to the Overhill Cherokee town of Great Tellico, and, although people of these distinct towns lived within the same stockaded settlement, fortified against the threat of enemy attacks, each town kept its own townhouse (Mereness 1916: 111–112; Mooney 1900: 533; Persico 1979: 93; Smith 1979: 56–57). The

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case of spatially aggregated but sociopolitically disaggregated settlements of Great Tellico and Chatuga is not common in the history of Cherokee towns (Boulware 2011: 77). The location of this conjoined settlement, at the western edge of the Overhill Cherokee settlement areas in Tennessee, distant from English settlements in Carolina but relatively close to Creek towns and French colonial outposts, offered both risks of exposure to Creek warriors and others allied with French interests as well as opportunities of pursuing trade with French colonists (Boulware 2011: 78). Perhaps each town shared common interests in these opportunities while sharing common needs for defense. These aggregated but separate towns chose to maintain distinct sociopolitical configurations, perhaps because of the importance of separate community histories and identities, rooted in separate townhouses. During the course of the eighteenth century, Cherokee townhouses tended to increase in size, and in related trends, there were shifts from townhouses with four major roof support posts to eight, and shifts from square to circular or octagonal structures. Increasing townhouse size was probably related to increasing numbers of people within individual Cherokee towns, as people moved from one town to another in the aftermath of European contact and colonialism in the Southeast (Schroedl 1978, 1986a, 2000). Larger townhouses enabled more people to gather for town council deliberations and other events. Changes in shape were probably related to changes in size, as the architectural template of townhouses was expanded to accommodate more space and more people (Rodning 2011b). These changes in Cherokee townhouses enabled aggregations of larger and more diverse groups than those present in late prehistoric and protohistoric Cherokee towns. Aggregations are composites of distinct components. Townhouses were architectural settings that enabled aggregations of matrilocal households and matrilineal clans as towns. During the early nineteenth century, and perhaps earlier, sections of seating were reserved for members of different clans inside townhouses, thereby incorporating clans as one mode of Cherokee social organization and spatial organization within the architecture of a town as a whole (Chambers 2010; Gearing 1962: 21–24; Persico 1979: 93; Riggs 2008: 44; Schroedl 2001, 2009). There were no overarching geopolitical frameworks above the level of towns during this period, and within those towns, leaders had neither ultimate authority nor coercive powers (Perdue 1998: 55–56; Persico 1979: 92–95; Smith 1979). Even in situations in which towns advocated war, warriors could choose not to participate (Gearing 1962). Households and clans could choose not to abide by decisions made by towns and town councils, and such groups could choose to move to other towns if they so desired. In this context of egalitarianism and decentralization of community leadership, townhouses were important architectural symbols and important venues for social and political aggregation at local scales. This consideration of Cherokee townhouses focuses on different scales of integration than other cases of aggregation and social coalescence in

Community Aggregation through Public Architecture 193 Native North America (compare with Beck 2009; Birch 2008, 2010; Davis 2002; Jenkins 2009; Kowalewski 2006; Perttula 1992; Rautman, this volume; Shuck-Hall 2009; Vehik 2002). Townhouses were not developed specifically to create architectural spaces for socially disparate groups such as those in aggregated pueblos of the late Pre-Hispanic Southwest (Adler et al. 1996). Nor were the southern Appalachians characterized by the same degrees of conflict, displacement, movement, and amalgamation as were the cases of Iroquoian villages in the Northeast and Caddoan groups in the southern Plains (Anderson et al. 1986; Perttula 2002; Warrick 2000, 2008). By the eighteenth century, several Native American groups in the Southeast moved to new locations and new regions, including cases of Lower and Middle Cherokee towns moving to the Overhill settlements. At that point, townhouses were symbols of community identity in the changing cultural landscape of the Native American Southeast. The significance of this architectural form was derived from its long history as an architecture of community aggregation, connecting local households to a town and a place, and connecting the present to the past through the placement of burials inside and beside townhouses, continuity in the settings of townhouse hearths and roof support posts, and the practice of burying and rebuilding townhouses in place.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks for encouragement from Bram Tucker, Steve Kowalewski, David Hally, Mark Williams, Charles Hudson, Rob Beck, David Moore, Brett Riggs, Gerald Schroedl, Lynne Sullivan, Jon Marcoux, Tony Boudreaux, Robbie Ethridge, Bennie Keel, and Hope Spencer; thanks to Jayur Mehta and Bryan Haley for help with manuscript preparation; and thanks to Jennifer Birch for bringing us all together for this book and the symposium that started it. Any problems with this chapter are my responsibility.

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10 The Work of Making Community Stephen A. Kowalewski

History is full of events, but we have the sense that some were more significant than others. Some events reset the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. Each case study in this book describes a particular episode of extraordinary cultural production, not just cultural reproduction—although that is well documented here, too—but remarkable cultural innovation in which people took social life in new directions. People invented or recast institutions, keeping and revitalizing some and discarding others. In many cases these transformative events altered the course of cultural evolution. In late precontact Ontario, the Wendat created what might be called longhouse societies that were committed as never before to intensive agriculture and deer harvesting (Birch and Williamson, ch. 8). Haggis tells of a massive and “purposive redirection” about 600 BC in which people created new sodalities and completely remade the architecture of the public and private spaces of their town on Crete (ch. 4). Duffy et al. (ch. 3) demonstrate three important things about episodes of aggregation—that they affect life at every scale from the neighborhood to the region, that coming together into more nucleated settlements might have different causes and functions (security, exchange) depending on the wider world, and that institutions that integrate people can be quite different (ritual practices and spaces in the Late Neolithic but not in the Bronze Age). Wallace and Lindeman reach similar conclusions from their research on a very different cultural tradition, Hohokam of the first and second millennia in southern Arizona, in a context where cooperation in canal irrigation was a necessity and integration through centralized architectural facilities was minimal (ch. 7). In contrast, people invested a great deal in creating hierarchical religion at the ruling towns on the shores of Lake Titicaca in the first millennium BC. The new regime was an expression of redefined communities and intense interaction among leading “social houses” (ch. 5). Rodning also focuses on central or public architecture, not to show sudden transformation but to describe how Cherokee actively sought to symbolize community integration, in which the townhouse was an anchor of continuity even as people moved

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about in the politically turbulent sea of the fifteenth- to eighteenth-century Southern Appalachian region (ch. 9). The Neolithic (sensu lato) was a time of enormous cultural creativity generally, and particularly at those moments when people were drawn, within a generation or two, into settlements larger and more tightly packed than had ever existed before. In the Puebloan Southwest, as people came together into larger settlements, they invented a new religious cult (the kachinas), and they used structural repetition in dwellings and village to define and express the new and proper way to live (Rautman, ch. 6). Çatalhöyük is a justifiably famous, sudden (and long-lived) aggregation, the village a dense honeycomb of similar, small dwelling spaces. In chapter 2, Düring suggests how the Çatalhöyük people might have organized themselves in the seventh millennium BC. Although from the archaeology we do not know what people thought and said, in many of these episodes the actors probably said rather precisely and fully what they wanted to achieve and how they were going to do it. In real social life there would have been many opinions not always in accord, and consequences unintended or unimagined. From our point of view, we cannot know what the actors were saying and thinking, a fact we should keep in mind lest we oversimplify or misrepresent their world. But we do have one advantage—whatever it was that they wanted to make happen, it is we who came later who can know how things worked out in the long run. In this chapter I suggest some main themes and add in a small way to the substantial contributions the authors have made in the preceding chapters. Reflecting on what the contributors and editor Jennifer Birch have said, it seems to me that these and similar episodes of aggregation, reorganization, innovation, and institution building must have called for unusually great amounts of work on the part of all sorts of actors—in many cases, virtually everyone. These transformations required social labor in the twin senses of the productive, material work to provide economic needs and wants and the time and energy it takes to talk over controversial issues and create that social power or momentum to have people do one thing rather than other things and to make community. The rest of this essay considers the social labor of coming together. First, I take up how aggregation changed how people made a living. I think rapid aggregation was a strong influence on economic intensification and sometimes even plant and animal domestication. Next, as many of the chapters show, people designed, constructed, and used new kinds of buildings for new activities and ideological representations. I want to suggest how the social labor of building is itself part of the process of forming enduring institutions. I conclude by reflecting on the work it takes to make community, in light of recent discussions of labor process theory, which has been an on-again, off-again thread in Marxist scholarship. Labor process theory has a useful lesson to contribute to our archaeological task, but I also think that the

The Work of Making Community 203 archaeologists writing in this volume have something to say about history and the long term that would broaden and thereby improve the discourse of labor process scholars.

MAKING A LIVING When many people aggregated rather suddenly in one settlement for more than a season or so, they had to make adjustments in how they got their food and other material necessities. This applies to most of the cases in this book. It was a consequence that the actors themselves undoubtedly knew quite well ahead of time. With more restricted spatial range, their responses were often more work in processing, more storage, different technological means, more labor input per unit area of land, larger and more organized forays to distant procurement grounds, narrowing of the food spectrum to a more limited set of high-volume resources, or some combination of strategies. In other words, aggregation required labor, land, or resource intensification. In most of the cases in this book, aggregation and intensification occurred not just at one isolated village but as a regional process involving all settlements. This larger-scale intensification affected localities in ways not predicted from strictly local ecological conditions. In the Puebloan Southwest and in Ontario and New York, rapid aggregation led to the abandonment of dispersed settlement and broader-spectrum economies, which in turn required intensification and changes in the technological and social means of production. Labor was socially reorganized, often in corporate or collective directions. It would be interesting to know whether similar processes happened on the Hungarian Plain in the Late Neolithic, and with the founding of large Near Eastern Neolithic villages like Çatalhöyük. Other ethnographic and archaeological examples show that intensification with rapid aggregation is a common pattern. In Amazonia, Yanomami groups sometimes had to leave their old villages and establish new ones because of war. Ordinarily they grew plantains, the basis of the diet. But when Yanomami needed a crop quickly, they turned to a fast-maturing maize (Chagnon 1983: 76). Ferguson (1995: 50) says of this pattern, citing Chagnon and Lizot: “New labors are called for during wartime. Gardens may need to be established in more defensible locations; the choice of garden sites will be restricted by the need to keep them close to the village because vulnerability to ambush increases with distance.” Most groups in Amazonia favored bitter manioc as a dietary staple. But under Colonial pressure or warfare, some groups opted to flee deep into the forest. The time and equipment needed for processing bitter manioc was too onerous for small groups trying to flee and hide, so they tended to use plantains, and when plantain gardening was impossible, maize (Balée 1994: 4, 211; Ferguson 1995: 70–73). The intensity and type of food production varied with military or security conditions.

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Another historical case comes from Polynesia. “In Fiji . . . chronic warfare instigated a need to locate high yielding gardens adjacent to isolated and defensible settlements. The provision of staple crops for gatherings of warriors also stimulated agricultural intensification” (Kuhlken 1999: 270). Concentrated fields and harvests then would become a customary target for attackers. Kuhlken explicitly reverses Carneiro’s (1970) model of population pressure causing circumscription, war, and the state—making war the independent variable that concentrated people and made them farm differently. In Fiji the dates on fortified sites begin around AD 1200, and, once underway, the cycle of violence was apparently difficult to stop. War made people take to the hills and build ditches, ramparts, and walls. Around their fortified villages they farmed intensively: “drained fields and raised beds around ring-ditch forts on flat terrain, and irrigated terraces adjacent to ridgetop forts” (Kuhlken 1999: 275). Kuhlken cites figures of 5,200 hectares of raised gardens in the Rewa delta, which surround scores of old fortified villages, and in an inland situation, 325 hectares of hillside terraces around a complex of fortified villages and hamlets. With the gradual end of hostilities in the Colonial period, people abandoned these fortified hill complexes and the associated, intensively cultivated, fields in favor of dispersed settlements and less labor-demanding gardens on the open valley floors. Again, the intensity and type of farming depended on the conditions of warfare. In the New Guinea highlands, warfare played a major role in determining settlement type and the manner of agricultural production. The western part of the highlands is home to ethnographically famous groups such as Enga, Dani, Kapauku, and Arapesh. In the mid-twentieth century, settlements in this western area were typically dispersed, which favors pig raising and sago production, both female-dominated activities (Brown 1978). Males were involved in the network or finance strategies of the tee and moka ceremonials. These participants would often oppose violence and try to curtail it because it interfered with their tournaments of value (Blanton and Taylor 1995; Feil 1987: 49–52; Wiessner 2002). As Blanton and Taylor (1995) pointed out, in this case it was men’s “network strategy” for prestige accumulation (not war) that was the road to pig domestication and yam intensification. In contrast, in the eastern New Guinea highlands, east of Chimbu, among such groups as the Chuave, Sina Sina, and some in the Asaro Valley, “total” warfare was more common, settlements were larger and often fortified, and there were more abandoned areas so population density was lower. Some of the villages had 1,000 or more people. This eastern area had open, grassy land and less forest (Brown 1978: 99–109, 193; Feil 1987: 49–52, 70). Eastern social groups tended to stress home production rather than finance production—the corporate strategy (Blanton et al. 1996; Feil 1987: 52). Tuzin’s study of Ilahita (2001) shows how, in a strategic response to warfare, a new, unusually large town emerged as a physical settlement and as a powerful sociopolitical group. The town was a center of intensive

The Work of Making Community 205 yam cultivation. Yam growing here had what would have to be called a prodigiously male emphasis. Pataki-Schweitzer (1980) published excellent photographs and drawings of eastern highlands settlement clusters, which he calls bounded complexes, consisting of hilltop hamlets, ringed by a few square kilometers of intensive gardens, and some less-intensively used area. Typically a bounded complex had several hundred people. These bounded complexes were highly localized foci for yam intensification. Roscoe offers a general model of warfare, settlement, and production in highland New Guinea that stresses both village formation and social group formation. In his words, “the formation and reproduction of Sepik villages were motivated primarily by defensive concerns with the threat posed by surprise attacks at night” (Roscoe 1996: 649). But defense raised certain problems with production, which ordinarily was maximized with dispersed settlement. A consequence of larger village formation was greater emphasis on agriculture, where agricultural production provided more staples than sago processing, hunting, gathering, and fishing. Roscoe also notes the increased importance of intervillage trade for staples where larger villages were involved. It is interesting that male prestige could be furthered by pursuing those economic activities especially significant for measuring group strength. He says, “the gifts of shell wealth and pigs through which men also manifested their ‘strength’ were symbolically represented as metaphoric spears thrown at metaphoric enemies. . . . The threat of attack, then, not only compelled village formation but also furnished an evaluative framework within which men were judged” (1996: 661). Institutions of intervillage exchange were ways of measuring the competition in peer–polity rivalry. During the first millennium AD in eastern North America and on the Plains, dispersed populations practicing hunting and gathering and some horticulture were the norm (see Gremillion 2002 on subsistence variation). In the Middle and Late Woodland periods (first millennium AD), maize was widespread but not a major component in the diet anywhere. For example, Middle to Late Woodland Kansas City Hopewell (Adair 1988: 72–76), the Ohio and central Mississippi Valleys (Johannessen 1993a), and Kolomoki (Pluckhahn 2003) on the Gulf Coastal Plain all had some corn. Nasseny and Cobb (1991) review the spatiotemporal variation of more and less intensive maize use in the Southeast, but neither in these studies nor in other reviews (Anderson and Mainfort 2002) is sudden aggregation for warfare or other reasons considered as a factor in the degree of intensification or maize use. Maize had been around for centuries, but it did not bring about the “full Neolithic Revolution.” I suggest that instead of accumulated environmental or demographic change leading to the formation of larger villages, political growth, and subsistence change, the reverse happened—aggregated villages pushed subsistence intensification and more maize use. After roughly AD 900 in eastern North America, we see larger villages, more warfare, and more maize. When people aggregated into larger

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villages, these often had defensive features. Community ritual evidence suggests redefinition of local social groups. In the central Mississippi Valley, increasing use of corn in the 800s was linked to changes in community form and village size, where “individual communities are well-defined circular compounds of small houses with open central plazas” (Johannessen 1993b: 190). On the Middle Missouri, settlements of the Plains Village tradition were larger than Woodland sites, and they were often fortified. Middle Missouri villages have broad lists of plant and animal species, but, as Toom says, among the plants, it was “maize, maize, maize,” and for the animals, it was “bison, bison, bison” (Toom 1992: 163, 171). Oneota settlement in Wisconsin, compared to the local Late Woodland, was more clustered in agriculturally prime areas, more concerned with defense, and sites were larger and more permanent. Nearby are the remains of ridged fields (Sasso 1993). For the southern Plains, Vehik (2002) has shown the close connection between conflict, aggregation, and intensified long-distance trade, especially after AD 1200. As Scarry (1993) has pointed out, there were differences in the timing of maize adoption in eastern North America. In the American Bottoms of the Mississippi Valley and in the Black Warrior Valley in Alabama, maize production preceded the formation of hierarchical polities. But in the Toltec area in Arkansas, maize did not become important until after such polities were established, so aggregation in itself did not always lead to more maize farming (e.g., Rollingson 2002). After AD 1000–1100, corn was important everywhere, although nuts and starchy seeds continued to be important dietary components in some regions. Why wasn’t maize exploited sooner? Anderson and Mainfort (2002: 17–18) have a list of speculations on the negative side. They say “in its initial form maize may not have been well suited to the temperate climate, or else people had not learned to care for it effectively” (2002: 17; similarly, Reber 2006). But there are other proposals for why people did shift to corn. Scarry argues that it wasn’t climate change, new varieties of maize, or population pressure that forced the adoption of maize, but intersocietal prestige competition, with its feasting on the food of the gods (Scarry 1993). Another political hypothesis is Benn’s (1995a, 1995b), in which in Late Woodland circumscribed societies, “elite” or kin group “authority figures” had to increase production and maintain their power by getting people to work harder. These are interesting proposals, but they are faulty because they imply an assumed or unexplained miraculous conception and boom of aggrandizer babies, a sudden appearance of prestige-driven individuals who had power to command, when this had not happened before in the previous thousands of years. In contrast, rapid, large-scale aggregation, because of violence or exchange in the general sense, which we know occurred in some places, could have been a crucial proximate factor causing people to intensify. Whatever the causes of the shift toward maize farming, these causes must operate at an appropriately large spatial scale and rather sudden temporal

The Work of Making Community 207 scale. A cycle of warfare has that capacity to affect very large areas quickly. As in Roscoe’s (1996) model for highland New Guinea, dangerous times would have forced aggregation for war, for which appropriate social and technological modes of production had to be adopted. Food production had to be locally intensified near nucleated villages. Maize farming was a good possibility for intensification. Local group size would be influenced by requirements for offense and defense and the labor mobilization for maize and conventional food production. This local and regional group reformation may have been the context for the political change envisioned in Scarry’s and Benn’s explanations cited above. Since these processes are systemic, it is fair to ask this question: If war was behind settlement nucleation and the adoption of maize, then what brought on the warfare? A review by Lambert (2002) discusses environmental change, population pressure, and technological innovation, especially the bow and arrow, as possible causes of what she sees as an almost continentwide increase in warfare in North America after AD 1000 or 1200. I think these climatic, demographic, or technological factors, alone or together, are undemonstrated as explanations for the initiation of a widespread, uncontrollable cycle of war. In any case, a specific trigger is not nearly so significant compared to the problem of why existing Woodland social institutions could not suppress costly—and, at least to many people, undesirable—violence. This focus on social institutions is I think the central contribution of Raymond C. Kelly’s book Warless Societies and the Origin of War (2000). When we ask why people began warring at the beginning of the Mississippian period, we ought to attend to the prior and the new social institutions. A model explaining the late adoption and intensification of maize farming in eastern North America as a response to warfare, or conceivably as part of a transformation of exchange, seems a viable alternative to climatic, technological, carrying-capacity models. To expand on Rautman’s theme in chapter 6, with some examples from later periods (Pueblo III and IV) on the Colorado Plateau, in general people aggregated into large villages and towns; nearby, they carried out intensified maize and sometimes cotton agriculture. Conflict was a major reason behind the demographic concentration (Gregory and Wilcox 2007). People at the ancestral Hopi towns at Homo’lovi, in northern Arizona, produced cotton and maize using the floodwaters of the Little Colorado River (Adams 2002). The historic Hopi villages also had to develop techniques for intensive farming under dry conditions (Bradfield 1971). At San Marcos Pueblo, a large Pueblo IV village in the Galisteo Basin of New Mexico, farmers developed large areas of pebble-mulch gardens (Lightfoot 1993; see Briggs et al. 2006 for the Perry Mesa area; Fish et al.1992 for the Classic Hohokam Marana community). The Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico was the most densely settled region of the Southwest at the close of the fifteenth century, and its nucleated, large villages probably relied on canal irrigation, as did their descendants in historic times. Recent archaeological studies in the Pajarito

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Plateau region of the Rio Grande Valley suggest a general intensification of resource use beginning with major village aggregation in the fourteenth century (Kohler 2004: 296–299). Canal irrigation had been known for over 2,000 years on the Colorado Plateau, but its intensive deployment awaited the aggregated villages of the late prehistoric period. Three things are noteworthy about the widespread coalescence of Pueblo III and IV. First, the older type of agriculture of the Pueblo I and II periods was dispersed and extensive. Farmers sought out moisture in thousands of little “folds and creases,” as Lekson aptly put it (1991). Second, in terms of overall regional demographic performance and presumably total farming yields, the older, dispersed system was actually more productive—Colorado Plateau population peaked around the end of Pueblo II and then declined during the period of coalescence and intensification (Gregory and Wilcox 2007; Hill et al. 2004). Third, in the Hohokam area of southern Arizona, there is little evidence that “intensification under duress” was a factor. Hohokam populations developed canal irrigation early, and the irrigation systems of Preclassic and Classic times were extensive, labor-absorbing, and complex. Yet rural settlements were persistently dispersed, villages and towns were not very densely nucleated, and, for the most part, there is little evidence that warfare shaped the system (although hilltop trincheras [terrace] sites found in the southern Hohokam area and into Sonora may be an exception) (Doyle 1987). The Hohokam case is important because it shows that one can have intensification not provoked by threat of violence (and see Beck’s ch. 5, which notes that the sudden opening of new lands might have precipitated change in the agricultural economy). The diverse scholarly positions on the role of intensification in Europe have been summarized by Chapman (1990: 118–149). But only recently has there been much systematic attention paid to rapid aggregation brought on by warfare or other factors (Carman and Harding 1999; Gronenborn 2003; Monks 1997). Methodical study of variation in the intensity of production and warfare has yet to be carried out, but there are interesting possibilities, beginning from Neolithic times in the Near East to the Neolithic and Bronze Ages of the Mediterranean and Europe. Settlement nucleation in fortified sites must have been a major stimulus for agricultural intensification and trade in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages. A review of farming in Britain concludes that “in the first millennium [BC] less land was farmed much more intensively [than in prior times] while other land previously exploited was abandoned . . . and a marked intensification of effort and increase of population occurred in those places” (Fowler 1983: 78). For example, at Cranbourne Chase, the remains of field features are abundant around Iron Age enclosures (Barrett et al. 1991). Collis (1982) describes how oppida and earlier hill forts would become multifunctioned central places. Many of the Iron Age enclosures were centers of production as well as defensive and residential sites. Long-distance trade was often a prominent function. The link between large, fortified settlements and

The Work of Making Community 209 especially intensive nearby agricultural fields is also seen in central Europe. In Late Hallstatt times in northern Poland, “the economy of the fortified settlements was based on specialized intensive farming, a kind of garden cultivation” (Kristiansen 1998: 298; see also Milisauskas 1978: 260–287). The same association of densely packed fortified settlements and “a highly refined farming technique” is made for Western Poland in Late Hallstatt (Kristiansen 1998: 298). One might imagine that collective political economies might draw people together in aggregated villages and towns for other reasons not necessarily involving warfare. Yet the costs of aggregation and intensification could often be high, so the reasons must have been compelling. The hypothesis would be that the people aggregated into large villages either because they were under the duress of violence or because the advantages of social life and material gain outweighed the costs of their intensifying animal and plant production, working harder, speeding up the artificial selection of domestication, and making investments in the technologies of harvesting, preparation, and storage. These cases from different parts of the world are not just particular historical or local anomalies. Where coalescence and intensification occurred, the events affected everyone over broad areas and across varied biomes. Iron Age European hill towns were important to early state formation and urbanization in Europe. In eastern North America, unusual aggregations, intensification, and warfare brought about the “full Neolithic” transformation of ca. AD 900. Coalescence made Southwestern Puebloan societies as they are known historically and ethnographically. It was not the case that aggregation into towns necessarily increased the volume or helped the efficiency of production. Dispersed settlement, by closely matching people to resources, can be highly efficient. The communities not so organized for war in New Guinea produced more pigs. As Smith (1978) pointed out, Mississippian settlement patterns were compromises between energetically optimal dispersal versus aggregation for boundary maintenance. The threat of war may force people away from prior efficiencies, and channel their efforts into producing items that previously had not been given much emphasis. Increased long-distance trade had been on my original list of coalescent society characteristics. Still I am struck by the prominence of long-distance trade in many of the cases reviewed here. New, fortified towns promoted novel kinds of production for trade. Trade was important in the organization and mobilization of labor, gender role redefinition, prestige motivations, and alliance building. Larger aggregations of people had those advantages of efficiency in scheduling, regularization, and specialization that typify central place systems. Most models for the origins of towns and for the origins of agriculture see their evolution as gradual or mechanical processes—that is, as accumulations of pressures, selective improvements in crops, a fortunate congruence of

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resources in particular places, or climate changes. The aggregation of people into larger villages and the increasing reliance on domesticates in such models is something that happened to people, perhaps as an unintended consequence of their foraging choices or as a consequence of environmental change. But the examples discussed here suggest that such processes can be sudden. Coalescence is a rapid transformation brought about by collective action, and this is a different path toward intensification than is contemplated in most models for agricultural origins or the evolution of agricultural technology.

BUILDING THINGS The studies here provide rich details about buildings, plazas, roads, and palisades, in terms of their materials, form, function, and style. Architecture is both expressive and archaeologically accessible. In every case study in this book, architecture was an important line of evidence regarding social integration. Sometimes this was domestic architecture, sometimes it was public, and usually the cases involved both domestic and other architecture. Actually the contributors are more careful about their terminology than I was in the last sentence. Consider, for example, these two contrastive sets of terms that we have used at one time or another to speak about buildings: [public, monumental, community, ceremonial, special function, elite, palace, temple, kiva] versus [private, residential, domestic, house, ordinary, commoner, household]. Obviously the terms in the first set and their counterparts in the second set do not precisely and exclusively categorize the form, function, and style of buildings in the real world. For example, buildings are rarely entirely public or entirely private, in regard to what groups of people built them, what people are permitted access and on what occasions, or who the building is said to belong to. Buildings are usually the estate of corporate groups that are some subset of society—household, town, sodality, family, and so on—not exactly public, not exactly private. Buildings belong to, and are the estate of, social groups. How these groups were constituted is a major theme in this volume. Similarly, as these contributions show, architectural function is rarely exclusive. Iroquoian longhouses and Northwest Coast big houses were domestic but also ritual and political places. Men’s houses might see ritual and political activities, but men make things, eat, drink, and sometimes sleep in them, so are they also domestic? In the course of doing regional surveys in Oaxaca I came to know one present-day community structure rather well—the palacio municipal, or town hall. Every municipality has one, and so does every subordinate village of a certain official standing. I have waited on the bench and met with officials and citizens in over 200 of these buildings. The palacio municipal is built, renovated, maintained, and cleaned by collective labor. It is the official site of town government, where officials

The Work of Making Community 211 meet and public assemblies are held. It is the lowest stage in the federal-statedistrict-town-village government hierarchy—and every level has its palacio. The palacio municipal is the symbol and place of authority, legitimate or corrupt. It is also a place of contention—the palacio can be “taken” by an opposition faction. It is office, archive, storage, repository of the symbols of local government; museum for basketball trophies, fossils, and historical artifacts; and jail for human and beast. It is a point of articulation between the community and outside agencies, officials, and visitors, and the porch is occasionally a place for the overnight traveler to sleep. It is a site of assembly for tequio (corvee labor) and political events. It is a place for secular and religious feasts. It has a formal garden, gazebo, plaza, clock, library, and basketball court. It is a point of community pride (or shame) since towns seem to build and renovate their palacio for competitive display. In the nineteenth century, the state assessed the monetary value of all public and church buildings (including the cemetery), and those lists still exist. The palacio municipal is a place for men to hang out. In the social halls on Crete (Haggis, ch. 4), in Iroquoian longhouses (Birch and Williamson, ch. 8), and in Cherokee townhouses (Rodning, ch. 9), highly formal speeches were made and heard, according to historical accounts from these traditions. Feasting, deliberation, status marking among attendees, and instruction were some of the other activities, many of which are not especially accessible archaeologically. Yet the activities that took place in these buildings must have been an important part of instituting coalescence. The social and material labor of construction is another key element not always susceptible to archaeological observation. Yet from an ethnographic perspective, the building project is an important first stage. Here I am referring to planning, concept, and all the deliberation, cajoling, disputation, pleading, arm-twisting, favors, eating, drinking, conviviality, motivating, and sheer social work that it takes to carry out a project in the face of competing goals and other activities and opportunities. All this before axe strikes tree, stone is levered from quarry, and sweat is broken, and then the same social work continues throughout the duration of construction. In other words, even before the building is put to use, its social group comes together. Prior to the inauguration, something important has already taken place. This point is made well by Rautman for the collective construction of pueblos (ch. 6). The standardization and construction as one event imply collective work, and collective work is the praxis, as Rautman says, according to a shared idea of what a pueblo should be as a physical structure and as a place in which to lead a proper life. In many cases, the template for that life was a set of conjoined room spaces each just like all the others, up-close and egalitarian. It is not easy at all to distinguish higher-status or founding families. In some cases, the floor and walls would not even give any indication of differentiation into main activity such as cooking, sleeping, storage, or visiting—all were alike as far as an archaeological excavation could tell. In a few cases, these pueblo blocks of nearly identical room spaces might have

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offered aggregating families a real estate agent’s selling point—the rooms might have been larger than those in which people had lived beforehand. That collective construction according to a shared concept of life together might also have benefits of efficiency in materials and labor, and that rapid construction in some instances might be a response to hostilities, could be other benefits, but for our purposes the central theme is the formation of the social group manifest in the labor process. The New Mexico example is reinforced by other studies in this volume. Birch and Williamson say that the whole village plan at Mantle came first, including the placement of longhouses within a palisade (ch. 8). Rodning describes the building of Cherokee townhouses (ch. 9). Haggis’s case is the very dramatic, complete makeover of the center of Azoria (ch. 4). In all these instances, the work of construction implies forming groups of people committed to a social project. What happens thereafter is another matter, for a building may or may not serve as originally intended, and might be done away with, as discussed by Beck in chapter 5, for example. Hohokam buildings were relatively small, especially in the Preclassic phases. Even in Classic times, compounds and platform mounds were smaller than, for example, Andean or Mesoamerican public buildings. Wallace and Lindeman (ch. 7) describe rather modest integrative architecture in the Martinez Hill locality on the Santa Cruz River in southern Arizona. The architectural modesty, however, has to be juxtaposed with the fact that the people here were already heavily committed to a larger collective endeavor—a major canal irrigation system that required the almost daily organized efforts of the inhabitants of multiple villages and hamlets. Hohokam canal irrigation systems themselves must have been the largest and most constantly demanding social projects that dwarfed the platform mounds and walled compounds. In our recent regional survey work in the Coixtlahuaca Valley in Oaxaca, Mexico, we found another example of integrative architecture of modest scale compared to other public works. In Coixtlahuaca, there were public buildings constructed on mounds, as is common in Mesoamerica. But their number and size are considerably less than in other areas, such as the Valley of Oaxaca. As in the Hohokam case, people’s labor was dedicated to agricultural works. Practically the whole Coixtlahuaca Valley was an artifact—a system of contour terraces and cross-drainage checkdams built and maintained by the constant labor of thousands of households. Recent studies of terrace building in the Mixteca Alta show that these works are the product of household efforts, and there is nothing about them that would benefit from or require centralized control (Pérez Rodríguez 2003). But these terrace systems still require a commitment to maintenance, for all participants in a whole drainage, because not terracing a part of a drainage or neglecting to maintain just a few terraces will quickly lead to gulleywashing that could easily endanger the whole system. As with Hohokam canal irrigation, Coixtlahuaca’s terraced landscape dates back to about the

The Work of Making Community 213 beginnings of village life. The demand for social commitment was constant and consequential.

THE LABOR PROCESS This book defines and explores the question of how people create the cultural means to “come together” or aggregate rapidly. The focus is on relatively small-scale societies, since limiting the inquiry sometimes facilitates understanding, but the results have broader implications. Why did people in some times and places quickly aggregate? Warfare was a factor in many instances but probably not in all, and in those cases where violence did encourage people to form larger groups, war might not have been the only reason for coming together. Larger groups of people living together can facilitate social and material exchange, within the community and abroad. Haggis’s chapter 4 on rapid aggregation on Crete at the end of the seventh century BC, involving urbanization and the formation of new states and constituent institutions, demonstrates this multifacted process of aggregation better than I can, and with the benefit of specific archaeological data on the particular case. Rapid aggregation implies purposive redirection of people’s time, energy, and resources. Redirection means that they did some things quite different from what they had done before. Who or what was doing the redirecting? It seems to me that in none of the cases in this book was this a matter of an authority or leader commanding that his will be done. For one thing, these archaeological cases all represent not singular events but situations in which the times were changing—that is, structure itself was undergoing transformation. Second, each of these cases represents transformation on a spatial scale far beyond the bounds of the broadest existing political authority. No Cherokee, Puebloan, or Hungarian Plain leader or polity had wide, pan-regional or enduring a power or influence. Third, most of these studies point to the instrumental role of new institutions that relied on broad, if not universal, commitment to collective action. Aggrandizing leaders might be able to co-opt some of these institutions after a time, when participants’ commitments to cooperation could begin to waver, but such cooperation is very difficult, if not impossible, for a leader to institute by decree. Often I hear logic such as this: “The ancient people built [a big mound, a road, anything large]. Therefore, it shows that they must have had a leader to tell them what to do.” This is a good candidate for the most anthropologically vapid and culturally biased syllogism in archaeology. Many things in society are not directed; they are carried out by the “hidden hand” of multiple actions. Other things are partly intentional and carried out by cooperative efforts in which the sum of the efforts is beyond the knowledge of any of the participants. Here, the answer to “who was doing the redirecting?” seems to be that there wasn’t “a leader” but that the purposive

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actions of many people resulted in major cultural change, some of which had unforeseen consequences. As I studied these contributions I was struck by how much physical and social work it took for people to build new communities and institutions, and I began to think about the work itself as an important component of community building. This reminded me of a phrase familiar from older Marxist literature—“the labor process”—which, as I remembered it, claimed that all the steps and actions in doing work (praxis) built, reproduced, and could change capitalist structure. Out of curiosity I checked to see if this line of inquiry was still active and quickly found that it was, in critical studies of education, philosophy, social psychology, and labor history. I make no attempt to summarize all the strands in this literature, but I did find ideas that resonated well with the project of this book. In particular, a theoretical and case-study paper by Paul Adler is relevant. Adler carried out ethnographic studies concerning the labor process in software-development firms in California. What struck me was how his relentless method of the dialectic led him to find in the labor process so many multifaceted, multiscalar (in our terms), and dissonant features: the “persistent, contradictory coexistence of [both] enabling and coercive features of modern organizational forms” (2006: 185). This “thick” ethnographic sense is a good lesson for archaeologists to bear in mind, lest we become too entranced by one-note sirens. For our case, community formation required more intensive, differentiated, and specialized work than had been the case prior to aggregation. In labor-process theory terms, as workers are drawn from local isolation into more globalized (for us here, community or regional) webs, tasks may become more demanding in skill and work discipline, and more technically and socially differentiated. “ [U]nder the impact of the progressive socialization of the forces of production, tasks become on average more complex, and there is a progressive differentiation of roles and increasing collaborative interdependence at various levels” (Adler 2006: 190). Whether all these things occurred in each of our cases could be confirmed or disconfirmed. We have seen that with aggregation, production and its work intensified. That is, attention focused on a narrower range of resources, became more land intensive, or became more labor intensive. I have in mind Wendat deer hunts and maize farming; Southwestern land-intensive farming and maize and cotton processing; olive, wine, and wheat processing in the Mediterranean; textile production, elaborate architectural construction, or other tasks requiring or favoring larger task groups or differentiated production processes. Such collective work raises issues that would be familiar to the labor-process theorists. These are matters that required time, energy, and attention on the part of the actors. How are task group members recruited and retained? Are task groups pressed to increase output, and how? What are the work rules? How are work and material contributions allocated and monitored? Since everyone can see what others are doing, how are differences in output reconciled, especially as skill levels and skill differentiation

The Work of Making Community 215 increase? How are workers fed and entertained? How are gains in productivity of gendered or age-set work groups balanced against participants’ individual and family interests? Not all motivation comes from individual interests; sometimes the collective labor process activates its own motivation, but that motivation needs to be created. How are pressures for hierarchy balanced or controlled by broader egalitarian interests? How is competition between groups (say, communities) reconciled with potential advantages of cooperation between them? What about struggles between individualizing, network-strategy forces (for example, fur trade and war glory in eastern North America and the Plains in Colonial times) and collective, egalitarian forces (tribal unity in the face of external threat)? The Marxist labor process approach could learn two lessons from the research presented here. One is that capitalism is not the only structure that differentiates labor or the only structure that creates dynamic and contradictory relations between the forces and the social means of production. Some of the same research questions asked about factory or software work can be asked fruitfully about work in the Neolithic; therefore, although capitalism is special in some ways, it is not special in these. So the theory has to be broadened and enlightened to take account of all the historical-ethnological register. Second, several of the case studies, including the Hungarian Plain and Hohokam, have long-term archaeological sequences in which there is more than one episode of aggregation—cycles, perhaps. This does not do much to shore up the nineteenth-century progress theory clung to by many Marxist scholars. In fact, the cycles raise new questions about alternative directions and multiple pathways in social evolution. Back to the question that Jennifer Birch asked of us: How did people come together, how did they rapidly and fundamentally alter their ways of life, in some cases almost every aspect of life? The blunt answer is that they created a lot of new culture, from materials on hand, and they created new institutions, many of which were collectivist. The process required extraordinary physical and social work. In retrospect, the results were episodes of extraordinary cultural creativity and change.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I sincerely thank Jennifer Birch and every one of the contributors for the privilege of collaborating with them on this project.

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Contributors

Robin A. Beck, Jr., is assistant professor of anthropology and assistant curator of North American archaeology, Museum of Anthropology, at the University of Michigan. He is author of the forthcoming book Chiefdoms, Collapse, and Coalescence in the Early American South and editor of The Durable House: House Society Models in Archaeology (2007). His articles have appeared in the journals Current Anthropology, American Antiquity, Ethnohistory, Latin American Antiquity, Southeastern Archaeology, and Native South. He has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Bolivia, Peru, western China, and much of the eastern United States. Jennifer Birch is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Georgia. She is the coauthor, with Ronald F. Williamson, of The Mantle Site: An Archaeological History of an Ancestral Wendat Community (2013). Her current research is concerned with investigating the development of organizational complexity in eastern North America. She also teaches and conducts research on the archaeology of communities, warfare, cultural resource management, and the intersection of archaeology and contemporary society. Her articles have appeared in the Canadian Journal of Archaeology, Archaeological Review from Cambridge, and American Antiquity. Paul R. Duffy is a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Michigan and has carried out archaeological fieldwork in Hungary and Romania. His research interests include social dynamics in middle-range societies, spatial and network analysis, and mortuary archaeology. He is director of the Bronze Age Körös Off-Tell Archaeology project and conducts research on Bronze Age settlement and cemetery contexts in Eastern Hungary. Bleda S. Düring is assistant professor in Near Eastern archaeology at Leiden University. His research focuses on Neolithic Turkey and early imperialism in Syro-Mesopotamia. He has recently published The Prehistory of

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Asia Minor (2011). Bleda is director of the Cide Archaeological Project, a survey in the Turkish Black Sea region. He was recently awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant for a project entitled Consolidating Empire: Reconstructing Hegemonic Practices of the Middle Assyrian Empire. Attila Gyucha is a research archaeologist and the managing director of the regional office of the Hungarian National Museum in Southern Hungary. In addition to carrying out large-scale cultural heritage management projects, he has been the co-director of the Körös Regional Archaeological Project since 2000, the coordinator of various other prehistoric international projects in Hungary, and a member of several archaeological research programs throughout the Balkans. His major interests include landscape and regional archaeology, ceramic analysis, and the study of various aspects of the Neolithic, Copper Age, and Iron Age in southeastern Europe. He has published extensively in international journals. Donald C. Haggis is professor of Classical archaeology and Nicholas A. Cassas Professor of Greek Studies in the Department of Classics and the Curriculum in Archaeology, and research associate in the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include settlement structure in the Aegean; the archaeology of Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Crete; and the post–Bronze Age development of early cities and small-scale states in the Aegean. He is director of the Azoria Project, an excavation of an Early Iron Age and Archaic site in northeastern Crete. Stephen A. Kowalewski, professor of anthropology at the University of Georgia, has research interests in Mesoamerica, the U.S. Southeast, and Southwest U.S./Northwest Mexico. He has collaborated on full-coverage, regional archaeological surveys in highland Oaxaca. Recent publications include Origins of the Ñuu: Archaeology in the Mixteca Alta, Oaxaca and “A Theory of the Ancient Mesoamerican Economy” in Research in Economic Anthropology. Since 2008 he has been conducting research in the Coixtlahuaca Valley (“La Presencia Azteca en Oaxaca: La Provincia de Coixtlahuaca” in Anales de Antropología). Michael W. Lindeman is a research archaeologist at Desert Archaeology, Inc. and has twenty-one years of experience conducting archaeological fieldwork and research throughout Arizona. He has also worked in Utah, New York, South Carolina, Vermont, Germany, and Belize. His interests include households, social standing, social roles, and craft economies, with a particular focus on the Tucson Basin Hohokam. He directed excavations at several major portions of the Valencia community in the southern Tucson Basin.

Contributors 221 William A. Parkinson is associate curator of Eurasian anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History and adjunct associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University. His research interests focus on the social dynamics of early agricultural villages and archaic states in southeastern Europe. He is American Director of the Körös Regional Archaeological Project in Hungary and American Co-Director of the Diros Project in Greece. Alison E. Rautman is associate professor in the Center for Integrative Studies at Michigan State University. Her long-term archaeological fieldwork in the Salinas region of central New Mexico focuses on issues of social and economic organization of early Pueblo society in the American Southwest, funded by research grants from the National Science Foundation, National Geographic, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. She has served as editor for the journal American Antiquity (2009–2012) and is currently planning new archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork on cultural landscapes in Salinas. Christopher B. Rodning is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. His interests include landscape archaeology, monuments, architecture, mortuary practices, and Native American responses to European contact and colonialism in the Americas, particularly in southeastern North America. In addition to his interests in the built environment of Cherokee towns, he is also collaborating with David Moore and Robin Beck in studying encounters between Mississippian societies and Spanish expeditions in the upper Catawba Valley and neighboring areas of western North Carolina. His papers have been published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, American Anthropologist, American Antiquity, Southeastern Archaeology, North American Archaeologist, and other journals and edited volumes. Henry D. Wallace is a senior project director with Desert Archaeology, Inc. and has thirty-two years of experience in the archaeology of the Hohokam region of southern Arizona. He developed refined ceramic sequences for the Tucson and Phoenix areas and has worked extensively on rock art sites in southern and central Arizona. He is best known for directing and reporting on large-scale excavations at the Hohokam villages of Los Morteros, Valencia Vieja, Julian Wash, and Honey Bee Village. Ronald F. Williamson is founder and managing partner of Archaeological Services Inc., a cultural resource management firm based in Toronto, Ontario. He holds a PhD in anthropology from McGill University and has published extensively on the precontact and colonial history of the Great Lakes Region. Recent publications include The Mantle Site: An Archaeological History of an Ancestral Wendat Community (2013), coauthored

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with Jennifer Birch; an edited volume, with Michael Bisson, honoring the lifelong work of Canada’s preeminent prehistorian, Bruce G. Trigger, entitled The Archaeology of Bruce Trigger: Theoretical Empiricism (2006). He also recently completed articles for Revista de Arqueologia Americana, the New Cambridge World Prehistory, and the Oxford Handbook on North American Archaeology. Richard W. Yerkes is a research associate in anthropology at the Field Museum, Chicago, and professor of anthropology at Ohio State University, Columbus. He received his BA in anthropology from Beloit College, and his MA and PhD in anthropology from the University of WisconsinMadison. He has 40 years of field experience in North America, Egypt, Cyprus, Greece, and Hungary, and more than seventy-five major publications on the transition to food production, ancient land use and settlement patterns, microwear analysis, craft specialization and social complexity, GIS applications in archaeology, and zooarchaeology. He is co-principal investigator and field director of the Körös Regional Archaeological Project in southeastern Hungary.

Index

abandonment: of regions 1, 7, 44, 65, 69, 138, 160, 180, 183, 204; of sites 3,44, 65, 68–9, 76, 81, 112, 117–18, 125–7, 134, 138, 146, 153, 180, 186, 189, 191, 204 Aegean 38, 63–5, 68, 81 Africa 1, 10, 36, 44 aggregation: definition of 3–5; 179; vs. nucleation 63, 65; temporal 190 agriculture 81, 98, 100, 134, 139, 147, 155–6, 167, 201, 205–9, 212, 214 alliances 50, 71, 89, 160, 209 Alt, Susan 154 Altamira site 3 Alto Pukara site 87–8; 90–1, 93, 95, 97, 106–8 Amazonia 1, 203 Anasazi 1 Anatolia 23, 33, 36, 38 ancestors 89, 97, 103, 104, 106, 137, 150, 177, 179, 180, 181, 188, 189; ancestral lands 82, 139, 140, 172 Andean societies 93, 212 animal resources 76, 100, 168–70, 206 Appalachian Mountains 180–5, 190, 193 Archaic period, Greek 63, 65, 69–83, 81 architecture 13–14, 44, 63, 70, 72, 111, 117–29, 142–4, 181, 186–8, 201, 210; domestic 79–80, 114, 129, 185–6, 190, 210; monumental 3, 72, 76, 78, 80, 87, 107, 184; public 14, 72, 75, 79–80, 87, 90–1, 121–3, 182, 184–6, 190, 201, 210; and ritual 14 48, 79, 87–9, 90–93, 101–3,

123, 134, 137, 181–2; and social integration 14, 77, 79–80, 106–7, 120, 127–9, 134, 164, 182, 186, 202, 212; and status 77, 93, 97, 106, 211; see also built environment; households; kiva; plazas Arizona 114, 134–48, 181, 201, 207–8, 212 authority 14, 88, 106, 168, 171–3, 192, 206, 211, 213 Azoria site 65–8, 70, 72–82, 212 Baillargeon, Morgan 170 ballcourts 137, 140, 146, 181 Balkan region 23, 36, 38, 44 Bennett, Wendell 92 Birch, Jennifer 63, 202, 215 Bronze Age (Europe) 44–58, 64, 201, 208 buildings see architecture built environment 2, 8–9, 13–14, 25, 28, 111, 114, 118, 120, 129, 148, 164; see also architecture burials 24–5, 30–33, 68, 91, 96, 99, 106, 116, 139, 148, 158, 181–2, 185, 187–91, 193; cemeteries 137, 167, 190, 211; cremation 116, 137, 139; ossuaries 158; see also mounds, burial Cahokia site 2 Çatalhöyük site 1, 4, 23–38, 202–3 cemeteries see burials ceramics 49, 58, 81, 95–6, 101–2, 112, 115, 119–20, 137, 139, 142, 148, 156, 163 ceremony see ritual Chalocolithic see Copper Age, Europe

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Index

Chamberlin, Matthew 112 Chávez, Karen Mohr 101, 102 Chávez, Sergio 101 Chiripa 87–99, 100–3, 106–8 Christiensen, David 170 cities 1–2, 4, 63–4; Aegean 63, 69, 79–82; Mesopotamian 28 clans 10, 14, 70, 77–8, 82, 89, 157–8, 161–2, 163, 165–8, 172–3, 179, 182–3, 185, 190, 192 coalescent societies 10–11, 13, 71, 81, 158 Coe, William 90 community, definition of 5–7, 112, 128; imagined 36 complexity see social conflict 8–9, 71, 82, 88, 127, 139, 158–60, 165–6, 172, 180, 182 193, 204–7, 213 Copper Age, Europe 44, 47, 56–7 cosmology 88, 97, 103, 106, 181, 188 Coweeta Creek site 186–91 cremation see burials Danube River 47 decision-making see political organization defense 10, 54, 81, 123, 128, 139, 161, 165, 191–2, 204–9 domestic see architecture, domestic; household domestication 202, 204, 209 Draper site 155–6, 158–9, 161–4, 167–71 elites 27, 71–2, 77, 80, 82, 99–101, 103, 106–7, 185, 207, 210 ethnogenesis 154 ethnohistory 153 exchange 45, 55–6, 58, 63, 71, 81–2, 98–100, 115, 120, 161–2, 167– 8, 170–3, 182, 192, 201, 205–6, 208–9, 213, 215 farming see agriculture feasting 25, 70, 78, 79, 81–2, 101, 128, 172, 206, 211 Fish, Paul 140 Fish, Suzanne 140 fishing 168 Flannery, Kent 28 fortifications see defense gender 26, 37, 209; and labor 215 Göbekli Tepe site 3

Gran Quivira Pueblo 112, 116, 117 Grasshopper Pueblo 114 grave goods 45, 188 Great Hungarian Plain 44–58, 203, 213, 215 Heidenreich, Conrad 167 hierarchy 35, 78, 201, 215; administrative 211; settlement 2, 57, 99; see also elites Hohokam 1, 134, 137–9, 146–8, 181, 201, 207–8, 212, 215 Hopi 121, 207 horticulture 156, 205 households 5–6, 9, 13–14, 26, 28–38, 63, 68, 70, 72–82, 87, 112, 120–1, 128, 137–8, 144–5, 161, 163–4, 172, 179, 182–3, 185–6, 189–90, 192–3, 210, 212 house society see social, house hunter-gatherers 2–3, 134, 156, 184, 205 hunting 155, 166–7, 169–73, 205, 214 Huronia 159, 169 identity 26, 37, 70, 75, 78, 79, 81–2; community-based 6, 14, 36, 79, 88, 112, 115, 117, 128, 137, 146, 163–4, 172, 181, 193; ethnic 81; regional 81, 82, 107 ideology 36, 97, 101, 103, 106–8 Ilahita village (New Guinea) 9–10, 204 integration see social Iron Age (Europe) 64–72, 75–7, 79, 81–2, 172, 174, 208–9, 220 Jamieson, Susan 155 Kidder, Alfred 90 kin group 10, 32, 55, 70, 75, 77, 115, 121, 127, 155, 206 kinship 50, 63, 68–70, 77, 82, 89, 161, 207 kiva 111–12, 114, 121, 128–9, 180–1, 210 Körös Region (Hungary) 45–58 Kowalewski, Stephen 10, 158 labor 50, 70, 72, 79, 81–2, 87, 99, 106–7, 112, 166, 202–4, 207–14 Lake Ontario 158–60, 164, 168, 170 Lake Titicaca 87, 91, 98, 201 Lake Wiñaymarka 87, 89, 98–100, 104, 106

Index 225 leadership 2, 8–9, 11, 81, 142, 146, 173, 192; see also political organization Lévi-Strauss, Claude 89; see also social, house lineage see kin group linguistic groups 81, 182 Mantle site 155–6, 160–73 marriage 36, 147, 156, 161, 172 Martinez Hill 134–48 megasites see Neolithic Mesoamerica 1, 10, 28, 212 middens 117, 148, 163, 171, 184 migration 7, 25, 114–17, 126–7, 154, 158 Mississippian society 10, 185, 207, 209 Mississippi Valley 205–6 monument see architecture, monumental Mooney, James 181 mounds 44, 213; burial 47; earthen 181–5, 187, 189, 191; platform 142–4, 146–8, 181, 212 neighborhoods 24, 29, 33–6, 38, 45–6, 48, 70, 72, 77, 144, 201 Neolithic 1, 2, 23–5, 33, 36–8, 44–58, 63–4, 201–3, 205, 208–9, 215; megasites 25–6, 37 New Guinea 1, 9–10, 204–7, 209 New York State 158, 160, 203 nucleation see aggregation Oaxaca (Mexico) 210, 212 Ontario (Canada) 158, 167, 203 peer-polity interaction 71, 205 petroglyphs 141, 147 pithouses 116, 127, 138–9 plazas 14, 49, 90, 91, 111, 112, 114, 116–18, 120, 121, 123–8, 137, 143, 146–7, 163–4, 166, 179, 180–1, 183, 185–6, 188, 190, 206, 210, 211 political organization 4, 9, 14, 64, 111, 134, 153, 155, 157, 161, 167, 171, 192; confederacies 155; see also hierarchy; leadership population: estimates 29–30, 35, 36, 138, 142, 144, 179 pottery see ceramics prestige 106, 163, 204–6, 209 public buildings see architecture pueblos 1, 5, 11, 111–29, 142, 146, 180–1, 193

refuse see middens Rio Grande Valley 114, 116, 121, 123, 207–8 ritual 3, 9–10, 25, 27, 29–31, 33, 36–7, 50, 56–8, 63, 70, 77, 79–81, 88–9, 95, 97, 107, 111–12, 123, 128, 137, 146–8, 184, 189, 201–2, 206, 210; offerings 95–6; see also architecture, and ritual; shrines rock art 119 Saint Lawrence Valley 158, 160, 172 Salinas region (New Mexico) 112–14, 119, 121, 123, 126–9 Santa Cruz River 135–6, 142 scalar stress 8–9, 27, 37, 56, 71, 82 shrines 30, 71 78–9, 89–90, 119 social: archaeology 26; complexity 4, 26, 154, 167; evolution 3, 154; house 80, 89, 100, 106–7, 201; integration 71, 79, 112, 117, 121–2, 127–9, 146, 163, 210; labor 202 societal archaeology 26 Solometo, Julie 123 Stanish, Charles 103 status 24, 31, 38, 79, 80, 87, 93, 106, 114, 146, 173, 189, 211 Taraco Peninsula 14, 87–9, 98–101, 103, 106–8 tells 44–58 Tiwanaku Valley 99 trade see exchange tribal cycling 45, 56 Trigger, Bruce 155 Tucson basin (Arizona) 134–48 urban settlements 1–2, 63, 65, 80–2; classification of 23, 25, 37; political economy 79; protourban 2, 37–8; urbanization 5, 63–5, 69, 80, 209, 213 Wallace, Saro 69 warfare see conflict Woodland period (North America) 154, 156–8, 205–7 Yaya-Mama Religious Tradition 89, 101–7 Zuni 114, 116