Connected communities joins a long tradition of regional-scale analyses of social identity and change in the ancient American Southwest. This topic is familiar among Southwest archaeologists; what Peeples brings to the table, however, is a framework drawn from relational sociology that emphasises how identities are fluidly shaped through interaction and contact. His case study is settlement change in the Cibola region (east-central Arizona and west-central New Mexico) during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries AD. For readers unfamiliar with the Southwest, this period roughly began with the dissolution of the Chacoan system and culminated in a major phase of migration and resettlement that reshaped the entire Pueblo world. The Cibola region witnessed an unprecedented aggregation into large towns centred on expansive plazas. Peeples promises a “novel theoretical approach for tracking social identification at regional scales” (p. 5) that can shed light on this transformative period.
Chapter 2 lays out an integrated framework for examining ‘categorical’ and ‘relational identities’. The latter draws on relational sociology as well as practice-orientated models in anthropology that emphasise the fluidity of identity and its emergence through social action. With the Cibola region in mind, he sets out to evaluate the notion that significant episodes of change can involve “increasing consolidation of relational social ties followed by the creation, elaboration, and spread of new and more distinct categorical identities” (p. 38). Peeples sees the Cibola case study as an emergent catnet, a term used to denote circumstances that combine robust relational networks with ‘homogeneous’ categorical expressions. In the modern world, such instances are transformative and seed collective actions. These outcomes are not limited to contemporary settings, as he suggests, but are relevant to parsing out identity formation in pre-state, non-centralised societies. He is explicitly concerned with how these two modes of identity intersect. Chapter 3 outlines the relevant culture-history of the region, and, importantly, what he means by ‘social transformation’ in the context of this time and place.
Pottery and architecture are the bread and butter of scholarship on identity in the ancient Southwest, so it comes as no surprise that both are central to Peeples’s study. Much of the data presented in these middle chapters are not original except for additional compositional studies; nonetheless, his survey is comprehensive and unprecedented. Three chapters examine patterns in ceramic production, distribution and use. Chapter 4 explores patterns in the production of ceramics based on compositional data, with attention to how the movement of vessels across the Cibola region reveals ‘relational connections’. Peeples uses a vast neutron activation analysis (NAA) database to suggest that the circulation of painted ceramics reveals increasing connectedness of relational identities to collective ritual in plazas and other public settings. He turns his attention to unpainted pottery in Chapter 5. Similarities in technological patterning and production speak to relational networks at smaller geographic scales. Chapter 7 picks up on the ideas presented at the end of Chapter 4. Peeples emphasises the importance of painted pots and their designs, which “communicated” and reaffirmed what he refers to as the expression of collective and increasingly “homogeneous identities” (p. 172) in public ritual and other social activities.
Two other chapters summarise architectural patterns across time and geographic space. In Chapter 6, he assembles a large corpus of data from publications and field reports to address the configuration of domestic structures and their internal features. Features such as hearths and grinding bins reflect relational intersections based on “frequent interaction and historical connections” (p. 142). With an eye on broader cultural interactions in the region, Peeples uses Chapter 8 to outline patterning in public architecture, or what he refers to as a “venue for interaction at a large scale and a symbol of the shared traditions that are enacted in those spaces” (p. 173). Based on architectural patterns and data presented in other chapters, he argues that ceremonial spaces, along with painted ceramics, evoked expressions of converging identities in the Cibola region, particularly the Zuni area.
The book’s final chapter (9) synthesises the ceramic and architectural patterns. He identifies two discrete relational networks in the study area, noting their resemblance to the culture groups defined nearly a century ago (the so called ‘Anasazi’ and ‘Mogollon’). Categorical identities show some overlap, perhaps corresponding to new and larger forms of collective ritual. The patterns, however, differ across several areas and Peeples uses these divergences to parse out various pathways of cultural change in the region. He leans on two well-designed figures that convey patterns across four time intervals. In the end, he characterises the Zuni area in the central Cibola region as a probable catnet with robust relational ties through time and emergent categorical identities that were reified through ceremonialism. Peeples concludes, rightly, I think, that his model can better inform contemporary discussions of tribal cultural affiliation.
Connected communities is a well-written and significant contribution to the field of Southwestern studies. Archaeologists have long been captivated with large-scale settlement dynamics, but Peeples offers a novel way to think about the intersections of identities and networks and how these shaped the histories of entire regions in the past.
