This volume reports on a series of multidisciplinary projects involving the Archaic period of the American Midwest. A period of innovation and technical achievement, the articles focus on changes in environmental, social, and economic factors operating in this period, and the adaptation of the hunter gatherer peoples living at this time.

Essential overview of American Indian societies during the Archaic period across central North America.

Although it has been occupied for as long and possesses a mound-building tradition of considerable scale and interest, Muller contends that the archaeology of the lower Ohio River Valley—from the confluence with the Mississippi to the falls at Louisville, Kentucky – remains less well-known that that of the elaborate mound-building cultures of the upper valley. This study provides a synthesis of archaeological work done in the region, emphasizing population growth and adaptation within an ecological framework in an attempt to explain the area’s cultural evolution.

Archaeologists, anthropologists, and classicists discuss how urbanization first emerged in strikingly different sociopolitical contexts in North America, Europe, and the Near East. The pursuit for universally applicable definitions of the terms “urban” and “city” has frequently distracted scholars from scrutinizing processes of how ancient nucleated settlements evolved and developed. Based on the premise that similar social dynamics to a great extent governed nucleation trajectories throughout human history, Coming Together focuses on both prehistoric aggregated and early urban settlements. Drawing from a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, archaeologists, anthropologists, and classicists discuss how nucleation unfolded in strikingly different sociopolitical contexts in North America, Europe, and the Near East. The major themes of the volume are nucleation’s origins, pathways to sustainability, and the transformative role of these sites in sociopolitical and cultural change.