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Architectural remains, especially domestic architecture, are essential for understanding the ways in which households organized themselves socially and economically in the past. Unfortunately, these remains are infrequently identified from Woodland period (1000 BC–AD 1000) archaeological sites along the Gulf Coast, an area home to well-known ceramic and mortuary traditions during this time. As a result, our knowledge of Woodland period households in the region is scant. In this article I present a newly discovered house from Letchworth (8JE337), a large Woodland period ceremonial center in northwest Florida, and compare it to the few published examples of houses from this region. I show that domestic architecture along the Gulf Coast during the Woodland period is diverse, suggesting differences in the organization of households and the historical development of ceremonial centers.

Kolomoki was one of the largest villages of the Middle and Late Woodland periods in the American Southeast. Located in southwestern Georgia, the site features a circular village plan nearly a kilometer in diameter which is centered on a large open plaza. This chapter introduces the term “hypertrophic village” to describe Kolomoki and, by extension, villages of similarly exaggerated size. New insights from recent excavations covering Kolomoki's transition from Swift Creek to Weeden Island pottery suggest that Kolomoki grew from a relatively compact to hypertrophic village beginning around the sixth century A.D. and culminating a century or two later. The wide spacing between domestic units both enabled and constrained social cohesion, and may have afforded the community at Kolomoki unrivalled symbolic power. The construction of Kolomoki's hypertrophic village may have been a strategy related to settlement shifts that recent work suggests took place throughout the region in the seventh century A.D.

In order to obtain information about landscape activity and stability during the Late Quaternary in the Transcaucasian region, fluvial sediments of the lower Algeti River in SE-Georgia were studied by means of geomorphologic, sedimentologic and geochronologic methods. These investigations show that sediments aggraded by the Late Pleistocene braided Algeti River were strongly incised around the Pleistocene/Holocene transition, and subsequently a small-scale pattern of diachronous fluvial terraces deposited by the now meandering river developed in the new valley during the Holocene. Prior to ca. 3 cal. ka BP, active phases of river channel aggradation and overbank sedimentation about 6 cal. ka BP and 3.4–3.2 cal. ka BP can be linked with climate-driven vegetation changes, i.e. stronger fluvial dynamics with sedimentation occurred during more arid and colder periods whereas the Caucasian Holocene climate optimum between 6 and 3.4 cal. ka BP was characterized by stable geomorphologic conditions. After 3 cal. ka BP, strongly increased human impact documented by former pollen studies is reflected by the fluvial dynamics as well, i.e. an activity phase of strong overbank sedimentation 2.7–2.1 cal. ka BP occurred during a period when forests in the Lesser Caucasus were burnt down. Two subsequent activity phases with fluvial sedimentation can be linked with historic events that probably both influenced vegetation distribution of the region, i.e. a period of flourishing of Georgia during the Middle Age and a time of large-scale destruction of the country due to a Persian invasion at the end of the 18th century AD, respectively. Thus, whereas no influence of tectonic events or fluctuations of the Caspian Sea level on the fluvial dynamics could be detected, SE-Georgia shows its fragile character with respect to climate- and human driven vegetation-changes similar to other semi-arid landscapes of the Mediterranean region.

A defining characteristic of the Middle Woodland period is the prevalence of craft goods of stone, bone, shell, and metal, which originated frequently from exotic sources and were often fashioned into non-utilitarian, symbolically-charged products. In the processual heyday, archaeologists devoted considerable attention on the perceived control of the production and exchange of these exotic goods and what it may say about the political and economic power of elites, and, by extension, their societies. In this chapter, the authors suggest that this emphasis on the political- and ritual-economic contexts for craft production may obscure an important point: specifically, that crafting was rooted in the everyday rhythms of domestic life, by which the authors mean the networks of relationships with other people and other objects. Reviewing the archaeological record for two large Middle Woodland populations and ceremonial centers – Kolomoki in southwestern Georgia and Crystal River in west-central Florida (Figure 9.1) – the authors argue that a low level of craft production was common to domestic contexts.