university alabama press circular villages of the monongahela tradition aug 2007

Circular Villages of the
Monongahela Tradition

Circular Villages of the
Monongahela Tradition
BERNARD K. MEANS
THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Tuscaloosa
Copyright © 2007
The University of Alabama Press
Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Typeface: Minion
∞
The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American Na-
tional Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Means, Bernard K. (Bernard Klaus), 1964–
Circular villages of the Monongahela tradition / Bernard K. Means.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-1573-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8173-1573-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-5438-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8173-5438-7
1. Indians of North America—Dwellings—Pennsylvania. 2. Indians of North America—
Dwellings—Monongahela River Valley (W. Va. and Pa.) 3. Indian architecture Monongahela
River Valley (W. Va. and Pa.) 4. Central-plan buildings—Monongahela River Valley (W. Va.

and Pa.) 5. Land settlement patterns—Monongahela River Valley (W. Va. and Pa.) 6. Social
archaeology—Monongahela River Valley (W. Va. and Pa.) 7. Monongahela River Valley (W. Va.
and Pa.)—Antiquities. I. Title.
E78.P4M35 2007
974.8′801—dc22
2006102622
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
1. Village Spatial Layouts and Social Organizations 1
2. A Review of the Late Prehistoric Monongahela Tradition and the New
Chronology for Allegheny Mountains Villages 13
3. Villages, Communities, and Social Organizations 31
4. Building Models of Village Spatial and Social Organizations 40
5. Models and Hypotheses Related to Community Organization 69
6. Data Sources, Variables, and Analytical Approaches 86
7. Modeling Community Patterning from Select Village Components in the
Allegheny Mountains Region 106
8. Comparative Analyses from Modeling Individual
Village Components 145
9. Implications Drawn from Interpreting Community Organization
through Village Spatial Layouts 155
References Cited 165
Index 189

FIGURES
1. Maximum extent of the Monongahela tradition 2
2. DeBry’s version of John White’s 1585 watercolor of the village
of Pomeioc, North Carolina 4
3. Villages sites in Somerset County, Pennsylvania 10

4. Select drainages in the Allegheny Mountains region 17
5. Reconstruction of a Monongahela village 20
6. Diametric model of a ring-shaped settlement 46
7. An Omaha tribal camping circle 47
8. Map of a Zulu homestead 49
9. Concentric model of a ring-shaped settlement 50
10. Village of Omarakana 51
11. Yellen’s model of a ring-shaped settlement 56
12. Portnoy’s model of a ring-shaped settlement 57
13. Map of Fort Ancient Mayo Site 58
14. Radial model of the Mayo Site 59
15. Map of Fort Ancient SunWatch site 60
16. Circumferential model of a ring-shaped settlement 62
17. Hub-and-spoke model of a ring-shaped settlement 66
18. Circular histogram of grave orientations at Gnagey 3 104
List of Illustrations
19. Circumferential graph of features at Gnagey 3-2 105
20. Map of Gnagey 3 108
21. Map of Petenbrink 1 113
22. Map of Peck 1 115
23. Map of Peck 2 117
24. Map of Clouse 122
25. Map of Hanna 123
26. Map of Fort Hill 125
27. Map of Gower 130
28. Map of Reckner 132
29. Map of Powell 1 134
30. Map of Powell 2 136
31. Map of Troutman 138
32. Map of Emerick 140

33. Site plans arranged by increasing size 147
34. Site plans arranged by age and by increasing size 148
TABLES
1. De¤nite Allegheny Mountains region village sites 25
2. Radiocarbon assays for Allegheny Mountains region village sites 27
3. Areal extent of major social spaces at Allegheny Mountains region
village sites 107
4. Descriptive statistics and population estimates for dwellings at Allegheny
Mountains region villages 109
5. Dwelling clusters and population at select Allegheny Mountains
region villages 152
viii / Illustrations
A portion of the material presented in this work was supported by the National
Science Foundation under Grant No. (BCS-0226785) titled “Modeling Somer-
set Monongahela Village Organization Within a Chronological Framework De-
veloped through AMS Dating of Curated Organic Remains.” My research also
bene¤tted materially from a Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commis-
sion Scholars in Residence grant. Without the generosity of artifact loans from
The State Museum of Pennsylvania and the Carnegie Museum of Natural His-
tory, this work would not have been possible. The State Museum of Pennsyl-
vania and the Pennsylvania State Archives made available all the original ¤eld
records and photographs from the New Deal excavations in Somerset County,
Pennsylvania, and these are relied on throughout this work. Washington and
Lee University’s Glenn Grant Publication Fund aided publication of this book.
My wife, Laura J. Galke of Washington and Lee University, provided a key
illustration in this work, helped to further clarify its contents, and patiently
supported the writing process. Finally, I would like to thank the critical ap-
praisal of John Hart and an anonymous reviwer of an earlier draft of this
manuscript. This work is stronger for their comments, but all misinterpreta-
tions or errors in this work are solely my responsibilty.

Acknowledgments

Circular Villages of the
Monongahela Tradition

Across time and space, a signi¤cant shift in how social groups con¤gured them-
selves has repeatedly taken place: families abandoned their millennial-long
practice of living in small dispersed settlements to reside with other families
in aggregated village settlements. Wills (1991:161) stressed the importance of
this shift when he noted that “the organization of unranked social groups into
village communities is a remarkably widespread phenomenon that bespeaks a
profound adaptive strength.” In northeastern North America (hereafter the
Northeast), villages became a ubiquitous part of the social landscape during
the Late Prehistoric period (ca. a.d. 900 to Contact), following the adoption of
maize horticulture as the primary subsistence strategy (Church and Nass 2002;
Hart and Means 2002; Smith 1992). Despite the widespread presence of village
sites in this region, archaeological studies at the community level remain at
their infancy.
A serious limitation on our understanding of the past peoples that once in-
habited the Late Prehistoric Northeast is that their af¤liations to historically
known tribes have been long lost or are ambiguous. Pre-Contact inhabitants
of a region that encompasses large portions of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana,
and most of Kentucky and West Virginia include groups referred to as “Poorly
Known Tribes of the Ohio Valley and Interior” (Trigger 1978:ix). Direct knowl-
edge of native inhabitants in this area is limited primarily to what can be ex-
tracted from the archaeological record.
The upper segment of the Ohio Valley has an archaeological record known
best from the remains of excavated village sites. Village sites from this re-
gion have been assigned to a taxonomic unit referred to as the “Monongahela
culture” (Figure 1). A robust understanding of village community organiza-

tion has been hampered by widespread use of the overly broad Monongahela
taxon, which was de¤ned within the cultural-historical paradigm in the 1930s
and 1950s (Means 2003). The Monongahela taxon subsumes a considerable
1
Village Spatial Layouts and
Social Organizations
amount of variation in the material expressions of cultural practices (Hart
1993; McHugh 1984; Raber et al. 1989:39), which differed over time and space.
The use of the Monongahela taxon has led to an overgeneralization of simi-
larities and a suppression of differences within and between village sites. Indi-
vidual village sites are often characterized as having been created according to
a broadly de¤ned typical settlement form. By ignoring or dismissing variation
between Monongahela taxon village sites, archaeologists have been unable to
successfully compare these sites within a developmental sequence. Complex so-
cial relationships too often have been reduced to a level of abstraction that has
little explanatory value, if considered at all. For reasons explored in Chapter 2,
the phrase “Monongahela tradition” is preferred over Monongahela taxon or
the more commonly used “Monongahela culture.”
Although the cultural af¤liations of Monongahela tradition populations are
not de¤nitively known, the manner in which they commonly con¤gured their
village sites is quite evident. Ongoing excavations beginning in the 1930s dem-
onstrated that Monongahela tradition village sites frequently consisted of a
circular or oval occupation zone that formed a band around a central open
space—a formally de¤ned plaza—devoid of most cultural features (George
1974; Hart 1993; Johnson 2001; Johnson et al. 1989; Mayer-Oakes 1955). That is,
their village sites were ring-shaped.
1. Maximum geographic extent of the Monongahela tradition.
2 / Chapter 1
The so-called typical ring-shaped Monongahela tradition village site as
described by regional scholars is a widespread, almost archetypal settlement

form. Ring-shaped settlements once existed throughout much of the Eastern
Woodlands, from New England and New York into Virginia and the Carolinas
and throughout the Middle and Upper Ohio Valleys (Bushnell 1919; Drooker
1997:48; Grif¤n 1978:559; Hart 1993; Johnson et al. 1989; Mayer-Oakes 1955;
Ward and Davis 1993). This basic settlement form has also been recorded else-
where in North America and throughout the world, including the camping
circles once formed by some native Plains Indian groups during annual buf-
falo hunts (Bushnell 1922:129; Dorsey 1884:215, 1894:523, 1897; Fletcher and La
Flesche 1911; Fraser 1968:20–21; Guidoni 1975:31–36; Lévi-Strauss 1953:528) and
in settlements 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), Puerto Rico (Siegel 1997:109), southern Africa (Kuper 1993;
Yellen 1977), and in early agricultural villages in Mesoamerica and the Near
East (Flannery 1972:30–38, 2002:422).
A ring-shaped village is the subject of John White’s iconic illustration of the
village of Pomeioc, located in what is now North Carolina (Figure 2). Pomeioc
and some of its inhabitants were painted by White following his visit to the
village in July 1585 as part of Sir Walter Ralegh’s failed attempt to establish a
colony in the New World (Hulton 1984:10; Quinn 1985:68). White’s watercolor
of Pomeioc depicts villagers actively interacting within a palisaded commu-
nity where a ring of houses surrounds an open plaza. Several individuals are
shown performing a ceremony around a rather large ¤re located in the cen-
ter of the plaza. Monongahela tradition villages likely would have resembled
Pomeioc, except that their dwellings had circular ®oor plans. The watercolors
of Pomeioc and its inhabitants are of unparalleled value; they breathe life into
an otherwise static past that often left few material traces (Quinn 1985:182).
Impermanent aspects of material culture captured by White include architec-
tural details and modes of personal dress, body adornment, and even hair styles
(Hulton 1984:27–28).

Ring-shaped sites in the Eastern Woodlands are not limited to villages in-
habited by maize agriculturalists of the recent past. Middle Archaic foragers in
Louisiana, for example, initiated construction of the Watson Brake mound
complex around 3350 b.c. (Saunders et al. 2005:631). Two curved earthworks
form an oval around an open area devoid of cultural remains. The two earth-
works consist of eleven mounds connected by arti¤cial ridges (Saunders et al.
2005:632). The central open area is thought to have served as ritual space and
the encircling ridges had a more domestic function (Saunders et al. 2005:631,
665). As explored in Chapter 4, Watson Brake is structured in a similar fashion
Village Spatial Layouts / 3
to more recent ring-shaped villages of the Eastern Woodlands, where a domes-
tic zone encircled a central ritual or ceremonial space.
The ring-shaped settlement form arose repeatedly and independently in
different times and places—and among cultures of varying complexity. The
phrase “ring shaped” was adopted in this work from Wüst and Barreto’s (1999)
characterization of Central Brazilian village settlements, the layouts of which
2. DeBry image of John White’s 1585 watercolor of the village of Pomeioc, North
Carolina (from Lorant, The New World, 1946).
4 / Chapter 1
closely correspond to those of many village sites in the Eastern Woodlands. The
ring-shaped village has been viewed as a fairly modular settlement form (Wills
1991:162), which readily enables its inhabitants to arrange material elements—
notably dwellings—to accommodate a wide variety of social organizations
present at varying scales. The layout of a ring-shaped settlement is intention-
ally manipulated to reinforce the local social order and often is explicitly per-
ceived as a microcosm of the universe, rather than passively re®ecting its con-
stituent social groups (Maybury-Lewis 1989a:11; Pearson and Richards 1994:12).
The act of linking their settlement’s layout to their model of reality en-
hances the stability of the local group (Fletcher 1977:64). In other words, the
inhabitants of ring-shaped settlements are cognizant on some level of the ac-

tive role that material elements and their arrangements play in maintaining,
perpetuating, and even generating social interactions (Fletcher and La Flesche
1911:138; Gross 1979:329, 337; James 1949:48; Lowie 1946a, 1946b; Means 1999a:35,
2000a:44, 2001, 2002a; Pearson and Richards 1994:12). Changes in village lay-
outs re®ect lessons learned from earlier manifestations of a community and
the development of new or modi¤cation of extant social institutions to better
manage increasingly large groups of people working and living alongside one
another (Carneiro 1967:239; Eggan 1955:495; Gumerman 1994:9).
Ring-shaped settlements attracted the attention of ethnographers as early
as the late nineteenth century, with some noting that these settlements are de-
signed by their inhabitants according to geometric models (Dorsey 1884:215,
1894:523, 1897). Especially beginning with the work of Lévi-Strauss in the 1950s,
ethnographers have argued that geometric models had social and ideological
dimensions. Community-wide planning principles generated by these geo-
metric models in®uence to some degree the spatial con¤guration of social
groups—and their associated architectural elements, especially dwellings. As
is evident from this work’s cross-cultural sampling of societies, presented in
Chapter 4, discrete social groups of varying sizes and levels of political, so-
cial, or economic integration can arrange themselves within their ring-shaped
settlements according to one of a variety of geometric models.
Ethnoarchaeological and archaeological studies in the latter half of the
twentieth century argued that geometric models in®uence the distribution of
activities within a ring-shaped settlement, usually with respect to the con¤gu-
ration of architectural remains (Dunnell 1983; Yellen 1977). Depending on their
nature, activities are arranged spatially with respect either to individual dwell-
ings or to the entire band of dwellings that encircle a central communal space.
That geometric models in®uence the distribution of activities, architec-
ture, and social spaces associated with social groups at ring-shaped settlements
should not come as a surprise. My review of these settlements indicates that
geometric models in®uence not only the locations of social groups but also the

locations of the material aspects of a settlement’s layout, resulting in a non-
Village Spatial Layouts / 5
random distribution of all or some material remnants. At known ring-shaped
villages, social groups are evident physically in the distributions and con¤gu-
rations of their dwellings. The placement of these dwellings structures inter-
actions within the village, including the nature and location of activities with
respect to individual dwellings and to all dwellings, which form an occupation
zone around the centrally located plaza. One can expect village social organi-
zations to be re®ected in the spatial arrangement of some or all material re-
mains at their village sites.
The comparatively large number of completely excavated village sites from
the Allegheny Mountains region of Pennsylvania are well suited to address-
ing three broad goals central to this work. First, geometric models responsible
for the con¤guration of all or some archaeologically recovered elements of
Monongahela tradition village sites should be determinable from each site’s
community pattern. Second, the kinds of social groups once present within
these village sites should be identi¤able at least to some degree from the na-
ture and con¤guration of archaeologically recovered elements. Third, objec-
tively identifying variation—if any—in village community patterns and corre-
sponding social organizations should enable a consideration of whether these
changed systematically over time. The third goal is directed toward potential
social transformations that may have occurred in village communities after
they emerged in the Upper Ohio Valley. This work is not concerned directly
with the question of why villages ¤rst emerged in this region.
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE
In recent American archaeology, a continued focus on the household as the
major unit of study has led some researchers to lose sight of a basic fact: house-
holds in village settlements intentionally chose to be part of a larger social
entity—the community. Village sites such as those inhabited in the Allegheny
Mountains region represented a particular type of community—the nucleated

community—and differed from communities made of dispersed households.
Yaeger and Canuto (2000) argued that the community as an entity in and of
itself has largely been neglected in many household archaeology studies, and
in larger-scale settlement pattern studies as well. To understand community
organization, one must examine patterning evident at the level of the entire
village site and not simply from one segment extrapolated to characterize an
entire village site. All too often, there is at least an implicit assumption that any
one segment of a village site—such as one or two households—is interchange-
able with other broadly similar segments. The concept of the community is the
appropriate scale for examining social relationships at and above the household
level (Adler 2002:25). I consider a theoretical framework that relies on anthro-
6 / Chapter 1
pological and ethnoarchaeological studies of community organization to be
best suited to interpreting the archaeologically recovered aspects of village lay-
outs in terms of village social organizations.
Studies of built environments and the social and behavioral use of space
indicate that a settlement’s layout, “society’s largest and most complex artefact”
(Parkington and Mills 1991:365, quoted in Widlok 1999:399), can shape and be
shaped by the various social groups present, as well as the activities that these
groups conduct within the settlement. The ring-shaped settlement is a special
case of a settlement form that is clearly built according to models that attempt
to impose and maintain a geometric order on the layout of the settlement as it
exists in a horizontal plane. As touched on earlier, a cross-cultural and cross-
temporal review of ring-shaped settlements and models developed to explain
their form and shape suggests that these geometric models used to spatially
order major social groups within a settlement re®ect an ideal framework—a
framework that frequently has a cosmological basis.
Because geometric models can spatially order both social groups and activi-
ties within a ring-shaped settlement, they generate activity structures that are
geometric in their patterning. Considering more broadly both cognitive and

behavioral aspects of these geometric models, one can argue that, for ring-
shaped villages, community-wide planning principles exist that in®uence the
organization of, and place certain constraints on, the intravillage distribution
of the architectural remains and social spaces that were created and main-
tained by various social groups. In other words, a community’s activity struc-
ture is generated partly by the interaction between village social groups with
the geometric models they used to plan a site’s layout. For these reasons, ring-
shaped settlements should be ideal for considering how social organizations
can appear on at least some level within the spatial structure of a settlement’s
layout. Although writing of village settlements in general, Gillespie (2000a:7)
underscored a similar point when she noted that the village is “a meaningfully
constituted layout around which people organize behaviors.”
More than one geometric model can operate at any one time or at different
stages in the occupational history of a settlement, depending on how social,
behavioral, and ideological factors affect the relationships that generate the
layouts of a given ring-shaped settlement. For example, one ideal geometric
model may have been responsible for the distribution of village social groups
and certain material elements, especially dwellings or dwelling clusters associ-
ated with the social groups. Other geometric models can then come into play
that act to in®uence the locations of various activities. Disposal of a commu-
nity’s more noxious refuse, for example, can take place in a ring outside of the
main occupation zone, regardless of how social groups and their associated
dwellings are distributed within this zone. Dwellings are expected to provide
Village Spatial Layouts / 7
one of the strongest indicators of a settlement’s geometric models, either with
respect to their own arrangement within a settlement or in terms of the dis-
tribution of other material elements relative to dwellings.
Thus, the basic premise of this study is that community organization can be
modeled from the remains of village sites; the layout of a village settlement can
re®ect past social organizations. There is a wide range of possible social groups

that could be represented spatially within a ring-shaped village. Social groups
could range from spatially discrete and functionally redundant households to
household clusters representing more formal corporate entities, such as line-
ages, clans, or Lévi-Straussian “societies of houses” (Brooks and Yellen 1987;
Dancey 1988; Hart 1993; Hull 1987; Lea 1995; Lévi-Strauss 1982; O’Connell 1987;
Pollack and Henderson 1992). The recently formulated Lévi-Straussian “socie-
ties of houses” concept describes a form of social organization where social
groups form to maintain “property” from generation to generation, including
their “ownership” of part of a village circle (Gillespie 2000a).
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM, MODELS, AND HYPOTHESES
The social transformations that occurred after Monongahela tradition popu-
lations—and other groups in the Northeast—shifted to seasonal or year-round
co-residence in village settlements are not well understood. For the Mononga-
hela tradition, this failure to fully understand social transformations associated
with living in villages stems partly from a lack of understanding of the orga-
nizing principles that generated the layouts of their ring-shaped settlements.
Not knowing until recently the age of occupation for many Monongahela tra-
dition village sites also curtailed efforts to determine whether there was a tem-
poral shift in the nature of the organizing principles that operated at these
sites. To address these issues, two sets of models with archaeological correlates
and one set of hypotheses were developed for this work.
The ¤rst set of models considers selected Monongahela tradition villages
in terms of geometric models that potentially characterize all or some aspects
of a village’s community pattern and were formulated following a review of
ethnohistorical, ethnographic, and archaeological studies of ring-shaped settle-
ments. The ¤rst model is concerned with whether the material remnants of a
village site form two discrete clusters, potentially indicating the former pres-
ence of a dual social organization. Assessment of the next four models helps
ascertain the nature of radial patterning present at a ring-shaped village site,
ranging from a generalized zone of features, artifacts, and dwellings around a

central plaza to functionally distinct radial bands. The sixth geometric model
considers whether the radial band or bands of material elements present at a
ring-shaped village are divided into discrete segments akin to pie wedges, i.e.,
8 / Chapter 1
representing circumferential patterning. A seventh model argues that radial
and circumferential patterning in the distribution of material elements at a
ring-shaped village site should be considered simultaneously.
The nature and types of village social groups are illuminated through ex-
amination of village sites in terms of the second set of models. Some kinds of
social groups that might have been present at Monongahela tradition village
sites include lineages, clans, sodalities, moieties, and Lévi-Straussian societies
of houses. The second set of models also generates a more thorough under-
standing of the social, behavioral, or ideological factors that acted to in®uence
speci¤c Monongahela tradition village layouts. These models assist a determi-
nation of whether households within a village were autonomous or more for-
mally linked, whether a dual organization or sodalities were present at a site,
and whether status distinctions in®uenced village spatial organizations.
Finally, intercommunity comparisons are considered through implementa-
tion of a set of hypotheses. These hypotheses examine whether villages in-
creased in size steadily through time—as some have argued—or whether the
range of village sizes increased through time—as others contend. Particular at-
tention is directed toward a consideration of whether observed variation be-
tween community patterns from individual sites re®ected directional cultural
change or individual responses to unique historical and local circumstances.
Examination of the ¤nal hypothesis should enable a determination of whether
larger village components were more recent and more structurally complex
than smaller village components.
NATURE OF THE DATA
The majority of excavated Monongahela tradition village sites—and many
other village sites in the Eastern Woodlands for that matter—are not well

suited to an examination of patterning at the community level because only a
small portion of their site plans were exposed horizontally. These village lay-
outs were usually revealed through relatively small and discontinuous excava-
tion blocks. Many uncertainties are generated in the modeling of community
patterns when village layouts are extrapolated from the excavated portions of
such sites. To facilitate this study, village components that were selected had
their community patterns completely, or nearly completely, exposed.
Most completely exposed Monongahela tradition village components were
excavated as part of federal relief excavations in Somerset County, Pennsylva-
nia, in the 1930s and 1940 (Figure 3) (Augustine 1938a, 1938b, 1938c, 1938d, 1940;
Butler 1939; Cresson 1942; Means 1998a). However, these village components
once lacked secure chronological data. No matter how objectively the differ-
ent village components can be compared, the amount of variation in village
Village Spatial Layouts / 9
organization that existed at any one point in time—and the degree to which
this variation was related to changes in intra- and intercommunity relations—
cannot be determined in the absence of reasonably secure chronological data;
nor can comparisons be made to general trends in the Northeast during the
Late Prehistoric period without these data. A project funded by the National
Science Foundation (NSF) enabled the ages of many of these village compo-
nents to be determined through accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating
of organic remains and ceramics with organic residues curated in museum col-
lections (see Chapter 2 for an overview; see also Means 2005a, 2006a; Means
and Galke 2004).
Whether excavated in the 1930s or more recently, Monongahela tradition
village sites investigated in this work are examined in terms of ¤ve major
groups of variables. Variable Group 1 is related to the overall nature of each
village component, including its areal extent and whether its layout was in®u-
3. Village sites investigated as part of federal relief excavations in Somerset County, Penn-
sylvania, between 1934 and 1940.

10 / Chapter 1
enced by topographic and environmental factors. Variable Group 2 pertains to
architectural elements and includes dwellings and post-enclosed features used
for storage. The size of individual dwellings and their distribution within each
village component offer one of the strongest lines of evidence for inferring the
nature of past village social groups.
Nonarchitectural features—such as hearths, graves, and pits of unknown
primary function—characterize Variable Group 3. These features provide a di-
rect indication of some activities and where they occurred, and to what extent
the activity structure of Monongahela tradition village communities was in®u-
enced by geometric models. Variable Group 4 consists of spaces de¤ned by ar-
chitectural elements, including the plaza. The phrase “ring-shaped village” im-
plies the presence of a plaza, which was usually the largest space within a
Monongahela tradition village and was one of the more important elements
in®uencing village layouts. Finally, Variable Group 5 considers material culture,
with a particular emphasis on how the distributions of artifact classes are use-
ful for examining whether geometric models in®uenced the distribution of dis-
crete activity areas. The spatial distribution of stylistic artifact classes and in-
dividual stylistic attributes also potentially reveals whether certain types of
village social organizations, such as dual organizations, were present.
CONCLUSIONS
Monongahela tradition village sites in this work are considered against geomet-
ric models that, at their root, are ideal representations of reality. These village
sites represent the remnants of past communities. Villagers lived and died here,
welcomed new members through birth or emigration, and saw others leave,
perhaps to join another village or to found new settlements of their own. How
well community patterns correlate to one or more of a suite of geometric
models is in®uenced—like any other archaeological site—by the once dynamic
nature of these communities and, of course, by postdepositional processes
(Ascher 1968; Schiffer 1987). It is expected that some individual Monongahela

tradition community patterns deviate considerably from the ideal geometric
models that in®uenced their layouts at their initial establishment.
Nonetheless, simply describing and quantifying spatial patterning within
each village’s layout in terms of models with a geometric basis—in and of
itself—produces an enhanced understanding of community organization. Spa-
tial patterning is examined here to infer the presence of and interrelationships
among various social groups, potentially allowing villages to be distinguished
along a rough continuum: from sites with households that appear to have
been fairly autonomous, to those with households apparently linked infor-
mally (e.g., informal economic pooling networks), to villages where house-
holds appear to have more formal, institutional kinds of social groups (e.g.,
Village Spatial Layouts / 11
lineages, clans, moieties, or Lévi-Straussian societies of houses). This study
suggests that social changes were generated in part by attempts to impose and
maintain a geometric order on the arrangement of various elements in a vil-
lage’s layout, beginning at its initial establishment. These geometric models
were balanced against the reality of living in a dynamic community, where
individuals—and the social groups of which they were a part—sometimes
made decisions that put them at odds with one another.
This work shows that analysis of village spatial layouts can lead to a greater
anthropological understanding of the past peoples who inhabited the Upper
Ohio Valley than the still prevalent cultural-historical emphasis on de¤ning a
“Monongahela culture.” Geometric models clearly were a major factor in®u-
encing the initial spatial layouts of Monongahela village components, espe-
cially dwelling clusters that indicated social divisions within a village. For-
mal economic, social, or political links between households are evident at all
Monongahela tradition village components that had layouts uncompromised
by postdepositional or other factors. These formal links appeared as dwell-
ing clusters that occupied discrete segments of dwelling rings at ring-shaped
Monongahela tradition villages. At some villages, these corporate groups were

small—approximately 15 to 20 residents—and probably represented extended or
multifamily groups. Other village sites had multidwelling corporate groups—
ranging from approximately 30 to 100 residents—that were minimally lineage
segments, clans, or perhaps a form of social organization akin to the Lévi-
Straussian society of houses concept. Evidence for other types of social groups
that one might have expected at Monongahela tradition village sites was lim-
ited and ambiguous. Further, contrary to expectations based on a reading of
the literature, ring-shaped Allegheny Mountains region villages that were more
recent in the local developmental sequence did not necessarily have better de-
signed layouts than older village components.
This focus on examining ring-shaped village spatial layouts in terms of
geometric models can be extended to sites located throughout the Eastern
Woodlands—and beyond—regardless of “cultural” af¤liation. Although this
work uses Monongahela tradition village sites as the primary case studies, the
organizational principles underlying their settlements are not unique to the Up-
per Ohio Valley. Rather than comparing one “culture” to another, archaeolo-
gists can use the tools and techniques presented in this work to objectively ana-
lyze and directly compare the spatial structure of ring-shaped settlements and
also to elucidate how potential social organizations were distributed within
these settlements according to geometric models. Such an effort will success-
fully challenge our ideas about social organizational change in the Eastern
Woodlands during the last few centuries before sustained European contact.
12 / Chapter 1