Toward a Model of Monongahela Village Community Organization: Analyzing Pit Feature Data Recovered from the 1934 to 1940 Somerset County Relief Excavations

Abstract

An ongoing review of the Somerset County Relief Excavations shows that architectural and feature data are integral to modeling Monongahela village community organization. In this paper, I focus on how feature morphology can be used as a tool to analyze Monongahela village community organization. While conducting this study, I encountered and overcame limitations in the field techniques and data recording procedures employed during the relief excavations. I was also hampered by the present status of the collections and field records generated by the relief excavations, which are incomplete, scattered, or lost. Nonetheless, sufficient data are available from these excavations to model Monongahela village community organization independently from the published and unpublished reports by the original excavators. Lessons learned from this study can be applied to the management of current archaeological collections and field records.

Chapter 7 Start the Presses? John Alden Mason as Mesoamericanist and a Reluctant New Deal Archaeologist in the 1930s

“…While, like Mason, Augustine only published a few short articles, he left behind extensive documentation in the form of daily field reports, field notes, photographs, and progress reports. Augustine's work in Somerset County can and is used by archaeologists today interested in precontact village social organization—his data formed the core of my own dissertation and subsequent publication Circular Villages of the Monongahela Tradition , as well as a series of articles and book chapters (Means 1998; 2002a; 2002b; 2007; 2013b). In contrast, Mason's New Deal work is simply an historic curiosity and can make no contributions to understanding the archaeology of the region.…”