The transition to agriculture, social complexity, and village life are important and often coupled developments that occur in many human cultures. However, as many scholars have noted in recent decades, there are alternate pathways to these ends, and they are by no means always linked together. These important archaeological topics are addressed in New Histories of Village Life at Crystal River. This study offers a refreshing new look at Crystal River, an important and well-known site located on the west coast of Florida that was used over a lengthy span from roughly the first millennium BC to the first millennium AD.

The book is organized into eight chapters. The first chapter situates the study theoretically, with a focus on both historical and general evolutionary concerns, and geographically, in the context of coastal wetland, riverine, and estuarine locales. The second chapter describes the site's environmental and archaeological history and context. Chapters 3 through 7 summarize changes at the Crystal River site, from its initial emergence as a vacant ceremonial center to an early village, to its emergence as a regional political center, to the development of other community centers nearby, such as the Roberts Island site. Chapter 8 situates the major findings in broader perspective, highlighting similarities and differences with village origins in other world areas. An afterword argues for the current relevance of such archaeological investigations of climate, culture, and resiliency.

I commend the authors for several strengths of this book. They have painstakingly gathered an impressive array of data to situate the Crystal River site in its environmental and cultural context, highlighting the role of climate change and flooding for hunter-gatherers in this region. They admirably integrate the results of legacy excavations with their geophysical surveys and targeted excavations including soil cores and test units, isotopic analysis of shell, and a robust dating program. The authors also do well in situating their study theoretically. They provide a good overview of general evolutionary theories as well as historical ones (which they seem to prioritize) with respect to village origins. Their goal is to better understand village origins in terms of the contributing competitive and cooperative forces behind their formation, of which they find more support for the latter in this case. They have difficulty with the label “complex hunter-gatherers,” and they argue that the phrase does not apply to this case study, due to the broader concern that the archaeological literature on complex hunter-gatherers often assumes that villages can only be present in the context of agricultural economies. A key strength of their argument concerns establishing the long chronology and potential changes in the social and ceremonial significance of an important mound center. In doing so, they are able to examine diachronic trends that shift from initial use as a vacant ceremonial center to later uses of the site with more emphasis on domestic occupation and political activity within the region.

The main critique I have of the book is that, given its focus on early village life, greater attention should have been placed on defining exactly what constitutes a village and the related issue of material evidence needed to identify them. Pluckhahn and Thompson focus on the presence of midden deposits as constituting evidence for a village, which then allows them to base the study on a very limited amount of new excavation data (12 cores, three 1 × 2 m units, and one 1 × 4 m unit), wherein they encountered midden deposits in some places and a few postholes in one location. But do a few midden deposits and postholes a village make? Maybe so, and much of their argument does seem plausible, but skeptics will be left wanting. Clearly, there are more and different food remains over time and seasonal uses shifted as the site became more intensively utilized. But are villages the only interpretive possibility? Alternatives would have been useful to consider, if only to rule out.

Aside from this criticism, Pluckhahn and Thompson have written a very good book that deserves to be read by a broad audience. It pulls together much new data of use for furthering our understanding of the emergence of and shifting roles played by an important early mound site and a persistent monumental place in the US Southeast. While limited in extent, their excavations do nicely complement previous excavations that focused on mound contexts. Their results are good vertical windows into site stratigraphy and deposits that should be examined further through larger-scale excavations. This book offers new interpretations for Crystal River and other coastal archaeological sites in Florida from this period, it situates the development and composition of an important site in relation to key theoretical debates in anthropology, and it provides abundant room for future study. In these senses, it does what all good books should do—it moves the discipline forward.