Northeast Subsistence-Settlement Change: A.D. 700 –1300

use of the term “small village” and the term “large village”
can blur and obscure important differences
between village sites. For example, Means (this volume)
examines two overlapping village components,
where the later and much larger component has a
simpler community plan than the smaller and earlier
component. In this case, the density of dwellings relative
to overall settlement size and the complexity of
their arrangement with respect to each other are much
greater in the smaller component than in the larger.
Perhaps, to avoid terminological confusion, it would
be best to simply distinguish between smaller and larger
villages on an as-needed basis and within an explicit
comparative framework.
In some cases, a village may consist of a number of
households dispersed throughout a locality, and it may
be difficult to distinguish such a village from a settlement
system dominated by hamlets. Nucleated or
aggregated villages, on the other hand, consist of more
than two households in close proximity to one another
and, more so than with hamlets, their inhabitants need
to consider issues such as activity overlap and privacy.
Nucleated villages often have planned layouts that
indicate attempts to minimize these issues (Aiello and
Thompson 1980:167; Lawrence and Low 1990:447). For
some nucleated villages, a plaza that functions not only
as an integrative facility, but acts as a buffer between
households as well (Means, this volume) will be present.
A settlement’s layout may be redesigned when it
begins to interfere with rather than facilitate social
interactions (Fenton 1951:42; James 1949:56). Custer et
al. (1995:93) argue that villages became increasingly
planned through the Late Prehistoric period in the
Northeast and Middle Atlantic regions, indicating that
their inhabitants were cognizant on at least some level
of the active role that architectural elements and their
arrangement played in maintaining, perpetuating, and
even generating social institutions (Fletcher and
LaFlesche 1911:138; Gross 1979:329, 337; James 1949:48;
Lowie 1946; Means 1999:35, 2000:44, 2001; Pearson and
Richards 1994:12). Changes in the layouts of villages
likely reflected the development of new, or the modification
of existing social institutions to better manage
increasingly larger groups of people working and living
alongside one another (Carneiro 1967:239; Eggan
1955:495; Gummerman 1994:9).
REGIONAL SUMMARIES
In the following pages we provide brief summaries
of the history of maize agriculture and nucleated
villages in the Northeast, based primarily on the chapters
of this volume. We then provide a critical assessment
of our current state of knowledge about maize
agriculture and settlement in the Northeast for the
early Late Prehistoric period.
Western Lake Erie
Stothers and Abel (this volume) provide a summary
for the earliest evidence of maize in the western Lake
Erie basin. They determine that the earliest evidence
for maize is no earlier than A.D. 750, but suggest that
evidence will be found for maize as early as A.D. 400.
Maize becomes frequent in the archaeological record of
this region from A.D. 750 to 1000. SCIA suggests that
maize was an important dietary component for some
individuals by at least A.D. 900 (Stothers and Abel, this
volume, Tables 4.2 and 4.3). As in the central Ohio
River basin (see below), there remain individuals for
whom maize was not important at least through the
calibrated fifteenth century A.D.
There is apparently no evidence for nucleated
villages in this region as late as A.D. 1300 (Stothers and
Bechtel 2000:24), after which fortified hamlets and villages
occurred (Stothers and Abel, this volume). Prior
to this time, settlements consisted of warm weather
hamlets and small winter camps.
Southern Ontario
The earliest direct AMS date on maize in Southern
Ontario is 1570±90 (cal 2 σ A.D. 258 [442, 448, 468, 482,
530] 657) from the Grand Banks site (Smith and
Crawford, this volume). Maize is common on sites in
this region beginning by around A.D. 900-1000
(Ounjian 1998). A number of SCIA studies have been
published covering the period A.D. 400-1500 for southern
Ontario that provide insights into when maize
became an important component of some diets
(Katzenberg et al. 1995; Schwarcz et al. 1985). According
to Katzenberg et al. (1995:346), the results show that
there was a gradual increase in maize consumption
from A.D. 700-1300, when δ 13 C values consistently
show high levels of consumption. Because of the small
sample sizes, the late values indicate that high rates of
maize consumption were probably common; the early
values indicate that high rates of consumption were less
common (Hart 2001:173).
The earliest seasonally occupied nucleated villages
occur in southern Ontario by the late eighth century
A.D. (Kapches 1990; Warrick 1996). Palisaded, nucleated
villages with longhouses are present after ca. A.D.
Chapter 18 Maize and Villages: A Summary and Critical Assessment of Current Northeast Early Late Prehistoric Evidence 347