Population Aggregation and the Emergence of Circular Villages in Southwest Virginia

Archaeological evidence from throughout much of eastern North America documents a transition from small, scattered settlements to nucleated, often circular, villages during the Late Woodland/Late Prehistoric period (ca. A.D. 1000-1600). In southwestern Virginia's Appalachian Highlands, this transition is marked by the appearance of large circular palisaded villages associated with what Howard MacCord called the Intermontane Culture. This paper investigates the origin, structure, and spatial distribution of Late Woodland circular villages across the southern Appalachian landscape and compares their emergence to similar trends in settlement structure and organization witnessed in other parts of the Appalachian Highlands and beyond.

Initial Northern Iroquoian Coalescence

Northern Iroquoian societies experienced two phases of community coalescence, one in the thirteenth century, which brought semi-sedentary populations together into the first true villages, and a second phase two centuries later that created large palisaded settlements. This chapter is primarily concerned with the first wave of village formation and the changes in social organization and gender and power relations that accompanied the transition to sedentism. This included more formalized decision-making at the village level as well as the development of recursive entanglements between regional networks defined by kin- and clan-based relations and materialized through ritual and mortuary programs. We argue that transformations in the social and physical labor performed by males and females at the village and regional levels is key to understanding this transition.

Powers of Place in the Predestined Middle Woodland Village

The transition of small mobile groups to larger village aggregations poses distinct economic, social, and political challenges. New integrative institutions and practices are necessary, and their stability can be reinforced through inscriptions on the built environment and landscape, particularly as they define the configuration of community spaces in which people interact frequently. In northern Florida and southern Georgia, an effective approach to village proxemics and social grammar emerged in the Woodland Period around ca. AD 200, after which many villages formed with similar U-shaped layouts studded by mounds in similar, or identical, locations. This chapter posits that the origins of this particular village configuration, and ultimately its widespread popularity, were rooted in experiences of non-anthropogenic features on the landscape. The Garden Patch site on the northern peninsular Gulf coast serves as a case study that shows how natural, cosmically aligned features defined the village layout, revealing an element of inevitability that may have legitimated the organization of space and society.

The Power of Powhatan Towns

This chapter proposes a Powhatan theory of power and suggests links to the archaeology and ethnohistory of towns in the lower Chesapeake. Early colonial-era sources highlight a recurring process whereby powerful outside forces, materials, and people were socialized within the Powhatan settlements known as Kings’ Houses. We suggest that a key Algonquian concept for understanding this process is manitou—the vital spiritual force manifest in dangerously potent people, animals, objects, and places. Within the Kings’ Houses of the colonial-era, Powhatan leaders harnessed manitou by orchestrating ritual, trade, and the built environment. Archaeological evidence of feasting, ditches, and palisades points toward similar practices associated with the construction of boundaries—ditches and palisades—within prominent settlements, starting in the thirteenth century AD. By transforming the objects and people that transgressed these boundaries, religious practitioners and political leaders exercised a “tactical power” grounded in Kings’ Houses and animated by manitou.

The Village Remains the Same

Villages are one of the most ubiquitous and enduring site forms in the Eastern United States and beyond. In this chapter, I examine the dynamics associated with village formation in the Middle Ohio Valley. Integration of mortuary data with biodistance and isotope analyses from human burials with environmental data is key to unlocking the processes and histories at play. The central argument is that the basic structure of the Fort Ancient village developed in close connection and early interactions with Mississippian migrants and remained relatively constant through time despite major shifts in certain aspects of material culture and diet. Village origins are linked to a series of general processes and specific historical developments involving exploitation of a particular type of environmental niche, reuse of ancient monuments, and referencing mythic Mississippian events. Examination of the Fort Ancient village pattern in comparison with potential descendant communities also allows for heretofore unrecognized connections to be explored, particularly with Dhegiha Siouan tribes.

Size Matters

Kolomoki was one of the largest villages of the Middle and Late Woodland periods in the American Southeast. Located in southwestern Georgia, the site features a circular village plan nearly a kilometer in diameter which is centered on a large open plaza. This chapter introduces the term “hypertrophic village” to describe Kolomoki and, by extension, villages of similarly exaggerated size. New insights from recent excavations covering Kolomoki's transition from Swift Creek to Weeden Island pottery suggest that Kolomoki grew from a relatively compact to hypertrophic village beginning around the sixth century A.D. and culminating a century or two later. The wide spacing between domestic units both enabled and constrained social cohesion, and may have afforded the community at Kolomoki unrivalled symbolic power. The construction of Kolomoki's hypertrophic village may have been a strategy related to settlement shifts that recent work suggests took place throughout the region in the seventh century A.D.

It Took a Childe to Raze the Village

Over half a century ago, V. Gordon Childe challenged typological approaches to the definition and analysis of villages. Nevertheless, the village and variations of this concept continue on as organizational categories with neo-evolutionary connotations. This history in many respects has hindered as well as helped our understanding of how and why clusters of humans come to live together. Collectively, the contributions to this volume systematically address the concerns raised by Childe as well as more recent scholars as to the variation encompassed by the village construct, as well as why this is an important unit of analysis. In addition, several additional important themes are raised, all of which reflect current theoretical trends in the discipline: what precipitates village coalescence? What does the village mean experientially and to the landscape? And, what are the consequences of village life and identity?

The Power of Villages

While the settings for village formation in eastern North America differ widely, the cultural materials that peoples used to craft village communities and the social processes that played out within them were not so different. The power of villages to create new societal forms developed through processes of emplacement, negotiation, cooperation, and competition at multiple social and spatial scales. As such, the way individuals and groups expressed power operated under different societal constraints than under other kinds of social formations. In this chapter, we consider the several key themes that are important to understanding village coalescence and operation, including social relations, cooperation, power dynamics, kinship, hierarchy, and the rise of large and powerful villages, among others. While we have centered this discussion on eastern North America, we have also situated this regional analysis in a global context in order to illustrate how our understanding of village societies in the area contributes to a broader understanding of world archaeology.

From Nucleated Villages to Dispersed Networks

Members of the Seneca Nation of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy resided in a surprising variety of settlement forms during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Seneca communities in what is now western New York State lived in sequentially occupied sites that ranged from nucleated to fully dispersed, with and without defensive palisades. The regional Seneca settlement pattern also changed from one with two large core sites and surrounding satellites to a network of evenly spaced smaller sites arrayed across their territory. While earlier scholars viewed these transformations as decline away from a precontact cultural climax, the changes were non-linear and corresponded quite tightly to the dynamics of the regional political economy known in detail from documentary sources. This chapter reviews the details of 1669-1779 changes in Seneca community forms, and examines the lived experience of community relocation as a dynamic time for negotiation, reimagination, assessment of political-economic conditions, and the exercise of power.

The Path to the Council House

This chapter discusses the transition from Early to Late Mississippian in southeast Tennessee, a time period that encompassed many cultural changes, including shifts from dispersed to nucleated communities. More people moved into mound centers, the use of communal burial mounds ceased in favor of household and public space interments, palisades were added to some settlements, and new types of pottery, architecture, and symbolism came into use. Concomitant with these changes were new forms of community leadership overlaid upon an older base of kinship groupings. Gender duality, with men acting in community leadership roles in councils and women serving as kin group leaders, likely developed as a strategy for social and political cohesion related to a need to integrate refugees from drought-stricken regions to the west. This gendered division of leadership for village governance would have helped to manage and ease inevitable tensions and conflict during coalescence.