This volume is the latest publication of proceedings of the biennial Southwest Symposium. These conferences focus on important contemporary themes in the archaeology of the Southwest as a whole, whereby patterns in local areas reflect broader trends and processes. This approach transcends boundaries such as culture areas and modern geopolitical borders to place the Southwest within broader interpretive contexts.

The theme of this set of essays is social interaction, which Harry and Roth relate to different perspectives: diffusion (an introduction and four other chapters), social units (six chapters), and the northern periphery (an introduction and six other chapters). Some chapters are true gems, with enduring value; some, less so. Southwest specialists will find something of interest here, and some chapters have broader appeal.

Cameron introduces the chapters about diffusion by arguing that diffusion is far more complicated and nuanced than is often thought. She encourages considerations of how cultural practices are transmitted between societies or groups therein, including the role of captives, and ensuing chapters develop sophisticated models about processes of diffusion. Mills and Peeples illustrate how social network analyses advance knowledge about the spread of Roosevelt Red Ware, building on Patricia Crown's study of Salado polychrome pottery. Hays-Gilpin and others move beyond simple migration explanations of similarities in painted pottery and kiva murals between Pottery Mound in New Mexico and the Hopi mesas of Arizona. Gilman and coauthors trace the source of scarlet macaws at Mimbres sites to direct contact with Mesoamerica, rather than down-the-line bird trade, and they argue that some painted Mimbres pottery designs depict a Hero Twins saga that originated in Mesoamerica. I agree that specific Mimbres vessels are depictions of this saga rather than naturalistic portrayals of daily life, but I am not yet convinced that the saga derives from Mesoamerica rather than from a deep history and widespread mythology underlying societies throughout the Southwest, Mesoamerica, and beyond. Eckert examines the malleable and ongoing process of identity formation and the role played by culture contact.

Six chapters on groups and interaction focus on the architecture of domesticity and ritual to infer past social configurations and interactive networks. An exception, and one of the more provocative contributions, is the chapter in which Miller argues that burned rock plant baking pits, commonly used in deserts of the U.S. Southwest for cooking sotol and agave hearts, were not just mundane features linked to subsistence but rather played important roles in “political economies, community organization, and social production” (p. 251). The crucial link in his argument is use of these features to create fermented beverages and food for communal feasts focused on social reciprocity.

Other chapters in this section consider Mimbres households (Roth), contemporaneous use of pit houses and masonry rooms in the Kayenta region (Stone), community development in diverse environments of the Jornada Mogollon region (Rocek), Hohokam communities as house societies (Klucas and Graves), and ritual structures and ritual performance in the southern Chuska Valley (Douglass and others). The Chuska Valley chapter would benefit from considering other excavated pit houses and kivas in this region. The Hohokam chapter generates contrasting population estimates of “Houses” at the Richter site, one based on structure floor area and the other on burials. If the cemetery population significantly under- or overestimates that based on architecture, then the “social landscape of individual Houses, including ritual space, extended beyond the settlement documented at the Richter Site” (p. 212). This argument is interesting, but excavated areas shown in Figures 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5 reveal portions of structures extending outside those areas and burials and other features at the edges. How much was left unexposed that might alter estimates and interpretations? Stone argues that architectural differences at Kayenta sites reflect families with different learning frameworks, but designations of surface rooms as pit houses and semisubterranean rooms as surface rooms, as at the Three Dog site, raise concerns. Identifying pit houses extending from surface masonry rooms that form the back of plaza pueblos such as Neskahi Village and Surprise Pueblo as structures built by families distinct from those associated with attached masonry rooms is unconvincing. These Pueblo III settlements represent enlarged forms of typical Kayenta unit pueblos that proliferated during Pueblo II.

The third section begins with an overview of cultural developments in what Allison calls the northern frontier, sometimes known as the “northern periphery.” Allison cautions that the frontier label might also rankle, but this does not alter the borderland status of Fremont and Virgin areas, at least after the spread of farming into the Southwest. His chapter is interesting, but I doubt that the Chaco phenomenon drove people to occupy uninhabited areas (“shatter zones”) that filled in the landscape and linked the frontier. Chapters by Harry and by Ahlstrom consider sites in Nevada, Talbot considers the Fremont regional system, and Johansson considers Fremont architecture and social organization. Less is known about the northern periphery than about other areas of the Southwest, and the fact that a single CRM excavation project at Jackson Flat Reservoir (Roberts) can make such dramatic new discoveries is testament to how much more there is to learn. Richards considers Fremont pottery and clues about relationships with Ancestral Pueblo groups. I agree that Sosi, Dogoszhi, and Black Mesa Black-on-white pottery (all Kayenta types) make poor parallels for Fremont pottery. She finds better correlates in eastern Puebloan types such as Red Mesa, Cortez, and White Mesa Black-on-white. If this is true, then the Kayenta types of Wepo or late Kana-a Black-on-white should also be considered.

This interesting book derives from the Fourteenth Southwest Symposium in 2012. The seventeenth iteration of this biennial conference convened in early 2020, just before the coronavirus pandemic precluded such gatherings.