This volume collects a number of papers that were first presented in a symposium at the SAA annual meeting in 2013, along with a few more recent contributions. The unifying theme is a consideration of social and economic relationships among households and communities that are located throughout the Greater Southwest (the Four Corners states plus Texas and northern Mexico) and that range in time from the first millennium AD to the present, with the latter represented by contemporary Lipan Apache communities and the snowbirds that descend on the deserts every winter. The introduction by Robert Stokes provides a reasonably thorough overview of past work on households and communities in the Southwest, particularly the flurry of publications on the archaeology of communities that appeared in the 1990s and 2000s. Stokes points out that many of these studies failed to fully explore the utility of tacking between the social scales of household and community. Instead, they focused on one scale or the other. The authors of the chapters in the volume explore that dynamic with varying degrees of success. A shortcoming of Stokes's introduction, as well as many other chapters in the volume, is a lack of engagement with some crucial works that were either contemporaneous with these earlier studies or that appeared over the few years subsequent to the original SAA symposium. The extent to which chapters were updated after the 2013 symposium varies considerably. Some missed opportunities for pushing beyond the work of past decades on communities and households include (1) incorporating perspectives from landscape studies that extended Southwest archaeologists’ attention beyond the confines of the site and often at scales coterminous with or encompassing communities (e.g., Snead, Ancestral Landscapes of the Pueblo World, 2008), (2) exploring how renewed calls for examining ancient Southwest social organization through the lens of ethnology require rethinking of archaeological categories (e.g., Ware, A Pueblo Social History, 2014), and (3) investigating how synthetic research at larger spatial scales—including that of regions (e.g., the Village Ecodynamics Project) or the entire Southwest (e.g., Southwest Social Networks Project)—encourage us to reconsider how communities and their constituent households interacted and changed in wider fields.

With that said, the chapters are well written, they provide useful summaries of important projects, and they occasionally develop some farther-reaching insights. The volume has two parts: one is ostensibly focused more closely on the household scale, and the other on the community scale, but the authors usually move so deftly between the two due to Stokes's original charge that it was often hard to see the utility of this division. Strong contributions include Henry Wallace and Michael Lindeman's exploration of the protracted transformation of Hohokam village organization during the late Preclassic and early Classic periods in the Tucson Basin; an overview by Katie Richards, James Allison, Lindsay Johansson, Richard Talbot, and Scott Ure of variability in household architecture and community form in the Fremont area in Utah; Myles Miller's characteristically data-rich study of communal spaces and households in the Jornada region; and Kristin Safi and Andrew Duff's synthesis of a large body of work that considered multiple, adjacent Chaco-era communities in the southern Cibola region of New Mexico. The chapter by Safi and Duff illustrates the promise of exploring multiple communities at larger scales in order to better understand social organization within communities themselves.

The potential impact of Communities and Households in the Greater American Southwest will, unfortunately, be limited by its production and cost. Like a number of recent, edited books from the University Press of Colorado, it is a 6 × 9 in. hardcover, with tiny text and poor print quality. In many cases, the figures are so small that they are unreadable. This is unacceptable for a hardcover book costing $79.00. An e-book version is nearly as costly at $63.00, but fortunately, some scholars may have access to this version on JSTOR. The e-book is far more readable. One can zoom in on the figures, which are crisp and clear, and some even appear in color, unlike the grayscale versions in the print book. Even though academic presses are under siege, archaeologists must demand formats that are better suited to our work and our budgets. Although we are slowly moving toward digital publication, this trend may also provide an opportunity for us to advocate for better physical formats. The 8.5 × 11 in. paperbacks that were once much more common for scholarly publications in archaeology provide far more room for graphics, and they cost significantly less. There is an opportunity for a press that reinvigorates the quality of archaeological publications by figuring out the optimal blend of digital and physical formats.