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from these excavations to model Monongahela village community organization independently from the published and unpublished reports by the original excavators.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.