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

Petersen and Cowie; Stothers and Abel) demonstrate,
there is no wide agreement on this topic. In order to
better understand maize agriculture evolution, it is
important to understand how maize as a sessile plant
would respond to differing agricultural settings.
Explicitly incorporating biological knowledge,
including modern organic evolutionary theory, into
our models can lead to significant new insights, not
only about maize agriculture evolution (Hart 1999a),
but also about the evolution of settlement patterns
(Hart 2001). The current debate about the importance
of maize agriculture in New England could very well
benefit from such an approach, resulting in better
understandings about the potential of regional variation
in maize’s importance. Models such as Stothers
and Abel’s (this volume) might be more convincing
by being explicit about how maize agriculture could
have been managed successfully under the conditions
of their model, rather than just assuming its successful
perpetuation and availability.
CONCLUSIONS
Current data on the timing of maize and nucleated
villages do not show a sudden appearance of nucleated
villages after the adoption of maize. The frequency
of maize in the archaeological record may be a function
of the length of site occupation, and thus its ubiquity
at many nucleated village sites. Rather than
being a direct cause of nucleated settlements, settlement
nucleation and maize agriculture intensification
may be connected as a result of the coevolution of
human and maize populations (Hart 2001). Since evolution
is opportunistic, the adoption and evolution of
maize agriculture need not necessarily result in nucleated
villages. People can form social networks that
manifest at critical points throughout the year to manage
some of the tasks requiring group cooperations
that are associated with maize agriculture, without
also maintaining coresidence within a nucleated village.
Following this line of reasoning, the apparent
absence of villages in New England for hundreds of
years after maize becomes archaeologically visible
need not be such a puzzle or point of contention. The
apparent coevolution between maize agriculture and
nucleated villages in many areas may simply indicate
that some inhabitants of those regions chose to reinforce
their social and economic networks through
coresidence. Building explicit models of subsistence
and settlement change will help us identify those
areas where we are lacking appropriate data to
address these issues (Hart 1999a, 2001). Attention
needs to be placed not only on the size of villages and
their constituent elements, but how these elements
were arranged within villages at any point in time.
As we enter the twenty-first century, our knowledge
of early Late Prehistoric subsistence and settlement
change in the Northeast is greater than at any
time in the past. However, our knowledge is far from
complete and in many instances stands in need of
revision. The descriptions of sites in the literature are
based on the methods, techniques, and theories available
at the time of analysis and also reflect the biases
of the writer. Critically evaluating our data and the
implications of the sources of those data thus becomes
increasingly important as new methods and techniques
are developed and as the time since the original
analyses and interpretations lengthens. Increased
use of flotation recovery of macrobotanical remains,
AMS dating of crop remains, SCIA of human bone
collagen and apatite (if possible, under NAGPRA),
large-scale excavations, reanalysis of museum collections,
and new developments in method and theory
will change our understandings of early Late
Prehistoric subsistence and settlement in the
Northeast as we progress through the first few
decades of the twenty-first century.
Acknowledgments
We thank Chris Rieth and two reviewers for comments
on earlier versions of this chapter.
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