Abandonment of Settlements and Regions: Ethnoarchaeological and Archaeological Approaches, edited by Catherine M. Cameron and Steve A. Tomka. Cambridge University Press. 1993.
The Ouachita Mountains: A Guide for Fishermen, Hunters, and Travelers, by Milton D. Rafferty and John C. Catau. Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press. 1991. 308 pages, notes, references, index

Early, Ann M.

Vaughn, Heidi

English

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Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State Volume 1994 Article 7 1994 Book Reviews Ann M. Early Unknown Heidi Vaughn Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/ita  Part of the American Material Culture Commons, Archaeological Anthropology Commons, Environmental Studies Commons, Other American Studies Commons, Other Arts and Humanities Commons, Other History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons, and the United States History Commons Tell us how this article helped you. Repository Citation Early, Ann M. and Vaughn, Heidi (1994) "Book Reviews," Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State: Vol. 1994 , Article 7. https://doi.org/10.21112/.ita.1994.1.7 ISSN: 2475-9333 Available at: https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/ita/vol1994/iss1/7 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by SFA ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State by an authorized editor of SFA ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact cdsscholarworks@sfasu.edu. Book Reviews Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. This article is available in Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State: https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/ita/vol1994/iss1/7 CADDOAN ARCHEOLOGY NEWSLETTER BOOK REVIEWS Abandonment of Settlements and Re-gions : Ethnoarchaeological and Ar-chaeological Approaches, edited by Catherine M. Cameron and Steve A. Tomka . Cambridge University Press . 1 993. This volume has much to offer archeol ogi sts working in the Caddoan area even though only one article, by Robert L . Brooks, deals with a site that has a di-rect relation~hip to the region . Archeologists have long known that the sites they investigate are almost never literally 'snapshots' of any moment frozen in time, and a great deal of ef -fort over the last 15 years has gone into identifying and evalu-a t ing t he natura l and cultural processes that together have p ro-duced those sites . Much of this work has investigated formation processes, how artifacts and de-bris accumulate and are altered by cultural and natural forces. The effects of human behavior in the abandonment of artifacts, settle -ments, and r egions are often not e xplicitely addressed, however, when we analyze the remains- that we use to characterize prehistor ic lifeways . These essays which come from two 1990 SAA symposia on abandonment as an archeological process are good i l lustrations of how abandon-ment is a compl ex and varied set of behaviors that can significant-ly affect site assemblages and regional settlemen t patterns, and thereby can condition models of prehi s t o r ic societies . Bracketed by an introductory essay on abandonment and archeo-logical interpretation by Cameron, and a summary paper by co- editors Tomka and Stevenson, the 13 topi -18 cal essays are divided into four sections that represent two dif -ferent approaches and two scales of investigation. Part II contains five papers dealing with ethno -archeol ogical studies of regiona l abandonment processes, Part III presents three archeological stud-ies of regional abandonment, Part IV narrows the spatial focus to the level of the site with two ethnoarcheological studies, and Part V contains a group of three site level archeo l ogical studies of abandonment behavior . The papers in Parts I I and IV describe abandonment behavior in a wide array of cultur es, most of which are argrarian to one degree or another . The studies inc l ude subsistence agro-pastoralists in Bolivia, northern Mexico , and norther n I r an, Botswana Kalahari herder - foragers, modern Zuni farm-ers, rural Oaxacan peasants, and Nigerian and F.uroAmerican agrarian societies. Each is a capsule re -view of human ecology, and an e xamination of the linkages be-tween settlements , subsistence ecology, abandonment behavior, and the physical remains left at sites. One point that these papers strongly relate is that abandon-ment can be a continual process, that some lifestyles i nvolve a pat tern of periodic abandonment and reoccupation of the same buildings, sites, or localities after intervals that range from a few months to many years . The relationship between a site assem-b l age and a range of activities that took place at the site is signficantly affected by the re-moval of items from an unoccupied settlement which may happen al l at once or gradual l y over many years . The resulting material signature may s uggest a far different life history for a site than the ethno-graphic account relates. Steve Tomka's article on abandonment patterns at Bolivian agro-pastoralist sites is particularly noteworthy. His analysis of assem-blages based on manufacturing type, use category, and condition, and comparisons with corresponding cultural pract ices of seasonal subsistence and mobility shows how complex the relationship between assemblages and behaviors are, how importan t the impact of 'delayed curation' or the periodic removal of some artifacts from abandoned sites is, and how key artifacts diagnostic of site function may disappear from an archeological assemblage gradually over several years of site abandonment . Another significant point drawn from all of these studies is the dynamic na ture of settlement in these horticultural societies. Even within 'permanent' communi-ties or residences, families rou-tinely leave their 'main' resi -dence for periods of time. The collective result is a multipli-cation of sites within the land-scape, and a far more complex web of subsistence and settlement relationships than archeo logical models normally present . When this dynamism is added to the complex of behavior·s related to abandon-ment ( each ing some objects, se -l ect ing others for immediate re-moval, and the delayed removal of others over t he course of site abandonment) , the message to arch-eologists is that simple taxono-mies of site types and direct conclusions of site function that are extracted from their excavated assemblages are almost certainly wro ng, or at the least very over-simplified . The archeological studies in Parts III and V are fewer than the ethnoarcheological cases and come from only three regions . I suspect 19 Volume 5 Number 3 that this reflects the smaller number of archeologists who have investigated abandonment behavior in purely prehistoric contexts. Four describe research in the U.S. Southwest, one looks at Copper Age regional abandonment in coastal Portugal, and Brooks's a rticle deals with the abandonment behav -ior at the Washita River phase Arthur Site . Brooks's article shows one ap-proach to looking at abandonment practices that has direct applica-tion to Caddoan sites. He firs t reviews ethnohistoric and ethnographic data on household use and abandonment among several Plains Village societies, and then looks at artifact and feature data from houses excavated at the Ar-thur site to identify a number of criteria useful for investigating abandonment patterns among the houses at the site. Post hole characteristics, the size and distribution of artifacts and construction elements on house floors, and refit sequences are identified as variables that can be used to e xamine abandonment processes at the site . As the ethnoarcheological studies in this volume show, there are in addicion many other ways that the life histories of buildings, communi-ties, and regions can be examined from the perspective of abandon-ment signatures . Why is this approach useful to Caddoan research? There are many current characterizations of and important questions about prehis-toric Caddoan lifeways that could be i nvestigated from the perspec-tive of abandonment. For example, models of settlement pattern change through time and of popula-tion densities within communities and across regions are dependent on assumptions about residential contemporaneity. An investigation of explicit evidence of abandon -ment behavior in households is one 

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