Across time and space, a signi¤cant shift in how social groups con¤gured themselves
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 inhabited
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 knowledge
of native inhabitants in this area is limited primarily to what can be extracted
from the archaeological record.