Archaeologists in many areas of the world have noted that arcuate community layouts have been common and persistent across space and time. Examples of communities arranged in arcs, circles, ovals, and other curved forms are replete in the archaeological and ethnographic record. Yet, this ubiquity of form belies immense underlying variability in cultural significance and historical patterning. This volume, coedited by Martin Menz, Analise Hollingshead, and Haley Messer, effectively highlights this variability in two useful ways: first, the contributors focus largely on the Woodland period (ca. 1000 BC–AD 1050) in the Eastern Woodlands of the United States—a period that has been less frequently synthesized, especially in terms of settlement organization, than its chronological “bookends” of the earlier Archaic period and the later Mississippian period; second, the chapters present diverse analytical approaches to understanding arcuate settlement layouts in the archaeological record.

The volume’s case studies are organized into three sections based on analytical scale: domestic units, community-scale organizing principles, and variability and change across space and time. The first three chapters focus on the constituent element of communities—the household. Michael Russo outlines the challenges, both real and perceived, that have constrained the study of Woodland period ring midden structures at sites in coastal Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. He suggests that a combination of factors, ranging from theory to archaeological doctrine and methodological limitations, have implicitly conspired to leave these sites less well understood than their nonmidden counterparts. He suggests that these sites, especially those of the Woodland period, deserve more attention and an application of both new and traditional lessons from ethnology and ethnoarchaeology, particularly in the form of careful topographical examination to identify discrete households. Karen Y. Smith and colleagues’ contribution illustrates that the combination of careful absolute chronological assessment can lead to new insights from other kinds of data. Via their examination of the Hartford site in southern Georgia, they demonstrate that although variation in ceramic designs at single sites could be interpreted as an indication of long-term occupation, they instead show that there is contemporary intracommunity stylistic variation, which opens new avenues for investigation into the social mechanisms that supported or precluded the sharing of the carved paddles used to impart designs onto ceramic surfaces. Shaun E. West et alia bridge this section and the one that follows by reconstructing overlapping intrasettlement patterns of organization of households within the “village of villages” that comprises the site of Kolomoki, in southern Georgia. Kolomoki features evidence of numerous—and perhaps mutually supporting—geometric schemes of spatial organization, and West et alia argue that the site is one of many examples of this patterning, which demonstrates that such schemes have a deep history in the Indigenous Southeast.

The contributors to the second section of the volume focus on the underlying social principles of arcuate communities. Megan C. Kassabaum et alia examine circular ring midden sites in the Lower Mississippi Valley, focusing on evidence from the Feltus site in Mississippi to evaluate the extant evidence relating to its changing form and development over time. They argue that although spatial discontinuity and chronological uncertainty in its midden’s history will only be fully resolved with further off-mound investigations, and even though this is worthy of further examination, it is just as productive, if not more so, to acknowledge that the ring midden at Feltus is a product of its plaza; at Feltus, as elsewhere, the plaza, and its contained activities, was the structuring element in its residents’ depositional practices. Bernard K. Means offers a methodological intervention to the study of circular spatial arrangements, arguing that archaeologists should make more meaningful, direct comparisons between sites to better understand the variation between actual past cultures and not the uncritical archaeological stand-ins that we have used to frame our discussions and investigations for decades. His chosen case of the “Monongahela tradition” in the Ohio River valley and surrounding areas of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, is particularly burdened by the archaeological frameworks of the past half century, along with its “neighbor,” the Fort Ancient culture. Means argues that polar coordinate systems may be much better suited to statistical analysis and cross-comparison of circular spatial arrangements. By examining the Fort Hill cultural site in Pennsylvania, he argues that although practical considerations may sometimes have dominated the spatial plans of growing villages, culturally meaningful geometric models were ever present. Jayur M. Mehta and Tara Skipton examine the material aspects and connections that imbued ovular earthen mound sites in the Mississippi River Delta region of Louisiana with meaning, harkening to—if not directly referencing—the Muskogean creation story of Earth Diver. Drawing on analyses of volumes and viewsheds as determined through studying lidar data, they argue that these monumental sites shaped, and were shaped by, the watery floodplains and deep human history of this wetland landscape.

The contributions of the third section of the volume focus on the comparison of accurate forms between sites and across time. Robert A. Cook et alia problematize the concept of the village, critiquing the typical use of scale as a defining characteristic, and they argue that villages are better understood by the nature of the integrative social relations that facilitated these permanent, multihousehold living situations. They offer case studies of the two earliest recognized villages associated with the Fort Ancient archaeological tradition in southwestern Ohio: the Guard and Turpin site. They illustrate that integrative mechanisms (e.g., public structures and shared mortuary facilities) that constitute the village emerged during the Late Woodland and co-occurred with the increasing adoption of agriculture and were perhaps spread by the movements of people throughout the Eastern Woodlands, albeit with distinct sociopolitical trajectories: either in favor of or resistant to institutional hierarchies. The following chapter by William Green et alia provides a synthesis of Woodland period settlement forms for the Middle Woodland and early Late Woodland periods in the Midcontinent. Using the Gast Farm site in southeastern Iowa as an example, they demonstrate that although the circular spatial form of its two occupational components may have remained similar across time, the constituent elements of settlement (e.g., occupation duration, seasonality, feature diversity, etc.) were markedly different for these Hopewell and post-Hopewell communities. In highlighting these distinctions, the authors contend that although the circular arrangement of the villages at Gast Farm was formed from different patterns of lifeways separated by time, the integrative role of circular arrangements endured. Menz et alia conclude the section by reviewing research on Woodland period ring middens along the northern Gulf Coast in Florida, and they present a synthesized historical trajectory of their development and decline. In so doing, they demonstrate the promise of other similar syntheses in terms of making data available for comparative analyses—an important step in understanding the complex relationships evident in village life in terms of sedentism, population density, political organization, and integrative institutions.

The volume closes with a chapter by Thomas J. Pluckhahn and Neill J. Wallis, which takes a global perspective on circular community plans, spanning both geography and time. They review several general explanations of the appearance and use of circular village forms (e.g., sociality, mental models, corporeal needs, and ecological benefits), and they note that none of these proffered rationales are mutually exclusive. Ultimately, the volume shows the productive diversity of approaches that contemporary archaeologists apply in examining the lifeways and social processes that structured “life in the round” for small-scale and middle-range societies. This timely review is a valuable compilation of recent research on arcuate ancestral Native American communities postdating the earlier and more thoroughly studied Archaic period. Yet, it only begins to hint at the potential for productive synthesis of such data as it offers new ways of engaging with decades of accumlated archaeological data and interpretations. In the same way that they do with respect to the cultural underpinnings of circular forms, Pluckhahn and Wallis show that the variety of methodological and theoretical approaches offered by the contributors of the volume are themselves not mutually exclusive. How, for example, would an understanding of the use of the Feltus plaza and its implications be contextualized by a Bayesian chronology of any identifiable, discrete deposition events? How might the viewshed of Fort Hill have influenced its establishment and eventual decline as a single element of a dynamic settlement landscape? The scholarship presented in the volume promises further and future insights about village layouts, circular or otherwise. I recommend The Archaeology of Arcuate Communities to not only archaeologists working in the Eastern Woodlands of the United States but anyone who may be exploring the diversity of methods and approaches currently being employed to enhance our understandings of how past people experienced life in the round.