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

social organizations is drawn primarily from the literature
on built environments (Hillier and Hanson
1980; Lawrence and Low 1990; Rapoport 1976, 1980a,
1980b, 1990a, 1990b, 1997) and the social and behavioral
use of space (Kent 1987, 1990a, 1990b; Nass 1995;
Oetelaar 1993; Portnoy 1981; Yellen 1977).
Ring-shaped (and other) villages arose around the
world for various reasons, sometimes during a major
shift in prehistoric economies toward a heavier
reliance on agriculture. New economic arrangements
led to new social arrangements as well. Unlike in earlier
periods, when households were exclusively parts
of dispersed communities, ring-shaped village settlements
were discrete locations occupied by several
households simultaneously. In the Upper Ohio Valley,
the incorporation of maize into Native horticultural
systems is seen as the main catalyst for the coalescing
of scattered Late Woodland (A.D. 500 - 900) hamlets
into Late Prehistoric Monongahela villages (Fuller
1980, 1981a, 1981b; Wymer 1993).
The interaction of multiple households in a nucleated
community creates new opportunities and challenges
that are not evident in dispersed communities.
Eggan (1955:495) notes that social structures that integrate
and organize small and scattered populations
may be inadequate for larger and more concentrated
populations. A village community represents a set of
social groups that recurrently interact in interconnected
sets of roles and that have internal organization
(Keesing 1975:10).
Corporate descent first appeared in village-level
societies as a way to deal with organizational challenges
created when people began living in larger,
more stable groups (Keesing 1975:16). Corporate
descent groups often form in village communities as
an adaptive solution to the problems of maintaining
political order and defining rights over land and other
resources across generations (Keesing 1975:18). This is
a particularly important issue for horticulturists, who
must move their village settlements once every generation,
if not sooner, due to a variety of social and environmental
factors (Bamann, et al. 1993:445; Chagnon
1968:118; Fenton 1951:39; Gross 1983; Jackson 1975:311;
Wallace 1969:22). The establishment of new settlements
is sometimes consciously recognized as an opportunity
to alter village layouts to reflect changes in social
relations (Fenton 1951:42; James 1949:56). When multiple
descent groups inhabit a single settlement, each
may be strongly corporate and form discrete areas
within the settlement (Keesing 1975:41). This is because
people in traditional societies most often choose where
they live within a settlement based on social relationships
(Agorsah 1988:234-236).
Social relationships within a community often
change over time (Agorsah 1988:234; Rocek 1995:3-5).
The Late Prehistoric inhabitants of southwestern
Pennsylvania and other similarly structured groups
apparently had fairly flexible social arrangements and
village settlements with fairly simple architectural
elements (Flannery 1972:30; Means 1996; Wüst and
Barreto 1999). Since the builders of a dwelling in a traditional
village are frequently the individuals who
use and maintain the dwelling, they can change the
configuration, size, and location of their dwelling or
build new dwellings as needed to meet changing
social needs (Agorsah 1988:235-236; Eighmy 1981;
McGuire and Schiffer 1983; Wüst and Barreto
1999:12).
Several researchers have argued that, at least for
traditional societies, dwelling size correlates in some
fashion to the number of people living within the
dwelling and to different types of families, for example,
nuclear versus extended (Chang 1958:303; Lea
1995:208). Nuclear families may have lived in smaller
dwellings (Bennett 1949:2; Chang 1958:303; Watson
1978:141), as was characteristic of some Algonquian
tribes of the Eastern Woodlands (Bushnell 1919:100).
Larger dwellings may have been inhabited by extended
or multiple families (Chang 1958:303; Guidoni
1975:48), with a classic example being the long communal
dwellings, or longhouses, favored by the
Iroquois (Bushnell 1919:100; Hayden 1977; Kapches
1990, 1994; Snow 1997) and some South American
groups (Bennett 1949:2; Gregor 1977:57).
Household size varies along a number of parameters:
mean household size is both culturally and
regionally specific; within a specific region or culture,
the average number of people per dwelling changes
as communities increase in size; and mean household
size changes through time as a function of typical
family composition (Eighmy 1981:226). Wilk
(1983:105) cautions that variation in a dwelling’s size
may not relate directly to the number of its occupants,
but rather to ties of kinship or friendship that its
builder draws upon to construct the dwelling.
However, even if a dwelling is not built solely by its
occupants, one can still argue for a correlation
between a dwelling’s size and the number of its occupants;
a builder’s ties of kinship and friendship are
based in part on the builder’s economic standing
(Wilk 1983:108-113), which is related to the number of
people living and working in the builder’s household.
The apparent correlation between residential
dwelling size and family type (nuclear versus extend-
Chapter 3 Modeling Village Community Organization Using Data From the Somerset County Relief Excavations 47