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

IT TAKES A VILLAGE
Figure 3.2. Artist’s depiction of a Monongahela
dwelling (illustration by Laura J. Galke).
New England and New York into Virginia and the
Carolinas (Bushnell 1919; Griffin 1978:559).
This basic settlement form has been recorded ethnographically
and archaeologically elsewhere in North
America and throughout the world, including the
camping circles once formed by some Native Plains
groups during their annual buffalo hunts (Bushnell
1922:129; Dorsey 1884:215, 1894:523, 1897; Fletcher and
La Fleshe 1911; Fraser 1968:20-21; Guidoni 1975:31-36;
Lévi-Strauss 1953:528), and in villages located in New
Guinea (Fraser 1968:31; Lévi-Strauss 1963a:136),
Central Brazil (Bennett 1949:13; Fabian 1992:37; Gross
1979:329; James 1949; Lévi-Strauss 1953:528, 1963a:137;
Lowie 1946a:383, 1946b:420, 1946c:482; Wüst and
Barreto 1999), and Puerto Rico (Siegel 1997:109). In
their examination of ethnographic and archaeological
data from Central Brazil, Wüst and Barreto (1999)
referred to the layout of village settlements that strongly
resemble Monongahela village sites as “ringshaped,”
a term that will be adopted for the remainder
of this paper.
It would seem there is little inherently Monongahela
about the layout of a “typical” Monongahela village
site. This does not mean that the village sites uncovered
by the Somerset County Relief Excavations are
unworthy of further consideration. Rather, the fact that
the ring-shaped village is a basic settlement form that
arose repeatedly and independently in different times
and places suggests that the modeling of community
organization from the archaeologically recovered
remains of Monongahela village sites can lead to a
greater anthropological understanding of small-scale
societies in the Eastern Woodlands and elsewhere.
The concepts of “village” and “community” are
often conflated and treated interchangeably in the
popular media and by some anthropologists and
archaeologists. Therefore, it is important at the outset
to define these concepts and how they are employed
in this paper. Both the village and the community represent
analytical constructs that vary in their scope
and meaning depending on what questions
researchers are asking and on the nature of the data at
hand. Murdock’s (1949:79) definition of a community
as “the maximal group of persons who normally
reside together in face-to-face association” was once
widely cited by archaeologists (Chang 1958:303; Wills
and Leonard 1994:xv). One problem with this definition
is that it applies principally to a residential group
whose inhabitants occupy an aggregated or nucleated
settlement. While tacitly accepting Murdock’s definition,
Chang (1962:33-35) noted that many groups practice
a form of seasonal mobility where they inhabit a
nucleated settlement only part of the year and disperse
into small camp sites the remainder of the year;
but, at all times, they are members of the same integrated
community. Communities that practice this
form of seasonal mobility usually break into smaller
groups that are based on social divisions existing within
the nucleated settlement (Chang 1962:35). It is also
possible to have communities that never aggregate
into a single large settlement, but whose members are
instead scattered among a number of smaller settlements
that nonetheless have group consciousness and
common interests (Chang 1962:29; Rice 1987:15).
Fuller (1981a, b) distinguished between two types of
communities: the nucleated community, in which all
of its members live in a single settlement; and the dispersed
community, in which multiple settlements
compose a single community. The definition of community
produced by Beardsley et al.’s (1956) study is
sufficiently broad to encompass the nuances discussed
here. They define the community “as the largest
grouping of persons in any particular culture whose
normal activities bind them together into a self-conscious
corporate unit, which is economically self-sufficient
and politically independent” (Beardsley et al.
1956:133). Using such a definition shifts the focus of
community studies from a place or site to a human
group (Chang 1962:33; Nelson 1994:1).
From a traditional perspective, a village might be
defined as a discrete location on the landscape occupied
by a local group forming a nucleated community.
This traditional view, in which a village correlates
Chapter 3 Modeling Village Community Organization Using Data From the Somerset County Relief Excavations 45