Early villages are often assumed to be economically and politically autonomous and equivalent to an archaeological socio-spatial unit that represents a maximum scale of cohesive residential communities. But the boundaries of some communities extended far beyond such sites of early population aggregation. In the coastal plain of the American Southeast, early village communities of the Middle and Late Woodland period (ca. 100 to 1000 CE) were located at civic-ceremonial centers that hosted periodic large-scale events, including feasting and mound building. These places regularly integrated mobile populations and permanent residents, arguably creating translocal communities that were both spatially expansive and densely integrated. We employ social network analysis as a way of identifying the spatial extent, composition, and structure of these translocal communities. We compare relational connections via a database of shared makers’ marks on Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery with categorical identities revealed in temporally constrained pottery type frequencies. We find that most early villages in this region were far from autonomous and instead were characterized by frequent relational connections and shared categorical identities spanning hundreds of kilometers, with civic-ceremonial centers serving as central nodes of interaction within and between spatially dispersed communities.

早期的村庄通常被认为在经济和政治上是自治的，相当于考古学的社会空间单位，代表了最大规模的有凝聚力的居住社区。但一些社区的边界远远超出了这些早期人口聚集的地点。在美国东南部的沿海平原，林地中期和晚期（约公元 100 至 1000 年）的早期村庄社区位于市政仪式中心，定期举办大型活动，包括宴会和土墩建造。这些地方定期融合流动人口和永久居民，可以说创造了空间广阔且融合紧密的跨地方社区。我们采用社交网络分析作为识别空间范围、组成、以及这些跨地方社区的结构。我们通过斯威夫特溪复杂冲压陶器上共享制造商标记的数据库，将关系联系与时间限制的陶器类型频率中揭示的分类身份进行比较。我们发现，该地区大多数早期村庄远非自治，而是具有频繁的关系联系和跨越数百公里的共享类别身份，其中公民仪式中心充当空间分散的社区内部和社区之间互动的中心节点。