The Archaeology of Houses and Households in the Native Southeast

“This work is highly recommended for the overview of the development of architecture for the Woodland, Mississippian, and Historic Indian periods (200 BC to AD 1800); for its identification of the shift of maize agriculture as an economic approach to domestic architectural change; and for its summary of interesting research topics for the future.”
—North American Archaeologist
 
“Archaeologist Steere presents a detailed analysis of changes in Native American domestic buildings between about 200 BCE and 1800 CE in the US Southeast and Mississippi Valley. His data-rich presentation covers details as complex as wall construction as well as more generalized features, such as shape, floor area and interior division, and settlement planning. Combining data sets with illustrations of houses and statistical analyses, the book is an academic study indispensable for libraries serving programs in anthropology, archaeology, and history, and regional programs in the US Southeast. Essential.”
—CHOICE
 
“The Archaeology of Houses and Households in the Native Southeast is certain to become an essential reference for anyone doing native archaeology in the Southeast.”
—Robin Beck, author of Chiefdoms, Collapse, and Coalescence in the Early American South and coeditor of Fort San Juan and the Limits of Empire: Colonialism and Household Practice at the Berry Site
 

“The book is an important contribution to household archaeology for many reasons, and some of Steere’s results are summarized here to illustrate the significance of his work. His findings indicate that environmental factors are not key to explaining architectural variability. Economic factors, such as major changes in subsistence economy, and social factors, such as status differences within a community, are more important. Also, the variability in house size and form at many Mississippian sites fits with the expecta­tions of intra-community social ranking or stratification, although Steere points out that the range of variability in domestic architecture does not fit with simplistic distinc­tions between elites and commoners.”
—American Antiquity

“A critically important work that moves beyond mere synthesis and summary, and includes interpretations of southeastern Indian lifeways only possible through an appropriate matching of methodology, scale of analysis, and an incredible amount of data.”
—Ramie A. Gougeon, coeditor of Archaeological Perspectives on the Southern Appalachians: A Multiscalar Approach