This volume explores how native peoples of the Southeastern United States cooperated to form large and permanent early villages, using the site of Crystal River on Florida's Gulf Coast as a case study. Crystal River was once among the most celebrated sites of the Woodland period (ca. 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1000), consisting of ten mounds and large numbers of diverse artifacts from the Hopewell culture. But a lack of research using contemporary methods at this site and nearby Roberts Island limited a full understanding of what these sites could tell scholars. Thomas Pluckhahn and Victor Thompson reanalyze previous excavations and conduct new field investigations to tell the whole story of Crystal River from its beginnings as a ceremonial center, through its growth into a large village, to its decline at the turn of the first millennium while Roberts Island and other nearby areas thrived. Comparing this community to similar sites on the Gulf Coast and in other areas of the world, Pluckhahn and Thompson argue that Crystal River is an example of an ""early village society."" They illustrate that these early villages present important evidence in a larger debate regarding the role of competition versus cooperation in the development of human societies.

Combining older findings with new data on 1,000 previously undescribed archaeological sites, this book presents the cultural evolution of the Mixteca Alta in an up-to-date chronological framework. The nuu - the kingdoms of the famous Mixtec codices - are traced back through the Post-Classic and Classic periods to their beginnings in the first states of the Terminal Formative, revealing their origin, evolution, and persistence through two cycles of growth and collapse. Challenging assumptions that the Mixtec were peripheral to better-known people such as the Aztecs or Maya, the book asserts that the nuu were a major demographic and economic power in their own right. Older explanations of multiregional or macroregional systems often portrayed civilisations as rising in a cradle or hearth and spreading outward. New macroregional studies show that civilisations are products of more complex interactions between regions, in which peripheries are not simply shaped by cores but by their interactions with multiple societies at varying distances from major centres. This book is a significant contribution to this emerging area of archaeological research.