“Village life seems to usher in a new way of conceiving the world.” Charles Cobb's concluding thoughts on this volume (p. 198) speak to the heart of the matter—why we should care about the origins and operation of apparently humble village settlements in the archaeological record. In fact, (I believe) the development of village life represents a worldwide “event” equally significant as, if not more significant than, the emergence of social and political inequality. This volume contributes to the growing body of research that specifically considers the concepts of villages and village communities in the archaeological past.
These research essays investigate how people began, maintained, and came to depend on the specific sorts of social interactions that we find in residential village communities. Here, the editors define village very narrowly as a coresidential community: a restricted geographic space where people lived and engaged in face-to-face interactions with one another (p. 1). However, the main topic of interest is how social relationships develop and are expressed in villages—specifically, relationships of power. The editors ask how power works in basically nonhierarchical (or heterarchical) social contexts, how power differences are created and manifested both within and between villages, and how power relations change with changing circumstances over time. The case studies investigate the range of variation in the way that people in villages created and maintained a sense of community, how community life is to be defined, how it articulates with the concept of identity, and how the village community becomes a “social agent” itself, creating meaningful “villagescapes” and structuring social interactions and experiences of being.
Most of the authors follow well-trodden research paths to investigate how aggregation, ceremonial practice, monumental construction, and specialized architecture contribute to, and function within, a sense of community within the coresidential space of the village. For the earliest villages in the Eastern Woodlands, Victor D. Thompson (Chapter 2) considers how collective action might operate within a basically egalitarian context of Archaic shell mound villages; Neill Wallis (Chapter 3) specifically considers why, in light of the many drawbacks to village life, people were willing to form villages in the first place.
Jennifer Birch and Ronald F. Williamson (Chapter 6) consider the initial village formation of northern Iroquoian people during the Middle and Late Woodland periods and how gendered power dynamics changed with the adoption of matrilocal residence patterns and matrilineal descent. Lynne P. Sullivan (Chapter 7) also examines gendered power dynamics in Mississippian villages of southeastern Tennessee. The authors of both chapters argue that a gendered division of power between men in community leadership and women in kin group leadership positions may have facilitated between-community social ties at a regional scale. Robert A. Cook (Chapter 8) and Richard Jefferies (Chapter 9) both examine the importance of the village layout as a symbol and also the personification of village community in contexts as different as Fort Ancient in Ohio (Cook) and the circular villages of Late Woodland Virginia (Jefferies).
Four chapters specifically examine seemingly outlier case studies. Shaun E. West, Thomas J. Pluckhahn, and Martin Menz (Chapter 4) introduce the concept of the “hypertrophic village” to investigate the development and symbolic importance of the extraordinarily large village site of Kolomoki in Georgia during the Middle and Late Woodland periods.
Other chapters consider situations in which village settlements did not develop or where they were not sustained. Eric E. Jones (Chapter 5) considers what factors may have prevented dispersed populations in North Carolina and Virginia from coalescing into villages. In Chapter 10, Martin D. Gallivan, Christopher J. Shephard, and Jessica A. Jenkins focus on how Algonquian village communities were able to maintain social relationships despite long seasonal dispersals of most inhabitants from the village home base. Kurt A. Jordan (Chapter 11) similarly examines how Seneca villagers reorganized into dispersed “neighborhoods” during the historic period.
While not all of the authors follow through explicitly with the organizing theme of social power within and between villages, they all contribute to a greater understanding of the range of variation in authority, influence, and (yes) power in basically heterarchical societies. They are able to do so by utilizing a productive research strategy that includes questioning common assumptions, critically examining definitions, disaggregating variables into possible component subvariables, untangling general “processes” into steps, and considering the range of variation in our understanding of the village community.
