This book comprises papers presented at a symposium at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The symposium organizers and book editors, Amy E. Clark and Joseph A. M. Gingerich, have brought together a variety of current approaches to intrasite spatial analysis. Bookended by Clark's introductory chapter and an afterword by both editors, the body of the book has 10 chapters organized into three parts: “The Role of Formation Processes and Occupation Dynamics on Site Structure,” “Site Use and Patterns of Discard,” and “Elucidating Social Structure from Spatial Patterning.”
In the first chapter in Part I, Francesco Carrer describes an ethnoarchaeological study of trampling inside two historic herder's huts in the Italian Alps. He uses Moran's I statistics to analyze traffic zones and activity areas within a small seasonal residence and a small shed for the production and storage of cheese.
Next, Reuven Yeshurun analyzes materials recovered from an excavation of a rockshelter in Israel in which Natufians constructed and occupied a rock-walled room and then, over time, refloored and reoccupied the room at least 11 times. Over time and subsequent reflooring, the walls created spatial constraints on activities, and spatial patterning in debris was consistent from one stage to another.
Briggs Buchanan and Marcus J. Hamilton compare the camp size of single occupations and the number of “household features” in the ethnographic record of eight tropical hunter-gatherer societies to archaeological data from numerous Folsom sites in the North American Plains. The authors equate archaeological site size with ethnographic evidence of camp size, and the numbers of excavated or surface artifact clusters with ethnographic data about the numbers of household features including huts, hearths, and windbreaks. They find similar scaling between camp size and numbers of clusters in the two groups. Further comparisons with ethnographic studies of camps of hunter-gatherer encampments in temperate and arctic environments might be informative.
The final chapter of Part I, by Brian F. Codding and David W. Zeanah, examines site structure using the marginal value theorem for interpreting relationships between site size and the number of foragers and between the number of features and length of residence.
The first chapter of Part II is a study by Gingerich of refitting lithic artifacts, exotic raw materials, features, and their spatial distributions at the Shawnee-Minisink Paleoindian site in Pennsylvania. The contributions of this chapter are lessened somewhat because the text refers to excavation units that are inconsistent with the figures, and captions refer to colors on a grayscale map (pp. 56–57).
In the next chapter, Brooke M. Morgan uses contour maps to describe and explain the distribution of microdebitage in and around a Folsom house at the Mountaineer site in Colorado to identify a possible outside work area. I find these distribution maps problematic because the contour maps use artifact weights without clearly telling the reader the units or interval. The maps also do not show the limits of excavations, which is important for evaluating the impacts of edge effects noted in the chapter.
In the last chapter in this part, James G. Enloe illustrates several examples of the modular approach to spatial analysis, including comparisons of a spectacular photograph of a butchering area at the Magdalenian site of Verberie, France, to an ethnoarchaeological map of a Nunamiut butchering area in Alaska. However, the real “meat” of the chapter is the application of the modular approach to distributions of shell, bone, ceramics, and lithics to understand site-formation processes at a small Woodland occupation in an excavated rockshelter in Iowa.
Part III begins with an innovative ethnoarchaeological chapter about gender and the use of space in houses of the Dukha of Mongolia by Todd A. Surovell, Matthew J. O'Brien, and Randall Haas. They make a good case for considering impacts of gender on artifact assemblages from residences, especially if men's activities are usually conducted outside the house.
Scott Ortman, Laura L. Scheiber, and Zachary Cooper use the Wyoming database of archaeological sites to examine scaling in space use among stone circle sites. Using data on circle count, density, and clustering on almost 3,000 sites, they conclude that the use of space in stone circle sites resembles that found in typical, ethnographically documented hunter-gatherer camps.
The last chapter, by O'Brien and Danny N. Walker, reports new spatial analyses of Wyoming's Eden-Farson site, a protohistoric encampment and mass kill of pronghorn antelope. Those excavations were well reported by George C. Frison in 1971, and O'Brien and Walker take his work and the curated collection further. XRF sourcing of obsidian artifacts and refitting faunal remains excavated from 10 lodges in the encampment indicate from where the campers had come prior to the kill: these data shed light on patterns of intracamp meat sharing that reflect social organization and band origins.
The chapters are interesting and thoughtful, they reference each other frequently, and they fit well together. Readers interested in recent approaches to spatial analysis in hunter-gatherer archaeology will find this book useful.
