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

Figure 3.13. Box-and-whisker plot of dwelling areas at Fort Hill.
enact this change—that is, when the village population
reached a certain size.
The much larger total settlement size evident in Fort
Hill II allowed for greater spacing between adjacent
dwellings. This greater spacing would have decreased
activity overlap between households, a significant
potential source of intra-household friction in Fort Hill
I. The overall trend for an increase in dwelling size suggests
that dwellings were enlarged to allow for internal
growth within a household before necessitating the
construction of additional or larger dwellings.
However, since some studies indicate that the ratio of
dwelling size to number of occupants is greater for
larger settlements than smaller settlements, the overall
population of Fort Hill II may not have been that much
greater than Fort Hill I. Fort Hill II’s proportionally
much larger plaza ensured that the plaza itself acted as
a better distance buffer between nonadjacent dwellings
than Fort Hill I’s plaza. The maximum distance
between any two dwellings (e.g., dwellings on opposite
sides of a plaza) was 99.2 meters for Fort Hill II but
only 39.8 meters for Fort Hill I.
Finally, the increase in total settlement space and the
much larger plaza at Fort Hill II could have accommodated
considerable settlement growth and still have
ensured reasonable spacing between adjacent and nonadjacent
dwellings. A second house ring could easily
have been constructed inside the first at Fort Hill II and
the village component still would not have approached
the level of crowding seen in Fort Hill I. Thus, Fort Hill
II’s overall layout was designed to be fairly flexible in
that it allowed for considerable growth within the village
settlement before scalar stresses would have
become an issue. The members of a suprahousehold
decision-making group in the form of a council, which
may have arisen partly in response to crowded conditions
in Fort Hill I, would have played a significant role
in the planning of Fort Hill II’s layout.
These interpretations would be strengthened if it
could be definitively argued that Fort Hill I preceded
Fort Hill II, and that Fort Hill II represented a reoccupation
that followed closely, if not directly, from Fort
Hill I. However, as with the other village sites investigated
by the relief excavations, no radiocarbon assays
are currently available for Fort Hill. Despite this, there
is evidence supporting the argument that the proposed
occupational sequence is correct, and that there was little
or no discontinuity between village occupations.
First, as noted above, the possible men’s/council houses
at each component are nearly identical in size. The
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