The study of houses and the social groups who build and use them has been an important topic in North American anthropology since Lewis Henry Morgan and the origins of the discipline during the nineteenth century. Benjamin Steere's book, The Archaeology of Houses and Households in the Native Southeast, is a significant contribution to this anthropological tradition of exploring the complex relationships among houses, households, environment, and society.

Steere's research is most concerned with understanding and explaining similarities and variability in Native American domestic architecture in the U.S. Southeast across space and through time. His book considers the roles that environment, economy, cosmology, and status differentiation played in shaping continuity and change in Native American domestic architecture in the greater southern Appalachians, from about 2,000 years ago through the period after European contact in the Southeast, as well as patterns of similarity or variability across his study area. There were major changes in environment, economy, politics, and social organization in the Southeast during this period, but how do those changes correlate, if at all, with stability or transformation in domestic architecture?

Steere's research is based on analyses of an archaeological dataset generated from published site reports and scholarly literature about examples of domestic architecture at sites across the southern Appalachian region, a vast area that spans approximately half of the U.S. Southeast. He sorts sites and structures into the following periods: Middle Woodland (200 BC–AD 400), Late Woodland (AD 400–1000), Early Mississippian (AD 1000–1200), Middle Mississippian (AD 1200–1350), Late Mississippian (AD 1350–550), and the Historic period (AD 1550–1800). The vast temporal and spatial scales of this book are extraordinary, and they represent a deliberate effort by Steere to augment recent trends in household archaeology that have moved away from explanations based on broad-scale patterning. He argues that changes in domestic architecture need to be explained by social processes operating at macro-regional scales, and he positions his work as a move toward exploring the geography of housing traditions. Steere uses several univariate and multivariate statistical techniques to systematically and thoroughly explore relationships among various attributes of domestic architecture (e.g., size, spacing, construction methods, etc.); their archaeological contexts; and aspects of environment, economy, cosmology, and status as they are manifested (or not) in the architecture of houses. He explores these relationships through rigorous considerations of a robust dataset composed of approximately 1,000 structures from 74 sites.

The book is an important contribution to household archaeology for many reasons, and some of Steere's results are summarized here to illustrate the significance of his work. His findings indicate that environmental factors are not key to explaining architectural variability. Economic factors, such as major changes in subsistence economy, and social factors, such as status differences within a community, are more important. For example, some changes in certain aspects of architecture track well with major changes in subsistence economy, particularly the adoption of maize agriculture as a staple of the domestic economy in the southern Appalachians after AD 900. Also, the variability in house size and form at many Mississippian sites fits with the expectations of intra-community social ranking or stratification, although Steere points out that the range of variability in domestic architecture does not fit with simplistic distinctions between elites and commoners.

One of this volume's most important contributions is the finding that Native American domestic architecture in the southern Appalachians was relatively stable through time—more so than expected—and this stability belies substantial changes in the other realms considered by Steere. Further assessments of this remarkably conservative tradition of domestic architecture in the southern Appalachians pose important and interesting challenges for future research. Another contribution of this book, perhaps its most important, is that Steere's consideration of many different variables in a robust dataset shows that the relationships among attributes of domestic architecture and other realms of the human experience are very complex. Simplistic cause-and-effect relationships do not explain broad-scale patterns in domestic architecture, and the relationships that do exist often are nuanced. They are neither universal nor deterministic. The demonstration that these relationships are complicated is an important caution against simplistic explanations of households as economic or adaptive units within past societies and communities.