Archaeology offers a unique opportunity to explore the ways humans have created, lived within, and changed their communities. Recent research indicates important theoretical distinctions in the way in which archaeologists conceive of community, and further development of nontraditional theoretical models is necessary to improve our ability to understand communities of the past. This study offers a reconsideration of community that focuses on the incorporation of multiple spatial scales with social dynamics. Through the use of ethnographic and ethnohistoric examples, the link between community and spatial relationships in longhouse-using tribal societies is examined. A case study of community from the Oneota tradition of the North American midcontinent is then reconsidered using insights into kinds of community situated at and affecting multiple spatial scales. The reanalysis emphasizes the way human relationships in multiple social contexts created a multitude of spatially situated community links, and illustrates the importance of using alternative theoretical approaches.

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Morton Village and the associated Norris Farms #36 cemetery site in Fulton County, Illinois, provide an opportunity to synthesise community and mortuary perspectives on life among Mississippian and Oneota inhabitants of the late prehistoric Central Illinois River Valley. Among research directions to develop from new Michigan State University-Dickson Mounds Museum excavations are questions regarding the role that the 143 subadults interred in the cemetery can play in the analysis of community social relations. In this article, we focus on the lives and deaths of Morton's youngest residents, particularly as they relate to broader patterns of migration and identity (trans)formation. We specifically seek to understand whether some of these children were born into families with blended Oneota and Mississippian identities, potentially signalling multiethnic identity in their mortuary signatures. To this end, a particular subset of juveniles is compared to other burials in the cemetery, and is discussed within a larger context of migration and multiethnic social interactions. We argue that the mortuary disposition of certain children might be viewed as an avenue for the symbolic expression of novel identity processes borne of unique Oneota and Mississippian interactions in the region, particularly when interpreted with reference to children's roles in that process and through a lens of liminality, hybridity and communitas.

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