(PDF) Infrastructure Beyond Cities: Perspectives from the Americas

Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10963-025-09203-6 Infrastructure Beyond Cities: Perspectives from the Americas Edward R. Henry1,2 · M. Grace Ellis1,3 · Carly M. DeSanto4 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2025 Abstract The study of infrastructure is becoming a common focus in research across the social sciences. In this endeavor, archaeologists are uniquely situated to assess how societies in the past created, and relied on, infrastructure over time, and the different ways it facilitated or impeded communication, movement, and social interaction through an understanding of the material record. However, most archaeological engagements with the study of infrastructure occur through case studies that closely mirror the modern contexts in which contemporary social scientists study infrastructure: within state-organized sociopolitical contexts or urban places. We use this article as an opportunity to review the literature on infrastructure, contextualize how it has been adopted in archaeology, and then advocate for expanding the study of infrastructure to non-urban small-scale societies. In doing so, we reassociate the notion of infrastructure with connective and cooperative human projects that unfold within and between places situated across social landscapes. This perspective requires one to divorce infrastructure from modernity and early urban projects and to recenter it within the material nature of human interaction. It is our goal to offer themes and perspectives drawn from contemporary notions of infrastructure to better understand the diverse forms and functions of built and natural environments apart from early urban places in the ancient Americas. Keywords Infrastructure · Small-scale societies · Built environments · Placemaking · Landscape archaeology Extended author information available on the last page of the article 13 16 Page 2 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Introduction The material nature of infrastructure and its impact on human societies has developed into a distinct field of study present throughout many of the social sciences since the twenty-first century. Scholars in the social sciences suggest we are now in an ‘infrastructural turn’ in anthropology (Anand et al., 2018; Vasan, 2019). As a focus of social analysis, infrastructure has been used to examine the material emergence and growth of travel, communication networks, resource extraction and subsequent consumption, economic viability, power dynamics, and the ways social institutions that support infrastructure organize humans in their push toward modernity and increased global interaction (Anand et al., 2018; Carse, 2012; Dourish & Bell, 2007; Edwards, 2003; Harvey et al., 2017; Larkin, 2008; Star, 1999). Perhaps because of the modern, often urban, gaze in which studies of infrastructure emerged and became embedded, archaeologists who have explored infrastructure in their research have done so using case studies from societies that lived in urban settings or in the modern global era (Ertsen, 2016; Hauser, 2015; Morrison, 2015; Smith, 2016; Wilkinson, 2019a, b). These archaeological investigations make explicit that, as a multi-scalar category of material culture, studies of past infrastructure offer a way to compare cooperation and connectivity spatially and temporally, providing important new historical insights into human-environment interaction. As such, they have laid strong analytical foundations for the archaeological study of infrastructure. This is because they center on the material evidence for and analysis of dynamic interactions between humans and the social landscapes they interacted with. The current collection of archaeological literature on infrastructure shows that archaeologists can tease out the political and networked aspects of past infrastructural forms to investigate their inherent power to organize urban life and its frontiers. In this article, we work toward incorporating ongoing discourse on infrastructure from the social sciences into the body of work on the archaeology of infrastructure. To do so, we focus on developing a notion of infrastructure among non-urban small-scale societies, identifying how human groups established and maintained relationships to interconnected places through an engagement with infrastructure in the past. Our goal in this article is to detach infrastructure from its fundamental ties to modern global capitalist systems by outlining the ways infrastructure is not exclusively an organizational phenomenon tied only to urban or state developments, but to successes in various forms of human social organization. As we will argue, infrastructure is inherent to human experience at several scales of organization over large flows of time. By showing the ways small-scale non-urban societies engaged in infrastructural projects, we work to broaden the range of archaeological contexts usefully informed by the study of infrastructure and to begin assessing the social situations (Henry & Miller, 2020) and history of human encounters where infrastructure was involved. We limit our examination to societies in the precontact Americas. Doing so allows us to scrutinize cases where people created, and interacted with, built environments and unique natural places in ways that encouraged and/or discouraged the movement of people, things, and ideas. At first thought, natural places may not immediately seem synonymous with contemporary conceptions of infrastructure. However, because of the cosmological and historical significance such places hold through Indigenous 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 3 of 57 16 ways of being in the world (Basso, 1996; Cajete, 2003; Watts, 2013; Zedeño et al., 2021), we feel that unique natural places on the landscape are also a prime example of social infrastructure in ways we will discuss further below. These phenomena require us to focus on the power of placemaking to center the material and historical importance of natural places in ways we might afford similar significance to humanbuilt infrastructure in contemporary society. By outlining several cases where Indigenous Americans created lasting and durable networks of interaction by engaging in infrastructural projects, we work toward presenting evidence for the connectedness and cooperation of non-urban societies in North and South America in a way that recognizes how the institutions supporting infrastructure were fundamentally different, often cooperative, among small-scale societies. We develop an understanding of non-urban infrastructure by interrogating how we might consider the characteristics and qualities of infrastructure as a social phenomenon. By working to outline these conceptual boundaries we summarize many seminal theoretical engagements with infrastructure that begin with the emergence and usage of the term. We then review the arrival of infrastructure studies and describe presentday discussions of infrastructure in the social sciences. We follow these contextual groundings in infrastructure studies with a review of the ways archaeologists have engaged with perspectives on infrastructure. Our subsequent discussion of these perspectives teases out central themes between modern and archaeological examples of infrastructure that allow us to show their rootedness to the creation of place and an emphasis on interconnectedness between people and places. We then present archaeological case studies from North, Central, and South America to provide diverse examples of the ways infrastructure supported non-urban societies in the Americas and served to connect people and communicate ideas across space and time. We argue that infrastructure among small-scale societies operated as vehicles for communication and facilitators of movement in ways similar to societies in the urban past, or even the contemporary world. Moreover, we see non-urban infrastructure as evidence for sociopolitical agreements and institutional histories inscribed into, or historicized as part of, the social landscape. A discussion of case studies we draw on highlights the similarities and differences in how Indigenous non-urban societies in the Americas relied on infrastructure to exist and point to some tensions in viewing infrastructure in a singular framework of facilitating or inhibiting movement. We suggest that archaeologists might also consider expanding the social contexts and time periods where notions of infrastructure might present new understandings of social dynamics among small-scale societies. We conclude by supporting and furthering the calls of archaeologists who have previously advocated for infrastructure as a central focus in the discipline (see Ellis, DeSanto, & Howey, 2024; Wilkinson, 2019a). Infrastructure as a Topic of Analysis The conceptual emergence of infrastructure as a modern material phenomenon occurred during the height of post-World War globalization (Carse, 2017; Edwards, 2003; Humphrey, 2005). Since then, theoretical considerations of infrastructure, and the vocabulary surrounding the analysis of it, have been changing. Carse’s (2017) 13 16 Page 4 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 historical overview of infrastructure is important in this sense because it outlines several shifts in the meaning of the term before it came into its contemporary usage. Infrastructure as a term first emerged in French in the late 1920s among engineers to describe organizational practices that preceded (i.e., infra-) the construction of what we might consider infrastructure in contemporary society (e.g., roads, pipelines, power grids); this includes surveying, land grading, and the building of tunnels and bridges (Carse, 2017, pp. 29–30). After World War II the term became closely linked to military and national building projects, essentially defining global development amid the Cold War. After this point, infrastructure became synonymous with the foundation, or essential components, of a higher order system of institutions comprising contemporary nation-states. As Carse (2017, pp. 33–35) appropriately points out in this historical timeline, scholars have suggested that infrastructure only evolved into the managerial responsibility of the various institutions underlying nation-states over roughly the last forty years. As we argue below, infrastructure has always relied on the support of social institutions, even when it existed among small-scale societies in the archaeological past. We see the primary difference between contemporary and ancient forms of infrastructure conveyed through differences in the nature and power of the associated institutions underlying them. For these reasons, it is important to point out some material and conceptual similarities between what would be considered modern or contemporary infrastructure, with what archaeologists might examine as infrastructure in the deep past. This requires us to explore broadly what infrastructure is, and perhaps more importantly, what it does. Unfortunately, exact definitions of infrastructure, maybe like religion and cities, are hard to reconcile across, or even within, disciplines. This leads to tensions in how researchers approach the study of infrastructure. Without strictly defining the word, we follow many of the social scientists before us in focusing on several general, but essential, characteristics (or qualities) that most infrastructure possesses. This allows us to work toward building a comparative model for non-urban infrastructure identifiable in the archaeological past. For instance, most scholars agree that infrastructure is relational—part of projects that are collective in nature and grounded in the support of something larger and long lasting (Carse, 2017; Star, 1999). Star’s (1999) classic ethnographic treatment of infrastructure established useful categorical ‘properties’, not to validate what infrastructure is or is not, but to offer some insight into the multiple dimensions of infrastructure. She suggests that infrastructure is embedded, often transparent, geographically extensive, as well as socially learned and rooted in community practice. Moreover, Star notes how infrastructure can become integrated into other infrastructure, building on a prior base, and becomes most visible over the course of breakdowns or failures (Star, 1999, pp. 379–382). Star’s theoretical project positioned infrastructure in the philosophical tradition of Heideggerian ready-at-hand phenomenology (Heidegger, 1996). From there, many types of material networks could be explored because they possessed many if not all these qualities. Admittedly, this offers archaeologists relaxed boundaries for identifying and interpreting infrastructure in the past. In the wake of Star’s seminal work, scholars studying infrastructure have continued to avoid placing definitional restraints on infrastructure, instead choosing to analyze and critique the political, economic, and organizational influence it has on society 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 5 of 57 16 (Bélanger, 2009; Dourish & Bell, 2007; Edwards, 2003; Larkin, 2008; Meyboom, 2009; Westphal, 2008). These second-wave infrastructure studies added further conceptual framing to the study of infrastructure as new forms emerged for analysis (e.g., the internet; industrial projects in the Global South). Larkin’s (2013) review of infrastructure studies from the early 21 st century offers an influential perspective on infrastructure as primarily a facilitator of movement and exchange. He discusses infrastructure as built networks of matter that move other matter and ideas, focusing also on the earlier notion of infrastructure as the underlying possibility(ies) for what comes after. Commenting on the relational nature of infrastructure, Larkin (2013, pp. 329) writes, ‘[w]hat distinguishes infrastructures from technologies is that they are objects that create the grounds on which other objects operate’. This statement on infrastructure echoes conceptual similarities with its early origins in the post-World War II era as underlying what came next (e.g., the grading of land and placement of gravel before laying a railway). Contemporary examinations of infrastructure have even offered insights into the networked and relational material systems that encapsulate natural ecosystems (Carse, 2012; Orff, 2013). In these cases, unique natural features and places, in addition to some living species (e.g., oysters), offer the underlying potential for something, whether it be the Panama Canal or cleaner water in estuaries. These system-based relational approaches to understanding infrastructure as extensive, but not necessarily human-constructed, delves into an intellectual space that offers critique of modernist tendencies to divide subjects for study into clear binary opposition. One of these that we find interesting for the purposes of our work here is the divide between nature and culture, because this is a popular modern invention that has been interrogated by scholars in the social sciences (Descola, 2013; Haraway, 2003; Latour, 1993; Ortner, 1972) and by Indigenous scholars (Deloria, 1975; Niigaaniin & MacNeill, 2022; TallBear, 2015; Todd, 2016; Watts, 2013). We engage more with these ideas later in our conclusions. The experiential influence infrastructure has on people, including the social discontent associated with failing infrastructure, has also been explored by social scientists (Seberger & Bowker, 2020; Wu, 2020). Recently, performative social customs like dance have even been referred to as ‘infrastructural’ (Cohen, 2021; Doery, 2024). So, to focus on what material phenomena from the past might be examined archaeologically as infrastructure, we should perhaps center our questions on what possibilities landscape-scale material forms afforded social life in a given space/time situation (cf. Henry & Miller, 2020; Henry et al., 2020; Zigon, 2015). This should include examples of the built environment underwritten by human action, but also cases where the collective interfacing between humans and their environmental settings fosters infrastructural qualities. In both scenarios the purpose of such examples in the archaeological record should be visible as having supported sociocultural endeavors. Archaeology and Infrastructure Understanding the variability in how humans create and manage explicit connections between forms of material culture and their social organization, or ‘complexity’ as some define it (Dan-Cohen, 2020; Harvey et al., 2017), requires a rapport between studies of infrastructure and the objectives of archaeology. Not only does archaeol- 13 16 Page 6 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 ogy offer a historical perspective on infrastructure in the human past, but it can also be used to examine the causative power infrastructure possessed over past societies and other networks of things. This could be accomplished archaeologically by illuminating how infrastructure impacted interaction among societies and the materialities they relied on to endure. Moreover, an archaeological perspective on non-urban infrastructure allows us, and other social science disciplines, to trace how ancient infrastructures were incorporated into new pre- or post-state institutions and infrastructures. Several archaeologists have already found use in examining infrastructure to explain social behavior or to describe the role of past built environments. Archaeological engagements with infrastructure have included exploration into the political power of infrastructure in ancient states (Smith, 2016; Yoffee, 2016), the foundation for economic networks like colonial Caribbean plantations (Hauser, 2015), the power of water irrigation infrastructure in past Mesopotamian and South Asian states (Ertsen, 2016; Morrison, 2015), and the inequality that Inka roads helped to facilitate (Wilkinson, 2019b). Darryl Wilkinson’s (2019a) recent call for archaeologists to work toward more explicitly theorizing infrastructure is the most thorough treatment of infrastructure as a conceptual framework in our discipline. Wilkinson’s proposal offers a foundation for ways archaeologists can both identify and examine infrastructure in the archaeological past in a more unified fashion. In recognizing the diversity in infrastructure categorically, materially, and historically, Wilkinson offers a general and flexible typology of infrastructure that spans functional forms that are static, circulatory, bounding, and signaling in their nature (Wilkinson, 2019a). Each of these types refers to the operational purpose of the infrastructure. For instance, static infrastructure affords some kind of stability, such as the stability that economic systems achieve through storage, or the sustainability of agricultural practices visible in agricultural terraces (Wilkinson, 2019a, p. 1223). Infrastructural systems that facilitate and encourage the movement of things and people are termed ‘circulatory’, and include projects like roads, bridges, and canals. Alternatively, the intentional obstruction or control over movement is arranged through the creation of bounding infrastructure, such as walls, ditches, embankments, and built military features (Wilkinson, 2019a, pp. 1226, 1230). Signaling infrastructure, like lighthouses, supports long-distance communications (Wilkinson, 2019a, p. 1234). This typology offers a useful and flexible framework to approach the interpretation of networked material forms in the past and examine them as a causal mechanism for the movement of humans, things, and ideas, as well as their interactions. Following previous archaeological engagements with infrastructure, Wilkinson’s analysis is tied primarily to case studies from archaeologically identified state-organized societies. As a result, the notion of infrastructure as it relates to archaeology remains tied to urban contexts, and therefore closely mirrors modern social systems and interactions. We suggest that the study of infrastructure can still be broadened by recognizing that small-scale societies around the world often created, used, and lived among infrastructural projects well before cities emerged. Also important from our perspective are the ways those societies also built and interacted with infrastructure after the dissolution of urban organizations. This opens new questions related to why small-scale non-urban societies built and used infrastructure, and the social roles it 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 7 of 57 16 played in their historical trajectories. Wilkinson mentions the potential for studies like ours when he states, ‘[t]hus it seems implicit in many accounts that infrastructure is effectively the materialization of the state itself. I prefer not to make such a claim, mainly because it forces us to subordinate the definition of infrastructure to the broader category of the state’ (Wilkinson, 2019a, p. 1220). We agree, and with consideration of the generalizable qualities of infrastructure we have mentioned here, we work toward exploring the development of infrastructure among small-scale societies, using the Americas as a broad geographic case study. We feel that expanding our understanding of infrastructure allows us to extend its archaeological examination into the past toward queries about what social developments it made possible or impeded. As we argue later in this article, these perspectives provide evidence that infrastructure is not inherently modern, but instead, innately human. In a recent edited volume on infrastructure by Ellis, DeSanto, and Howey (2024), the humanness of infrastructure, in its diverse arrangements, is a common point that is emphasized through several threads of study. In the following sections we summarize several aspects of built environments in the Americas that archaeologists have shown, if implicitly, served infrastructural social roles among non-urban small-scale societies (Fig. 1; Table 1). We also emphasize the importance and characteristics of alternative infrastructure. In this sense, we see infrastructure in forms alternative to what archaeologists traditionally defined as infrastructure in the past (e.g., roads and irrigation canals). Our notion of alternative infrastructure conveys the importance of riverine networks and geologic or landscape features that become part of social assemblages at regional scales. Features like these can also be characterized as matter that is responsible for enabling the movement of other matter and facilitating the communication of ideas, or creating the grounds on which other objects and humans operate (sensu Larkin, 2013). Moreover, an expanded view of infrastructure that takes these concerns into account speaks to the blurry lines between how nature and culture might be conceived. Infrastructure and Non-Urban Small-scale Societies in the Americas Before we begin discussing infrastructure across the precontact archaeological history of the Americas, we first want to speak to non-urbanized societies as the social context of this article. In this sense, we are concerned with the examination of what archaeologists often refer to as small-scale societies; those collective groups of humans that are organized apart from bureaucratic political and economic institutions (DeMarrais, 2016; Hull, 2014; Miller, 2015; Reyes-García et al., 2017; Spielmann, 2002, 2008). Small-scale societies can be politically decentralized (e.g., heterarchical or anarchical) or arranged in more hierarchical sociopolitical organization, allowing for innovative and variable approaches to economy, group size, and cohesive social mechanisms that sustain cohesion and collective action through labor mobilization (Angelbeck & Grier, 2012; Carballo, 2012; Cobb, 1993; Everhart & Ruby, 2020; Henry & Barrier, 2016; Miller, 2021; Spielmann, 2002; Thompson, 2023). The performative and cooperative actions of small-scale societies have long been recognized as transformative to the ecologies they inhabit (Arroyo-Kalin, 2019; Balée, 2013; 13 16 Page 8 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Fig. 1 Selected archaeological sites and regions discussed in the text. See Table 1 for associated names and information Erickson, 2010; Reyes-García et al., 2017; Thompson & Waggoner, 2013; Walker, 2012), leading to the production of feedback loops where human societies are in turn shaped by the landscapes they have built and altered. While such feedback loops also apply to urban environments (sensu de Certeau, 2011; Lefebvre, 1992), they are simultaneously manipulated by the rigid top-down or administrative oversight associated with city governance. Moreover, our case studies are arranged to show how human societies are engaging with durable infrastructure apart from the functional and sociological influence of cities. We work here to outline infrastructural engagements apart from dense and permanent concentrations of multi-ethnic people, activities, and institutions in space (Fernández-Götz & Smith, 2024; Smith, 2023). While we acknowledge that both sedentary villages and temporary, even seasonal, concentrations of multi-ethnic people, activities, and institutions occur regularly in 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 9 of 57 16 Table 1 Sites and archaeological areas denoted in Fig. 1 with list of infrastructure present and purpose described ID Site/Area Infrastructure Purpose No. Present 1 Llanos de Moxos Area; Roads, Canals, Multiple – Facilitate & limit movement of Amazonian Region of South Rivers, Fish water & aquatic resources America Weirs, Turtle Corrals 2 Hohokam Area; North Ameri- Irrigation Facilitate movement of irrigation water can Southwest Canals 3 Acre Region of Brazil; WestGeoglyph Multiple – Facilitate & limit movement of ern Amazonia Region of South Enclosures; people, objects, & ideas America Wooden Palisades; Roads 4 Coastal Areas of the Pacific Clam Gardens Limit movement; store/concentrate shellfish Northwest; North America 5 Southern Brazil's Atlantic Sambaquis Multiple – Limit movement & store ancesCoast; South America Shell Mounds tors; facilitate movement of people to events at these places; signal/communicate ideas & information 6 Brazilian/Uruguayan Atlantic Cerritos Multiple – Facilitate movement to resource Coast & Interior; South Mounds rich areas seasonally; limit movement & America store ancestors by defining territory; signal/ communicate ideas & information 7 Hopewell Area, Middle Ohio Geometric En- Multiple – Facilitate movement across the River Valley; Eastern North closures; Burial landscape; limit movement within them; America Mounds concentrate ancestors; signal/communicate ideas & information 8 Chaco Canyon Area; North Roads, Canals, Multiple – Facilitate movement of irrigation American Southwest Check Dams, water & people across landscape; signal/ Plazas, Unique communicate ideas & information Natural Place 9 Zaña River Valley, Peru; South Canals Facilitate movement of irrigation water America 10 Jackson Landing, USA; Gulf Canals, Rivers, Multiple – Facilitate movement of people; Coast of North America Mounds signal/communicate ideas & information 11 Gulf Coast of North America Canals Facilitate movement of people, objects, & ideas 12 La Playa, Sonoran Desert; Canals Facilitate movement of irrigation water North American Southwest 13 Newark Earthworks, Middle Roads, Multiple – Facilitate movement of people, Ohio River Valley; Eastern Enclosures objects, & ideas; signal/communicate ideas North America & information 14 Portsmouth Earthworks, Roads, Multiple – Facilitate movement of people, Middle Ohio River Valley; Enclosures objects, & ideas; signal/communicate ideas Eastern North America & information 15 Aguada Fénix, Mexico; North Platforms, Facilitate movement of people, objects, & America early E-groups, ideas Plazas 16 Asana, Peru; Andean Region Corrals Limit movement of pastoral animals of South America 17 Huaca Prieta, Peru; Pacific Mounds Multiple – Facilitate movement of people Coast of South America & objects; limit movement/store ancestors; signal/communicate ideas & information 13 16 Page 10 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Table 1 (continued) ID No. 18 19 20 Site/Area Poverty Point, USA; Lower Mississippi Valley, North America Watson Brake, USA; Lower Mississippi Valley, North America San Lorenzo, Mexico; North America 21 Paso de la Amada, Mexico; North America 22 Callacpuma, Peru; Andean Region of South America Silver Glen Springs, Florida; North America 23 Infrastructure Present Mounds Mounds Isolates Mounds; Terraformed Platforms Mounds; Ball court Plaza Unique Natural Place, Shell Mounds Purpose Multiple – Facilitate movement of people & objects; signal/communicate ideas & information Multiple – Facilitate movement of people & objects; signal/communicate ideas & information Facilitate movement of people, objects, & ideas Multiple – Facilitate/limit movement of of people, objects, & ideas; signal/communicate ideas & information Multiple – Facilitate/limit movement of people; signal/communicate ideas & information Multiple – Facilitate movement of people; signal/communicate ideas & information small-scale societies, and in some of our case studies, we follow Smith’s (2023) recent notion of energized crowding that describes intense and repeated face-to-face interactions that can occur in and apart from urban contexts. One can envision how energized crowding was an occurrence that required organization and management across non-urban small-scale societies; however, we argue that in our case studies it is not something that necessitated the incorporation of a bureaucratic apparatus to permanently control it over years, decades, or centuries. In addition to this clarification of how we view non-urban social organization, we would add that we carefully considered our use of ‘Beyond Cities’ in the title due to the ability of precontact Indigenous societies in the Americas to organize themselves in an urban fashion at one point in time, and a non-urban one in another (e.g., after urban or state collapse). Furthermore, we recognize that urban and non-urban societies co-existed and interacted in the past, as they do in the present, and that these social phenomena are not always isolated in space or time. Thus, our focus on infrastructure beyond urban contexts speaks to the non-linear dynamics of social organization understood in contemporary archaeology (Beekman & Baden, 2016; McGlade & Leeuw, 1997). Nevertheless, durable long-term and historically embedded connections within non-urban landscapes require myriad forms of maintenance. To this end, we should emphasize that the intensive engagements that small-scale societies have with their environments take on a form of landesque capital (Erickson & Walker, 2009; Håkansson & Widgren, 2014) that transcends functional (i.e., ecological) or symbolic (i.e., relational/religious) interpretive binaries and becomes visible as the complex forms of emplacement that interconnect any active agents (e.g., people, objects, animals, and places) in the production of the social world (Deloria, 1992; Fowles, 2013; Henry, 2017; Rodning, 2015; Watts, 2013; Zedeño et al., 2021; de Castro, 2004; Norton-Smith, 2010; Cordova, 2007; Hunt, 2014). Zedeño et al. (2021, pp. 5–6) describe this relationship as a place-based embeddedness of kinship-centered histories and 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 11 of 57 16 memories where codified cultural practices and performances reify connections to distinct people and places on the landscape. This requires us to seriously consider the infrastructural properties and roles of unique natural landforms like geological monuments and erratics, as well as transportation corridors that emerge from phenomena such as riverine courses or overland trails stamped into the earth by herds of large mammals. We examine features like these comprehensively in this article alongside obvious anthropogenic features like earthen mounds and irrigation canals when we begin identifying infrastructure among non-urban societies. From a perspective grounded in the ways small-scale societies embed themselves within their environments and important places, we now turn to explore the various forms of infrastructure that helped facilitate and reproduce their ways of being. Infrastructure to Facilitate Movement Archaeologists have identified and studied numerous forms of circulatory infrastructure associated with small-scale societies across the Americas, but they are not often analyzed as such. Nevertheless, we see networks of causeways, trails, and roads (Erickson, 1995, 2001; Inomata et al., 2020; Kantner, 1997; Lepper, 2006; Raitz et al., 2010; Romain & Burks, 2008; Schmidt et al., 2014), canals (Dillehay et al., 2005; Erickson, 1995, 2000a; Huckleberry, 1999; Waselkov et al., 2022), wharfs (Ellis, 2019; Ellis et al., 2024a, b), and rivers (Boudreaux, 2011, 2013; Ellis, Fisher & Browne Ribeiro, 2024; Gobalet et al., 2004; Iriarte et al., 2017; Saunaluoma et al., 2021; Schaan, 2012; de Souza et al., 2018; Walker, 2018) as infrastructural features. Sometimes these disparate forms of built and natural infrastructure functioned together as bundled physical networks that enabled people, things, and ideas to move across the landscape with relative ease. Roads, overland trails, and causeways primarily facilitated foot traffic, while canals and rivers served various forms of watercraft travel, together enabling, and promoting movement across land and water. The presence of road-river-canal networks among non-urban, small-scale societies indicates the importance of interconnectivity among dispersed groups who built, maintained, and relied upon them to manage social dissonance (Henry & Barrier, 2016) by sustaining social, economic, and political relationships across vast distances. Evidence for these complex integrative material systems exists across the diverse geographies of North and South America, affording us the opportunity to compare how societies engineered their landscapes in ways that afforded the movement of humans, things, and ideas. Rivers and Canals Canals are human-modified waterways that help move water in the process of irrigating land and crops, as well as people and their possessions during travel. In the Llanos de Moxos region of the Bolivian Amazon, archaeologists have identified and described extensive networks of canals and raised causeways built by smallscale precontact societies (Erickson, 1995, 2000a, 2001; Erickson & Balée, 2006; Walker, 2018). Large linear canals accompanied by parallel raised earthen causeways stretch across vast distances of Amazonia, connecting physically unrelated alluvial 13 16 Page 12 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 networks, collections of raised agricultural fields, fishing weirs, forest islands, and dispersed village settlements. Erickson (2001, pp. 24–25) and colleagues (Erickson & Balée, 2006) have suggested that canals in the Llanos de Moxos region were built by 2000 cal years BP and continually modified and reconstructed into the early 1600s AD through a process that included excavation into the land surface to form canals. The earth removed during construction of the canals were mounded up adjacent and parallel to canals to form the associated causeways (Fig. 2). These features are reported to be a maximum of nearly 5 km long, standardized in width (12–18 m wide), and numerous, suggesting they were carefully planned and highly engineered by the people who built and maintained them (Erickson, 2001). The causeways (or roads) were likely used for foot traffic during periods of inundation, providing dry walking surfaces, while canals were used for canoe traffic (Erickson, 2001; Erickson, 2009). Both infrastructural features often, but not always, facilitated travel between forest islands, a complex mix of anthropogenic and ecological features that are part of a maintained biodiverse cultural landscape (Erickson, 2009; Erickson, 2010, pp. 622–23). Erickson (2009, 2010; Erickson & Walker, 2009) also suggests that the raised causeways could have also acted as dikes in controlling floodwaters amid raised agricultural fields and fishing weirs. As this evidence demonstrates, these infrastructural features were not only important for interconnecting dispersed, decentralized communities, but also for managing a complex and variable local hydrological regime that maintained the Baures landscape. Early Preceramic canals in northwest Peru’s Zaña Valley have also been identified in excavations by Dillehay et al. (2005). In a series of three, and possibly four, nested (e.g., rebuilt over one another) irrigation canals found near the Ñanchoc River, Dillehay and colleagues noted that the volume of each subsequent canal changes in the successive rebuilding event. They argue that these differences are indicative of a significant change to the availability of water flow in the area over time. The 14C dating of these features, along with their association with preceramic stone tools and wild plant cultigens, suggest the canals were being built, used, and maintained by 5400 cal BP and possibly as early as 6500 cal BP (Dillehay et al., 2005, p. 17244). These Fig. 2 Spatial relationships between water canals, causeway roads, and forest islands in the Llanos de Moxos. After Erickson (2001, figure 6) by Dan Brinkmeier, Field Museum, Chicago, USA 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 13 of 57 16 infrastructural features in the Zaña Valley show a commitment to sustaining wetlands and wild plant communities prior to the emergence of urbanism in the region. These practices and related material infrastructure systems would eventually lead to a greater economic reliance on domesticated cultigens and influence the adoption and intensification of agricultural practices. Archaeological interpretations of these infrastructural projects across very different geographic and environmental contexts in South America show these components of the built environment were constructed several centuries to millennia before the rise of formal urban-organized societies in both respective cultural locales. Moreover, they were built to allow small-scale societies to better interface with the ecological zones they inhabited, and may have been a socially-integrating mechanism that fostered ‘… an emphasis on interhousehold ritual linked to community interaction’ (Dillehay et al., 2005, p. 17244; see also Erickson, 2001, p. 27; Erickson & Balée, 2006, p. 196). These examples from the precontact archaeological record of the Andes and Amazonia highlight the multifunctional nature of infrastructure. They also exhibit the ability of infrastructural networks of rivers, canals, and (in Amazonia) canal-associated causeways to transcend traditional nature/culture and built/ non-built binaries. Similar networks of riverine and canal travel used by past American Indian societies have been documented by early settlers in the Eastern Woodlands of North America and confirmed through archaeological investigation. It is likely that human riverine travel in various types of wooden dug-out canoes extends to human colonization of the Eastern Woodlands; however, near the Gulf of Mexico, evidence for riverine travel among disparate small-scale Woodland communities can be seen in the coastal areas of present-day Mississippi at the Jackson Landing Site (Boudreaux, 2011, 2013). Here, a platform mound overlying a midden and adjacent curvilinear embankment earthwork presents evidence for the site’s use as a large-scale and repetitive ceremonial gathering place beginning sometime after 400 AD and through to the early 8th century AD (Boudreaux, 2011). Although he does not explicitly speak to infrastructure, Boudreaux (2011, 2013) has argued that the nearby Pearl River and the Mississippi Sound (opening to the Gulf of Mexico) would have likely facilitated travel for gatherings of large groups at Jackson Landing, which was a crucial space for integrating local communities and maintaining regional inland, deltaic, and coastal identities. Recent research recognizes that rivers, coastal areas, and adjacent bayous were well-traveled waterways during this time period (and likely much earlier) as seen in work by Waslkov and colleagues (2022) who have identified Indigenous canal construction and use by American Indians dating to at least the 7th century AD. In this example, a newly identified section of a canoe canal near present-day Gulf Shores, Alabama on the United States’ (US) Gulf Coast exhibited evidence for the excavation of the canal bed, in addition to the construction of earthen berms that defined the canal’s sides (Waselkov et al., 2022, p. 497). This research contextualizes the monumentality of these canals individually, and as they spread across the Gulf States of Alabama and Florida. Waselkov et al. (2022, p. 498) suggest that these landscape features create a ‘web of paths that interconnected Indigenous peoples along the Gulf Coast with places near and far.’ Because construction of the Alabama canals 13 16 Page 14 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 was situated in the Middle Woodland period (ca. 200 BC – 5/600 AD) of Eastern North America, Waselkov and colleagues (2022) compare Indigenous canals of the Gulf Coast to the parallel embankments created by Ohio Hopewell societies to the north that facilitated overland travel between ceremonial sites, a topic we cover more extensively below. This notion of coastal interaction spheres negotiated through canal travel is supported by evidence for canal systems elsewhere in the region, including some that facilitated travel from the gulf side of Florida into the Lake Okeechobee Basin (Wheeler, 1995, 1998). Canals that penetrate the Florida peninsula have been associated with late Middle/early Late Woodland Weeden Island societies based on an association with material culture. In these societies we see some commonalities with Hopewellian built environments between the North American Midcontinent and sites like Fort Center and Crystal River. These similarities have led archaeologists to discuss the shared experience of travel and negotiation of kinship networks among those traveling between Middle Woodland-era sites in Florida (Pluckhahn & Thompson, 2013). Functional uses of canals prior to urbanized societies in the Eastern Woodlands of North America also go beyond a use for travel. This can be seen in the canals in the Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV). In these lowland geographies, archaeologists have identified the construction and use of canals to drain inundated landscapes, as seen at the Jordan site in NE Louisiana (Kidder & Saucier, 1991). In this case study, a backswamp was cleared and drained through the creation of Indigenous infrastructure like embankments and ponds that were used to manage water and allow for the construction and preservation of earthen mounds. Canals in the US Southwest and Northern Mexico have a long and geographically extensive history because they enabled societies to irrigate the desert landscape within the context of emerging and increasing agricultural intensification. In Mexico’s Sonoran Desert, irrigation canals have been documented at preceramic/Early Agricultural period sites like La Playa (Cajigas, 2017; Cajigas et al., 2020). Extensive dating of some canals at La Playa by Cajigas and colleagues (2020) suggest that canal infrastructure was in place by 750–350 BC and important to the earliest adoption of maize agriculture at La Playa between 50 and 250 AD. The Hohokam (ca. 450–1400 AD) societies of south-central Arizona are wellknown for building canals to irrigate agricultural land. However, as Huckleberry and colleagues (2018, p. 606) note, the initial construction of canals began around approximately 1500 BC, when hunting and foraging lifestyles began to integrate food production. Geoarchaeological research on Hohokam canals tied to flows of the Salt and Gila Rivers in Arizona shows that Hohokam communities experienced and handled flood-based disruptions to their land and lifestyles differently, but canal construction and maintenance was observable most clearly as expanding in the period 450–1450 AD (Huckleberry, 1999; Huckleberry et al., 2018; Waters & Ravesloot, 2001). Hunt et al. (2005) discuss the social organization of Hohokam societies as never trending toward bureaucratic hierarchical organization but rather reflecting a more decentralized and situational social organization. They argue that participation in the ongoing construction and periodic cleaning and maintenance of canals served to frame the formation of Hohokam kinship networks. Woodson (2010) calls these irrigation communities and describes them as a kin-based organizational system that 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 15 of 57 16 managed power dynamics of multi-sized villages tied to a primary canal. In the case of Hohokam canals, we might describe their non-urban irrigation infrastructure as something that allowed societies to gather with a focus on responsibility to place and person. Irrigation canals have also been studied in and around the famous Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. This case is challenging within the theme of our research here because there is some debate as to whether one could classify Chaco, with its multiple Great Houses, as a city (cf. Lekson, 2015). However, because there is debate around whether Chaco was urban in the sense that it included governing bureaucracies to organize social life and labor beyond the canyon’s pilgrimage events, we consider the area an agrotown (sensu Smith, 2023) or ceremonial pilgrimage locale akin to the multi-form enclosures of Central Ohio and include it in our examination of nonurban infrastructure. Several different types of water management infrastructure have been identified archaeologically and discussed in relation to agricultural production in Chaco Canyon. However, canals have been discussed specifically as a means to facilitate the movement of water for agricultural purposes (Scarborough et al., 2018), and to move water closer to Great Houses in the canyon, presumably for labor projects (Wills et al., 2024). These studies, among others, show that water infrastructure around Chaco Canyon was being created and used to support local food production and to support massive building projects. Canals, in all their forms and functions, offer an example to observe material phenomena created not just for the management of water, but in several cases, the organization and management of society. In both the North and South American case studies we refer to here, there is evidence that water infrastructure enabled strong ties to and between places well before the emergence of ethnically diverse high density population settlements and interregional bureaucratic sociopolitical institutions. This might be because the labor and reliance on modified social landscapes opens new and diverse possibilities for non-urban societies to organize collectively and cooperatively in ways that allow them to thrive in their situation. Other forms of infrastructure important to non-urban prosperity include overland travel routes and footpaths. These pieces of the non-urban built environment provide another example of the ways infrastructure facilitated movement and supported social interaction across the Americas. Roads, Trails, and Causeways Infrastructure that served movement through inland portions of the Americas is something that is visible at different scales of time and space. We begin by noting the importance of movements by large mammals in this process. For instance, Bison are considered among the many large mammals that moved across the midcontinental US to access diverse resources (e.g., water and salt licks) during the Late Pleistocene. Raitz and O’Malley (2012) have suggested the travel corridors they left behind, known as traces, likely served as a foundation for some primary branches of American Indian overland routes in what is now the Eastern US. Extensive Pleistocene buffalo (Bison antiquus) remains have been identified at Big Bone Lick State Park in the North-Central part of Kentucky (Maggard & Stackelbeck, 2008). Raitz 13 16 Page 16 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 & O’Malley, (2012) note that modern buffalo (Bison bison) arrived in the region not too long before European settlement of the area began. Written documentation from European settlers working for land companies during the early-to-mid eighteenth century describes buffalo traces extending between large salt licks that were on average more than 60 m wide (Raitz & O’Malley, 2012; see also Myer, 1928, pp. 741–2). Some of these were incorporated into historic roads that became paved and are used to this day. Building upon the travel paths of large mammals like Bison, and existing apart from them, are a deep history of extensive overland trail networks throughout the Eastern US that were documented by the Bureau of American Ethnology (Myer, 1928). Indigenous overland trails extended from the coastal areas of the southern Atlantic to the west of the Appalachian Mountain range into the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys and beyond to the Plains (Blakeslee & Blasing, 1988; Myer, 1928). The number of various types of earthen mounds and enclosures constructed along some of these routes in the Eastern Woodlands speaks to their long history of use. For instance, a trail known as the Warriors’ Path, first documented by European settlers in the early-to-mid 18th century, started at the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains and stretched to several places along the southern banks of the Ohio River (Fig. 3). Where the Warrior’s Path splits into two prongs that extend northeast to the Ohio River is the approximate position for the last known Indigenous village of the Shawnee Tribe in Kentucky: Eskippakithiki. Portions of these prongs incorporated sections of very large bison traces. Moreover, Middle Woodland-era (200 BC–500 AD) earthen monuments (i.e., a burial mound and adjacent geometric enclosure known as the Goff Site) are located roughly 3 km to the west of this trail’s Fig. 3 Map of major traces and overland trail routes, including the Warriors Path, that traverse modernday Kentucky, USA. The Goff and South Portsmouth archaeological sites are denoted. Map by ERH 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 17 of 57 16 split (Henry et al., 2019). The Scioto Prong of the Warrior’s Path extended northeast, ending at the precontact Shawnee village known as Lower Shawnee Town opposite the mouth of Ohio’s Scioto River. This terminus of the trail on the southern banks of the Ohio River is also known for the Portsmouth Earthworks, an extensive collection of Middle Woodland burial mounds and geometric enclosures (Hardesty, 1965; Henderson et al., 1988; Lewis, 1887; Squier & Davis, 1998 [1848]). Middle Woodland Ohio Hopewell groups, and the distant visitors who participated in ceremonial gatherings at mortuary mounds and geometric earthen enclosures, created other visible and viable forms of non-urban road and causeway infrastructure (Carr, 2005; Charles & Buikstra, 2006; Redmond et al., 2019, 2020; Wright & Henry, 2013). While several examples could be drawn on to show how Hopewell societies participated in large collective action events that produced such infrastructural systems, none are perhaps more iconic than the Newark Earthworks (Hively & Horn, 2013; Lepper, 1998, 2004) (Fig. 4). This multi-form network of geometric enclosures, mounds, and causeways are unrivaled in the Eastern Woodlands of North America. Numerous astronomical analyses of the circle-octagon complex have revealed a major alignment with northern lunar maximum standstill, among several other minor alignments, offering one way to frame the timing and tempo of gatherings at this enclosure that attracted pilgrims from across North America (Hively & Horn, 2006; Lepper, 2006; Romain, 2000). Related to the Newark Earthworks is the Great Hopewell Road. This feature is a roadway consisting of parallel embankments that extended south from the earthworks. While the total distance of the Great Hopewell road is debatable, archaeologists have noted that it does extend southwest toward the present-day town of Chillicothe and the Scioto River Valley, where several multi-form geometric enclosures are situated (Lepper, 1998, 2006, 2024; Romain & Burks, 2008). Because the Scioto River runs Fig. 4 The Newark Earthworks, Ohio, USA (Plate XXV) as depicted by Squier and Davis 1998 [1848] 13 16 Page 18 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 south from Chillicothe, one potential distant endpoint of the Great Hopewell Road includes the Portsmouth Earthworks we mentioned previously, situated at the confluence of the Scioto River with the Ohio River (Holt, 1878; Lewis, 1887; Henderson et al., 1988). This collection of multi-form enclosures and mounds includes networks of parallel embankments like the road leading away from the Newark Earthworks. One such road ended at the Ohio River near present-day Portsmouth, Ohio, but continued onto the south banks of the river and into what is now South Portsmouth, Kentucky, where the Portsmouth Earthworks are (Henderson et al., 1988; Holt, 1878; Lewis, 1887; Squier & Davis, 1998 [1848]). These examples provide some context for understanding the deep history of nonurban overland trail and causewayed road infrastructure in the Eastern US. However, the Eastern US was not the only place where infrastructure like this was constructed and utilized. Examples of road infrastructure in the American Southwest are also visible in the archaeological record. Roads similar to the ones we previously described here for the Hopewell, as well as earlier and later societies of the North American Midcontinent, can also be observed connecting large and small ancestral Puebloan communities tied to Chaco Canyon (Friedman et al., 2017; Kantner, 1997; Lekson, 2015; Snead, 2017; Van Dyke, 2008). Chacoan roads can be characterized by shallow excavations into, and/or the clearing of, the land surface with edges defined by berms or low stone constructions (Friedman et al., 2017, p. 368). Comparable to the Hopewell embankment roads discussed earlier, some Chacoan roads are comprised of short segments (e.g., a few kilometers), others are documented to be more than 50 km (Friedman et al., 2017). These landscape features also hold small herraduras, or small stone semi-circles, along their courses that are interpreted as shrines for travelers to visit along their routes. These features draw comparison to the small geometric enclosures that are situated along portions of the embankment roads comprising the Newark earthworks and the overland trail routes that connected Indigenous people across the Eastern US (see Fig. 4). We briefly note that there is ample evidence for similar overland trail routes in other portions of the precontact and early settler periods of the Great Plains, where trails aided in the navigation of a seemingly featureless landscape between burial sites and villages (Blakeslee & Blasing, 1988). In Mesoamerica, examples of pre-Mayan causeway infrastructure are emerging in recent research. One case study we draw on here is the site of Aguada Fénix in the state of Tabasco, Mexico. At Aguada Fénix, Takeshi Inomata and colleagues (Inomata et al., 2020, 2021) have discovered a large human-built platform roughly 1400 × 400 m in extent and rising as high as 15 m above the surrounding landscape, with nine causeways radiating outward from it. The causeways connect the main plateau to several other rectangular complexes and extend as far as 6.3 km (Inomata et al., 2020). The radiocarbon dating of this built landscape at Aguada Fénix shows initial construction of the main plateau as early as 1000 BC, with completion of the complex and associated causeways at roughly 900–800 BC. This rapid construction event is interpreted by Inomata and colleagues (2020) as a communal and cooperative labor project that brought together several communities living in new social forms of settled village life prior to the formation of Classic-era (ca. post 300 AD) Mayan empires. The causeways linking different rectangular complexes (e.g., early E-groups) at Aguada Fénix likely facilitated the flow of people and things, as well 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 19 of 57 16 as communication regarding emerging religious ideas, for those who participated in the construction and gatherings at this lowland architectural complex (cf. Inomata et al., 2021). In South America, roads likely served similar dualities in function, allowing for the movement of people and things, but also ideas about cosmology and kinship. For example, Saunaluoma and colleagues (2021) have recently documented extensive pre-Columbian road networks across interfluvial areas in the Brazilian state of Acre. The roads radiate outward from circular mounded villages connecting to other villages, nearby watercourses, and activity areas located outside the villages, thus creating a complex fluvial-terrestrial route system. Saunaluoma et al. (2021) have concluded that the spatial patterning of the villages and road networks points to a population that shared the same structured patterns of movement, ideas about spatial planning, and ultimately, a shared sociocultural identity. This example supports the notion that infrastructural networks facilitated and helped maintain sociocultural identities among small-scale, non-urban societies in the Americas. Additionally, it reveals how we as archaeologists can analyze infrastructural networks to understand how they reflect and materially preserve aspects of past sociocultural identities, regardless of the degree of organizational complexity. Adding to this example, we reiterate the use of raised roads that paralleled canals in the Llanos de Moxos region of Bolivia that we described earlier. In that case, the engineered dry surface causeways extended for several kilometers to connect villages and forest islands when seasonal inundation made other forms of travel challenging (Erickson, 2001, 2009; Erickson & Balée, 2006). Infrastructural travel corridors and networks of rivers, canals, roads, causeways, and trails exhibit the ways non-urban Indigenous societies in the Americas coordinated the flow of local and regional populations, materials, and identities among and between small-scale societies. Because the movements and practices of individual people and communities unfold across shared physical networks, create similar experiences, and as a result, produce memories that are shared by other community members, they encourage the formation and preservation of communal bonds that extend beyond the domestic unit (Mixter & Henry, 2017; Van Dyke & Alcock, 2003). Creating and maintaining a shared sense of communal identity is particularly important for integrating and weaving together fragmented, small-scale, non-urban societies that are physically separated over large distances. Nevertheless, there were other ways infrastructure played important roles among pre-contact societies in the Americas who lived in non-urban contexts. These included ways material forms limit the movement of people, things, and ideas. We present case studies for some of these examples in the following section. Infrastructure to Limit Movement As we argued above, small-scale non-urban societies across the Americas built and maintained several forms of infrastructure that functioned to facilitate movement. This said, there were additional infrastructural forms that were constructed and used to limit movement in ways that offered different benefits to societies. In some of the case studies we cover below, we recognize an interesting tension between kinds of 13 16 Page 20 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 infrastructure that facilitate movement and those that limit it. There are even examples where infrastructure might limit movement in some instances, while facilitating or encouraging it in another. We will interrogate that tension more in our discussion. For now, we will focus on collating evidence for material forms that enabled types of endeavors like storing food or capturing and domesticating wildlife. Other forms of infrastructure operated to limit flows of people and things. Evidence for these material forms includes managing hydrology or controlling the movement of people or perceived forces and energies across a landscape. A few examples of infrastructure that fit these functions in the archaeological record of the Americas include artificial ponds (Blatrix et al., 2018; Erickson, 2000b; Schmidt et al., 2014; Stenborg et al., 2018), fishing weirs (Blatrix et al., 2018; Byram, 1998, 2002; Harrison-Buck et al., 2024; Petersen et al., 1994), corrals and game drives (Aldenderfer, 1998; LaBelle & Pelton, 2013; McGuire & Hatoff, 1991; Mengoni Goñalons, 2008; Meyer, 2023; Moore, 2016), clam gardens (Holmes et al., 2022; Jackley et al., 2016; Lepofsky et al., 2015), check dams (Doolittle, 1985; Woosley, 1980; Sandor et al., 1990; Reese, 2020), cache pits (Howey et al., 2016; Moore & Dekle, 2010), palisades (de Souza et al., 2018; Henry et al., 2019, 2021), earthen enclosures (de Souza et al., 2018; Henry et al., 2021), and burial mounds (Dillehay et al., 2012; Fish et al., 2013; Henry, 2017; Iriarte et al., 2017). The physical, lasting presence of these features among non-urban small-scale societies across the Americas indicates a significance of these infrastructures in the lives of the people who built, used, and maintained them for generations, likely in ways that facilitated social, economic, political, and environmental stability. Cache Pits, Fish Weirs, Ponds, Corrals, Clam Gardens, and Burial Mounds Storage infrastructure has a long history in studies of global capitalism and political economies, particularly in regard to the surplus and circulation of commodities (Marx, 1993 [1885]). In archaeology, storage is often associated with concepts of surplus and the ways it underwrites the power of social elites in sedentary hierarchical societies (Barrier, 2011; Morehart & Lucia, 2015), or provides unique and temporary opportunities for hunter-gatherers to engage in complex organizational forms where massive monuments and ecological settings are built and managed (Arnold et al., 2016; Kidder & Ervin, 2018; Thompson, 2023; Thompson & Moore, 2015). However, evidence is growing for systems of long-term and temporary storage infrastructure among semi-mobile and sedentary small-scale societies in the Americas. We see these as non-traditional forms of storage because they were not often used for long-term storage (> 1 year) that could be likened to the stowing of cereal grains typically associated with the redistributive early urban economies around the world. Nevertheless, the ability to store things and animals afforded non-urban small-scale societies the ability to thrive in their environments and potentially maintain decentralized sociopolitical organizations and subsistence systems. For our broad geographic focus, we find that this requires us to explore the use of ponds, weirs, corrals, clam gardens and cache pits. The use of these infrastructural features is far-reaching and not restricted to one certain type of social organization or time period. Instead, these landscape features offer durable ways that humans organize self and society. Engaging with such infrastructure embedded human activities within their environments. 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 21 of 57 16 We also see infrastructural mechanisms in non-urban contexts across the Americas that do not translate well to modern or early urban forms of infrastructure. To this end, we discuss burial mounds as kinship infrastructure grounded in the accumulation of ancestors that drives the creation of collective memories for their use in the present. Cache pits serve multiple functions related to food storage. They can be used to stow food items after preparation for subsurface storage (e.g., roasted nuts) and they can be used to store seeds until they are needed for consumption or subsequent sowing and planting events. In Eastern North America, cache pits have been identified in several archaeological contexts related to both mobile and semi-sedentary societies. In the Northern Great Lakes region, clusters of cache pits have been discovered across Michigan through foot and LiDAR surveys (Howey & Frederick, 2016; Howey et al., 2016). Excavations revealed they were constructed with access shelves and ramps and used for the subterranean storage of acorns and hazelnuts, as well as various berries (Howey & Frederick, 2016). In the Midwest and Southeastern US, cache pits are well documented in similar spatial clusters. In these contexts there is clear evidence for their use in the roasting and storing of nut mast among Middle and Late Archaic hunter-gatherer societies, and the storage of starchy seed stocks (often in upland rockshelters) that made up early domesticated crops known as the Eastern Agricultural Complex (Fritz, 1990; Gremillion, 2004; Hollenbach & Carmody, 2022; Moore & Dekle, 2010; Wright et al., 2022). Speaking to these forms of immovable storage infrastructure in Eastern North America, Moore and Dekle (2010) suggest these cache pits provided the capacity for upland horticultural practices to thrive and for hunter-gatherers to develop new perceptions of their worlds as immobile floodplain aquatic diets became less sustainable. Similarly, Hollenbach and Carmody (2022) suggest terrestrial storage infrastructure led to fundamental shifts in the physical landscape and social lifeways of precontact Indigenous foragers in the region, including an eventual delineation of social territories and property rights. Similar storage infrastructure can be seen in the construction of fish weirs, as well as the artificial and natural ponds that sometimes accompany them. These features are nearly synonymous with the lifeways of non-urban Indigenous people who inhabited coastal, wetland, and riverine ecologies across the Americas. In Amazonia, wetland depressions have been recognized by numerous archaeologists as artificial ponds that were used to store water and aquatic animals (Blatrix et al., 2018; Erickson, 2000b; Erickson & Balée, 2006; Prestes-Carneiro et al., 2021; Stenborg et al., 2018). The wide distribution of artificial ponds across Amazonian geographies indicates that these features likely functioned in similar ways to cache pits by providing ways for small-scale communities to dwell in water scarce interfluvial contexts, or live storage of aquatic animals (Prestes-Carneiro et al., 2021). The association with fish weirs in certain contexts corroborates the use of ponds to store aquatic food resources like fish and eels. Fish/eel ponds that were associated with V-shaped earthen weirs have been identified in the San Joaquín floodplains of Bolivia’s Llanos de Moxos region by Blatrix and colleagues (2018). They suggest these features, built as early as 1030 AD, would have permitted the storage of water and aquatic life in the ponds during dry seasons, and afforded people living on forest islands the ability to subsist on those resources throughout the dry season. 13 16 Page 22 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 The use of wooden-stake and stone fish weirs is common to societies of the Pacific, Gulf, and Atlantic Coasts in North America. In the Pacific Northwest, they are common to the tidal estuaries and channels where fish traveling through the areas in high tides could be trapped when tides receded, and date as early as 4600 years ago (Byram, 1998, 2002; Moss & Erlandson, 2007; Tveskov & Erlandson, 2003). An early fish weir discovered in Maine, situated in a channel that flows into a lake, shows evidence of reconstruction over multiple episodes (Petersen et al., 1994). Direct radiocarbon dating of the weir fence suggests these aquatic infrastructures date as early as 3100 BC in the Northern Atlantic region, and this particular weir was in use for roughly three millennia (Petersen et al., 1994). In the Southeastern US, fish weirs are suspected to have been used among the Archaic hunter-gatherers who inhabited the region (Colaninno, 2011; Connaway, 2007), but preserved weir remains are harder to identify in these areas. Nevertheless, their presence has been identified along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts through the analysis of fish body size indices from several archaeological sites, the results of which, indicate that fish weirs were commonly used for mass capture during the Late Archaic and Woodland eras (Colaninno, 2011; Reitz et al., 2021). Finally, in Mesoamerica, recent remote sensing and ground investigations have identified a landscape of linear canal features, earthen weirs, and ponds that were used in fish trapping as early as the Late Archaic (ca. 3400–1800 BC) in northern Belize (Harrison-Buck et al., 2024). Another form of storage infrastructure commonly used in the Americas includes corrals. Corrals might invoke images of domesticated livestock storage, however in the non-urban social contexts we focus on here, they were used in a variety of contexts that included temporarily concentrating herd animals at the end of game drives for mass kills, as well as storing animals like turtles, vicuña, and guanaco. In the far northern reaches of the Northwestern American Arctic, corrals are part of deep historical Caribou hunting strategies employed by hunter-gatherer communities that use wooden fences acting as game drives (Blehr, 1990; Van Der Sluijs et al., 2020). In these instances, roughly rounded corrals built from wooden fences used in the driving of Caribou are situated at the terminus of a broad and flat terrain feature so multiple Caribou can be harvested by close range spearing, bow and arrow shots, and/or snares. Corral features associated with game drives are also common across the mountainous boundaries of the Great Basin. In these cases, large wooden fence walls are constructed to tilt inward to presumably distort a Mule Deer’s ability to judge when to jump over the drive-trap feature (Nadel et al., 2020). In South America corrals are used in both highland geographies of the Andes, and in the low wetlands of Amazonia. Turtle corrals built and used by precontact Indigenous societies of Amazonia were typically constructed from vertically arranged wooden sticks, sometimes around artificial ponds, that created an enclosure for live turtles (Prestes-Carneiro et al., 2021; Fig. 5). Prestes-Carnerio et al. (2021) draw on early accounts by European explorers in describing how turtle corrals provided the main source of food for local populations, as well as for Portuguese settlers. They suggest live turtles could be stored for up to six months, while in some cases in the Upper Amazon, they were stored for years, routinely fed, and reproduced in corrals (Prestes-Carneiro et al., 2021, p. 97). They report that these corrals were most used in the span 300–1200 AD. In the mountainous highlands of the Andes corrals have a 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 23 of 57 16 Fig. 5 A wood engraving of a turtle corral used by Conibo societies in the Ucayali region of Peru in the 1800s; see Marcoy (1875); Prestes-Carneiro (2021, figure 1) connection to the early camelid pastoral economies (Capriles & Tripcevich, 2016). In some cases, corrals are associated with game-drive hunting techniques of vicuña and guanaco (wild relatives of domesticated llamas and alpacas) similar to those we describe above for Caribou and Mule Deer in North America, as early as 10th century BC (Yacobaccio, 2009). However, corrals transition to archaeological markers for storage (e.g., penning) as the domestication process unfolds and alpacas are domesticated around 4050 BC, followed by llamas roughly at 3050 BC (Mengoni Goñalons, 2008; Metcalf et al., 2014). Aldenderfer’s (1998) work at Asana, an archaeological site in the highlands of Southern Peru, identified a pattern of posts surrounding dung residues that represented a corral and coincided with a domestic occupation and an adjacent midden dating to 1690 BC, but an earlier and similar post mold pattern to the one associated with dung deposits identified at the site led him to suggest earlier use of the site as a pastoralist outpost around 2390 BC. These features would have been important at certain points in time for storing camelids but also for selectively separating and breeding them during the long process of camelid domestication described by Moore (2016). We should also consider the clam gardens along the North American coastlines extending from Alaska, through British Columbia, and into Washington State in the Pacific Northwest to be infrastructure that provides concentrated short-term storage (Jackley et al., 2016; Lepofsky et al., 2015; Rogers, 2024). Clam gardens are built infrastructure that encourages and concentrates the growth of an edible species of shellfish in a way that mimics storage infrastructure (Fig. 6). They can be described as an intertidal ‘… rock boulder wall[s] constructed near the zero tide line; this results in a terrace on the landward side of the wall that significantly expands bivalve habitat and productivity through a variety of abiotic and biotic mechanisms’ (Lepofsky et al., 2015, p. 238). Clam gardens associated with Quadra Island, British Columbia are estimated to have begun being constructed by hunter-gatherer-fishers around 1850–1550 BC (Smith et al., 2019; Holmes et al., 2022). Productive bivalve habitat increases approximately 30% where clam gardens are implemented, and they have been found to more than double clam biomass (Jackley et al., 2016; Lepofsky 13 16 Page 24 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Fig. 6 A clam garden (image left) that developed because of the constructed rock wall feature (image right) in the Pacific Northwest, Canada, North America. Photograph by Simon Fraser University Communications and Marketing et al., 2021). In the Quadra Island example, archaeologists have now mapped 15 km of clam garden walls (Holmes et al., 2020). These infrastructural features can be seen as having limited clam growth in cetain locations and encouraged it in others, and in doing so, providing the grounds on which clams operated in species regeneration and people practiced aquaculture in the region. A final example of storage infrastructure we would like to discuss compels us to touch on a built form that we examine in depth in a subsequent section of our article, the creation and use of burial mounds. Considering burial mounds from the viewpoint of storage infrastructure may at first seem somewhat unconventional. However, we find that burial mounds are among the cases of built environments that lead to a productive tension in how archaeologists should explore non-urban infrastructure. We view burial mounds later in our paper as built forms that encourage and facilitate movement. However, here we briefly discuss their capacity for storing ancestors, which provides an ability to signal information. Burial mounds are common throughout the Americas but are often more common among Indigenous societies organized in mobile to semi-sedentary forms. While we recognize that burial mounds (and cemeteries for that matter) do much more than store people, we wish to recognize how pulling together concentrations of ancestors in one locale creates forms of social power that provide the grounds on which collective memories are codified, decisions are made, and social responsibilities are kept (see Henry, 2017). As we will discuss below, the Huaca Prieta mound situated on Peru’s coast reflects how small groups of people moving to and from it coalesce during construction events. However, throughout the mound’s history we can trace its shift toward the use for containing some ancestors, as informal burials were added to the mound just before its entire surface was capped in a thin layer of yellow sediment. This act was followed by construction of a ramp that provided access to a sunken plaza at the mound’s summit. When these features were built at Huaca Prieta, stone chamber tombs begin 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 25 of 57 16 being built along the crest and upper slopes of the mound, followed by burial niches that were placed around the rim of the sunken plaza (Dillehay, 2017a). According to Dillehay (2017c), this marked the use of the mound as a place for the integration of unrelated groups, a potential re-membering of society. Interestingly, he notes that the limited ancient DNA work performed on the burials at Huaca Prieta suggests that females may have been more related than males in the mound, suggesting the builders and nearby occupants of the mound were organized matrilocally (Dillehay, 2017c, p. 590). In confronting the importance of burials placed in Huaca Prieta, Dillehay (Dillehay, 2017d, p. 609) notes that people interred in the mound were not forgotten, but part of the fluid ways the past was part of present social integration and negotiations among the living. The Cerritos mounds of the Uruguayan coastal wetlands and upland interior, as well as the Sambaquis of Brazil’s Atlantic Coast offer another look into the ways burial mounds were used to store ancestors, and in so doing, become mnemonic infrastructure for negotiating kinship and delimiting territories and access to resources. Iriarte and colleagues (2017) mention that there is almost no differentiation among burials in the Cerritos mound complexes. Primary and secondary interments appear in Cerritos mounds just at the terminal preceramic and reflect an emphasis on kinship ties and ‘communal social formations … that resisted individual aggrandizers in their path to power …’ (Iriarte et al., 2017, p. 269). The Sambaquis shell mounds are similar in the ways they exhibit infrastructural qualities but sometimes exhibit only minimal evidence for social differentiation. More commonly, the burials that went into Sambaquis are identified as bundle burials interred in pits (although the occasional extended burial occurs) and appear to be directly tied to new construction events in the mounds (Fish et al., 2013; Iriarte et al., 2017). Fish and colleagues (2013, pp. 132–133) note that fires prepared in hearths and feasting debris are associated with burial events in the Sambaquis. These mortuary patterns lead archaeologists to suggest that the Sambaquis represent heterarchical societies that centered around productive lagoons, the mounds which served as socio-economic identity and territorial markers among those who interacted in these resource rich ecologies (Fish et al., 2013; Iriarte et al., 2017). In Eastern North America, burial mounds appeared quickly around 500 BC and spatially spread, in addition to their size and complexity, across the region until around 400 AD. Mortuary mounds in the Eastern US are often conical and range in size from a few meters in diameter and less than a meter in height, to approximately 15 m in diameter and 10 m tall. They are often associated with Woodland-period societies who initiated ceremonial interaction across most of the North American continent (e.g., Adena and/or Hopewell) (Carr & Case, 2005); Charles & Buikstra, 2002, 2006; Clay, 1998; Henry, 2017; Henry & Barrier, 2016; Mainfort, 2013). The range of interments within these mounds includes cremation deposits, extended burials in clay-lined pits, in addition to simple and extravagant interments in log-lined and covered tombs. Unlike the Cerritos and Sambaquis, there are several instances among the Woodland burial mounds of Eastern North America where status differentiation is visible. This is particularly the case when log tombs (often used as defleshing crypts) were commonly used in mounds (Brown, 1979; Webb, 1940; Webb & Elliott, 1942). This said, there are interpretations that these burial mounds repre- 13 16 Page 26 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 sent heterarchical societies where leadership roles and differences in status existed, but were not sustained or ascribed, and were instead situational and achieved (Henry & Barrier, 2016). Similar to Dillehay’s (2017d) description of Huaca Prieta as a mnemonic kinship force in negotiations of the present, and the kin–based explanations used to describe the creation and use of Cerritos and Sambuquis, Henry (2017) has interpreted some of the more complex examples of Woodland burial mounds as bundles that helped negotiate the social dissonance of kinship dynamics. From this perspective, burial mounds in the Americas offer some generalized insights into how they operated as a form of storage infrastructure. They helped to store ancestors that kin-based communities (real and imagined) could draw on to re-member (reformulate through adding individuals) their connections to the past and to important places on the landscape. These connections were not fixed but constantly renegotiated through the memory work (Mills & Walker, 2008; Mixter & Henry, 2017) of adding earth, shell, and new kin to the mounds. Palisades, Game Drives, Check Dams, and Earthen Enclosures Other forms of infrastructure we see in non-urban societies across the Americas that limit movement can be grouped around the ways they control the flow of human and non-human movement. This relates to the flow of where humans can move and where they cannot, where water can flow or be sustained, or the ways herd animals move across a landscape. One example of infrastructure that fits this description is palisades. Palisades are common defensive features to proto- and urban settlements post-1000 AD in the Eastern US (e.g., among Mississippian communities) but are used in unique ways during the Middle Woodland era where post-alignments have no defensive connections but rather enforce physical boundaries in society. In these contexts, circular and rectilinear post arrangements are commonly found beneath burials and within the interior spaces of geometric earthen enclosures. These features are most associated with the built environments of Middle Woodland communities in the Middle Ohio River Valley. In this socio-geographic context post structures that mimic structures of some sort have been challenging for archaeologists to interpret. Professional archaeologists in the early-to-mid 20th century first thought these features represented houses or large communal structures (Clay, 2009), and indeed in the case of sub-mound structures below some of the larger and more complex Hopewell burial mounds in Central Ohio, communal ceremonial structures exist (Burks & Greber, 2009). However, in the case of some sub-mound structures and post enclosures found within the interior of geometric enclosures, there are no clear openings into the post architecture (Clay, 1987; Henry et al., 2021; Webb, 1941a, b). These scenarios have been understudied but recently a project at the Winchester Farm earthwork documented a post enclosure that encircled the outer edge of an interior platform to this ditch-and-embankment enclosure (Henry et al., 2021). Geophysical (magnetometer) results from the site show that this post enclosure extends across the causeway opening of the earthen enclosure with no clear entry into it. Moreover, an extensive radiocarbon dating program indicated that the post enclosure was likely the last phase of the monument’s construction, effectively closing off access to the 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 27 of 57 16 interior of the enclosure. If this is the case, and in cases where post structures are effectively closing access to the interior spaces of earthen enclosures, then they may be acting like defensive palisades in that they ‘keep in’ spirits, forces, and energies that were engaged with during gatherings at these places and protect the outer world from these phenomena (Henry et al., 2021, p. 19). In Amazonia palisades were used to ensure safety, as well as to create social barriers. For example, excavation of geoglyphs in the Bolivian Amazon has revealed that the ditches of geoglyphs were sometimes associated with wooden palisade structures that created a walled defense from outsiders and unwanted visitors (Erickson, 2010; de Souza et al., 2018). In this case, the palisades provided not only protection from raids but also a community symbol for the identities of small village hamlets that occupied the interior spaces of these landscape features. Other forms of built infrastructure that limit movement include game drives. Game drives are common to the mountainous portions of North America and constructed as walls made from rock or wood arranged into fences. They function by altering the flow of herd animals into constricted spaces, sometimes in the shape of a V, where communal hunting practices can take place. Sometimes game-drive constrictions funnel animals into corrals for snare, spear, and bow and arrow attacks, while other game-drive formations lead animals toward hunting blinds (LaBelle & Pelton, 2013; Lemke, 2021; McGuire & Hatoff, 1991; Meyer, 2023; O’Shea et al., 2013; Van Der Sluijs et al., 2020). In the Rocky Mountain region of North America, numerous game drives have been mapped, many above 3000 masl (LaBelle & Pelton, 2013; Meyer, 2021). In the Central Rocky Mountain region, encompassing the US state of Colorado, game drives were built by hunter-gatherers and in use before the Late Archaic (ca. 1400 BC), but used up until European contact (LaBelle & Pelton, 2013; Meyer, 2023). Check dams are infrastructure associated with the control of water flows. Check dams can be built from rocks, earth, and a mix of wood and woody brush; they operate to slow water runoff during high flow events (e.g., after a rain or spring snow melt) and divert the water toward other canal offshoots or agricultural fields (Nichols & Polyakov, 2019; Norton et al., 2002; Scarborough et al., 2018; Vivian & Watson, 2015). We have already discussed the use of canals around Chaco Canyon in the US Southwest, but integrated within the canal systems of this area are features like dams and check dams that served to limit and alter the flows of water associated with the canal system in the canyon (Scarborough et al., 2018; Vivian & Watson, 2015). Some archaeologists suggest that these flow restriction mechanisms were used to conserve water when it was available and worked to facilitate agricultural strategies like dry land akchin farming, or to facilitate the watering of gridded field systems in the canyon (Sturm, 2016; Vivian & Watson, 2015; Wills & Dorshow, 2012). Similar features have been recorded in the Mimbres region of southwest New Mexico, near the US–Mexico border (Doolittle, 1985; Sandor et al., 1990). There, terraced agricultural practices related to Mogollon societies were in place by 1000 AD and employed a series of small rock dams (e.g., check dams) to alter water runoff from hillslopes to terraces. This practice facilitated the alluvial and colluvial redistribution of A-horizon topsoil into areas for increased agricultural productivity (Sandor et al., 1990, p. 79). Different uses of check dams in this region have focused on the ways this infra- 13 16 Page 28 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 structure protected fertile fields from erosion, inundation, and colluvial accumulation of poor-quality sediments in field systems (Doolittle, 1985). Coming back to Middle Woodland earthen enclosures in Eastern North America that we noted earlier facilitated movement in the ways they drew people to gatherings at their locales and guided them through their boundaries, we are also faced with this productive tension that enclosures also limited movement. We can identify ways these landscape features limited how people moved through them in a manner not dissimilar to the game drives discussed above. When people entered an enclosure, the embankment walls directed and restricted where they could travel within them, and in some cases, between them. Moreover, the Winchester Farm enclosure noted earlier in the discussion of palisades is worth returning to. Often archaeologists interpret geometric enclosures of the Middle Woodland era as places built for social gatherings. Indeed, for many enclosures, this may be the case (Bernardini, 2004; Henry et al., 2020a; Miller, 2021; Wright, 2019). However, Henry and colleagues (2021) used chronological modeling to suggest that the ditch-and-embankment enclosure, in addition to the interior post enclosure, were the last construction events at the site before societies several centuries later erased the enclosure from the landscape. This leads them to suggest that the enclosure was more than a gathering place for people, but a way that people contained supernatural forces involved in events at that place, drawing on the Indigenous phenomena of spirit barriers in the Eastern US (Hall, 1976). This notion may be reinforced by the several instances of enclosures that surrounded burial mounds (Brown, 2012; Henry et al., 2014; Hardesty, 1965). The geoglyphs of western Amazonia provide suitable analogs to the geometric enclosures of the Eastern US While the uses of these enclosures are sometimes to hold small villages, in other instances they are virtually clean and exhibit only small amounts of cultural material (Virtanen & Saunaluoma, 2017). In the latter examples, similar arguments as the one we just made for enclosures in North America have been discussed for the geoglyphs. Virtanen and Saunaluoma (2017, pp. 622–3) draw on conversations with their Indigenous Manchineri collaborators to note that geoglyphs guide human movements to facilitate interaction between humans and humans and spiritual forces, but that shamans need places synonymous with geoglyphs to engage with supernatural beings. In doing so, the authors note that public places like geoglyphs may have been places where transformative and healing powers were accessible, but outside of those contexts such forces would, ‘be formless and dangerous’ (Virtanen & Saunaluoma, 2017, p. 623). Our case studies that represent built infrastructure to limit movement also provides comparative information for our section on infrastructure that facilitated movement, archaeological perspectives on landscape-scale built environments, and social interaction in a way that helps broaden an archaeological framework for non-urban infrastructure. Nevertheless, we find that there were other infrastructural achievements that can be attributed to small-scale non-urban societies. Some of these accomplishments might fall outside what many archaeologists often see as conventional forms of infrastructure discussed above. For this reason, we address built and natural material forms embedded within social landscapes to examine alternative infrastructures that were important in the archaeological histories of non-urban societies in the Americas. 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 29 of 57 16 Alternative Infrastructures Up to this point, we have focused on examples of non-urban infrastructure related to small-scale societies of the archaeological past that compare with infrastructure commonly seen in modern urbanized contexts (e.g., roads, canals, ports, check dams, and storage systems) to demonstrate the ways humans made and engaged with infrastructure apart from urbanized contexts. In this section, we present some cases from non-urban societies in the Americas where infrastructure might be less explicit in facilitating or inhibiting movement and interaction to create the socio-material grounds on which other humans and non-humans operate. Many of these examples also provide the means to signal information. We include in this section built and natural sacred places within social landscapes such as earthen mounds (e.g., burial and platform mounds), publicly defined plazas, unusual geological features, caves, and springs. We argue that these socio-material forms offer insights into how infrastructure can be embedded within both the built and non-built environment as small-scale societies participate in the ongoing and dynamic creation of their worlds. Built and Natural Sacred and Ceremonial Places Earthen mounds across the Eastern Woodlands of the US include both conical burial mounds and flat-topped earthen pyramids colloquially named platform mounds. While these are commonly found in what might be referred to as incipient or early urban settlements (e.g., Cahokia [Pauketat & Emerson, 2000; Dalan et al., 2003; Kelly & Brown, 2014; Fowler, 1997]), there is a deeper history involving these sacred Indigenous American Indian places. Research suggests earthen mound construction in the US began at least 6,000 years ago, originating in hunter-gatherer societies of the LMV (Kassabaum, 2021; Sherwood & Kidder, 2011; Saunders et al., 2005). Elsewhere in North America, Archaic shell mounds and enclosures exist along the Atlantic coast and coastal interior regions of Florida and Georgia (Davis et al., 2021; Marquardt, 2010; Randall & Sassaman, 2017; Sanger et al., 2018; Thompson & Andrus, 2011). In many of the non-urban mound-building contexts—whether the primary matrix of the mound is shell or earth—there often exists evidence for placemaking that precede mounds in these contexts and serve as an intellectual nod to infrastructure as the word was originally developed and conceptually employed (cf. Carse, 2017). This can be seen in North America’s LMV through pre-mound middens and post holes at Watson Brake (Saunders et al., 2005), and a burned wetland depression and subsequent placement of cleaned E-horizon soils beneath Mound A at Poverty Point (Sherwood & Kidder, 2011), both Archaic-era (ca. 8,000–1,000 BC) hunter-gatherer sites in the US. In North America’s Middle Ohio Valley the history of sub-mound placemaking is visible in circular post architecture beneath large Early and Middle Woodland-era (ca. 1000 BC–500 AD) burial mounds like we described above, and the intentionally burned and buried ground surfaces under geometric enclosures (Henry et al., 2020a, 2021; Henry, 2024). However, these ‘infra-structural’ communal pre-mound activities can be traced as late as the Coles Creek era (700–1200 AD), under platform mounds at the Feltus Site in the LMV where thick middens and both architectural and non-architectural posts are recorded (Kassabaum & Stevens Nelson, 2016). 13 16 Page 30 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 To expand on earthen features, we note that a wide range of soil colors and textures have been recognized as intentionally extracted and moved to be incorporated into construction locales (Dillehay, 2017c; Kidder & Sherwood, 2017; Sherwood & Kidder, 2011). In the Eastern US, archaeologists have also traced the ways these construction events involve the movement of people from distant geographies, potentially to participate in world-renewing reenactments of some Indigenous creation stories like the Earth Diver myth (Kidder & Sherwood, 2017; Kidder, 2011). Moreover, some of the monuments in this region, Middle Woodland Hopewell burial mounds for instance, contain finely crafted material symbols that originated from vast distances away from Central Ohio (e.g., the Rocky Mountains, the Gulf of Mexico, the Northern Great Plains, the Great Lakes) (Charles & Buikstra, 2006; Lynott, 2015; Carr & Case, 2005; Henry & Miller, 2020). With the movement of people to and from construction events for earthen mounds, and the movement of things from their source geographies to mounds for construction episodes, or use and/or deposition during the ceremonies that coincided with mound construction, there is a corresponding movement of ideologies and identities bundled into the memories of social experience (Henry, 2017). This suggests that an additional component of earthen mounds as infrastructural projects is related to signaling information. This might include information on what geographies are considered homelands to particular social groups (e.g., territories), who has access to certain resources in an area, or who has ancestral connections to a place. Additional information encoded in the placement and construction of mounds might include notions of cosmological origins, and myths and traditions important to the recreation of society. Earthen mounds like the ones described above are constructed in the Pacific and Gulf Lowlands of Mesoamerica amid the rise of complex sociopolitical entities like the Olmec. Pool’s (2007) examination of Olmec societies speaks to the early practices of mound building and landscape modification as emerging characteristics of sociopolitical complexity in the Olman region of Mexico during the Initial Formative (ca. 2000–1600 BC). He notes that there are situations where deep alluvium and later, and more densely occupied sites, can obscure the emergence of built landscapes and occupations that provided the foundation on which the Early Formative Olmec societies thrived (Pool, 2007, pp. 92–124). Within this context are sites where natural topographic features were modified into built environments (e.g., El Azuzul and the early platform at San Lorenzo) and in situations where these labor projects unfolded, more than soil was being moved to create architectural monuments. These construction events also provided the setting where carved wooden and stone monuments were not only being created but also arranged for viewing by visitors to these sites or deposited in nearby springs during ceremonial rituals (see Pool’s 2007 discussion of the Azuzul acropolis: pp. 122; and the El Manatí site: pp. 95–97). At San Lorenzo, what would become one of the largest urban locales in the Olmec world, the non-urban landscape was defined by modifying a 125 ha. natural rise, described by Cyphers and Zurita-Noguera (2012, pp. 138–9) as ‘gradually leveled with 1.3 million m3 of earthen fill … a task that did not require centralized coordination’. They go on to note that this massive construction effort coincides with the construction and maintenance of small dry base camp mounds named isolates. The mounds are regularly 1.3 m tall and roughly 50 m at their base. They are called ‘tech- 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 31 of 57 16 nological infrastructure’ because they offered a way for local household kin groups to maximize aquatic food acquisition in a marginal wetland environment (Cyphers & Zurita-Noguera, 2012). In doing so, they also served as early markers of family territoriality. Similar evidence of non-urban landscape modification and mound building is visible at sites in the Pacific lowlands of Mesoamerica’s Soconusco region. Rosenswig (2011) has referred to this area as an archipelago of early complexity in the Initial Formative era where a mix of mobile foragers, semi-sedentary societies, and early sedentary villagers existed. Some mounds in this social context are identifiable as singular constructions in swamps and estuaries built by extended family groups who used them as rotating bases for resource extraction like that described earlier for isolates in the Gulf Lowlands (Rosenswig, 2011, pp. 249–50). The site of Pajón is an exception to this pattern; it exhibits 11 mounds and has been interpreted as a salt extraction locale that served no sustained domestic habitations. This pattern of early mound construction reflective of settlement patterns in Soconusco is described as non-centralized. However, also existing at the Initial and Early Formative periods in this region are sites like Paso de la Amada, which exhibit more diversity in the size and form of earthen architecture. At this site, 50 low mounds were constructed, among them several provided evidence for the raised construction of domestic coresidences, one at Mound 6 was 22 m long. Another mound at the site represents the only Mesoamerican-style ballcourt in the region (Blake et al., 2010; Lesure, 2021). Lesure (2021, Chap. 27) considers the early occupation of this site to begin around 1900 BC and emerge as a locale where multi-family co-residences reflect the ongoing evolution of kin-centered concentrations of power that allowed further increases in sedentism and ceremonialism. These village-level social developments at Paso de la Amada underwrote increases in sedentism and power relationships that laid the foundations for larger Mesoamerican polities many consider urbanized. Throughout South America there are parallel lines of evidence that show how non-urban societies were central in the creation of built environments that reflect the mobilization of labor projects to produce earthen mounds. Along the coast of Peru, and just inside some of its riverine valleys, several preceramic mound sites dot the precontact landscape (Dillehay, 2017c; Haas & Creamer, 2006). Huaca Prieta and the nearby Paredones mound sites site near the mouth of the Chicama River and are unequaled in their size and geographic contexts, and present evidence that they supported diverse social practices that underwrote society. Human burials associated with Huaca Prieta reflect locals who inhabited the immediate geography, they certainly had social connections to very distant geographies (Dillehay, 2017c; Dillehay et al., 2012; Tung et al., 2020). Dillehay and colleagues’ (Dillehay, 2017d; Dillehay et al., 2012) investigation of Huaca Prieta and the Paredones mound construction histories (ca. 7555–3800 cal BP) show how preceramic Andean communities made place and reinforced social connections amidst parallel and mixed developments in maritime foraging and maize farming. Dillehay (2017b) notes that, while ceremonial gatherings lay the foundation for mound construction at both sites, the Paredones mound was primarily tied to farming and wild plant food preparation, while the Huaca Prieta mound was closely tied to maritime food preparation and consumption. Moreover, innovative infrastructural developments like a ramp that led to a sunken 13 16 Page 32 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 plaza were incorporated into the upper construction phases of Huaca Prieta’s mound apex; this coincides with the transition to the use of Huaca Prieta for human burials (Dillehay et al., 2012; Dillehay, 2017c). Other geographies in South America where we can trace non-urban mound construction includes coastal areas and wetlands of Southern Brazil and Uruguay. Here, Cerritos and Sambaqui societies modified their environments in ways that reflect the movement of seasonal populations and certainly ideological packages that included feasting activities and burial interments. Cerritos mounds might be seen, at least in part, as analogous to the early mounds in the wetlands of Olman we describe earlier. They are earthen mounds constructed at the preceramic/ceramic transition ca. 4750– 3000 cal BP in ecotones where seasonal flooding is common. Iriarte et al. (2017, pp. 263–4) note important spatial divisions in cerritos mound morphology, concentration, and size, where small numbers of mounds (1–3) that are more linear/curvilinear are situated along the levees of wetlands, while larger mounds (in size and number) occur in the more stable deflated hill ranges adjacent to wetlands. Investigations of cerritos mounds show that some changed in function over time, with mounds starting and ending as temporary residential camps for local aquatic resource extraction during seasonal fish migrations, while others show evidence that they incorporated mortuary rituals (e.g., burials) and feasting activities (Admiraal et al., 2025; Iriarte et al., 2017). This may reflect the need for people to temporarily coalesce at some of the more stable and robust mound locales to negotiate and reinforce kinship relationships. Sambaquis shell mounds are similar in their environmental positioning and construction to the shell midden rings and mounds of the Atlantic Coasts of the US, but their much larger scale of construction sets them apart in our study. They are found along bay and lagoon settings, built primarily between 5000 and 2000 cal BP and rival the size and volume of some of the largest precontact monuments (of any material) ever constructed in the Americas (Fish et al., 2013; Iriarte et al., 2017). Sambaquis, in their larger examples, reflect a continual visitation and construction history tied to sand and shell loading that covered funerary activity areas associated with feasting remains, wooden platform structures, secondary burial pits, as well as artifact deposition and commemorative fires (ash lenses and hearths). While smaller sambaquis do not reflect the construction and mortuary practices associated with larger mounds, Fish and colleagues (2013, p. 123) note that these are not ordinary habitation sites, but reflections of larger specialized social movements that were locales where societies could maintain a heterarchical organizational network. Communal plazas are another example of infrastructure in non-urban societies. Sometimes plazas can be observed as delineated through social activities, and sometimes they may be delineated through complex construction events. However, as Kassabaum’s (2019, p. 191) review of plaza construction and use in the Eastern Woodlands in North America has illuminated, the importance of plaza spaces has been poorly understood due to mound-centrism in archaeology. Nevertheless, if we consider the ethnographic literature on plazas in the Caribbean and Mesoamerican world, we see that these places facilitate very different types of movement for different objects and identities, depending on the time and circumstances (i.e., situation) that a plaza is used (Low, 1995, 2000, 2011). In addition, plazas are not just delin- 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 33 of 57 16 eated by their surrounding architectural elements, but are constructed through leveling and complex design practices central to the societies using them (Kidder, 2004). When considering plazas in the non-urban past, we should imagine how plazas make possible the trade and exchange in quotidian and special goods in one space/time situation, who might travel to the plaza for such an economic event, and then who might travel to a plaza for a performative ceremonial event like a parade, ritual procession, or political demonstration. In each scenario, different things are moving, different people are likely to attend (with the potential for overlap in attendees), and the space is used to communicate different messages. Circular and rectangular plazas, some sunken, are ceremonial interactive infrastructure among early complex societies in the Andes (Levine & Stanish, 2020), with the tradition potentially starting in the Late Preceramic at sites like Sechín Bajo in the Casma Valley and Callacpuma in the highlands of Peru. Sechín Bajo includes an architectural complex with circular sunken plazas dating to 3400 BC (Fuchs et al., 2006). Callacpuma includes an 18 m dia. concentric circular construction of stones (not sunken) with interior rooms that was built as early as 2850 BC (Toohey et al., 2024) (Fig. 7). Lack of interior domestic debris led Toohey et al. (2024, p. 6) to suggest this was a ceremonial locale that might represent an ‘emerging offshoot’ to more common circular sunken plazas elsewhere in the Central Andes (Levine & Stanish, 2020). These features were often reused through time and incorporated into later ceremonial cycles after the rise of larger population centers like Caral that are argued to be emergent urban locales (Solis et al., 2001). Nevertheless, they facilitate the movement of people to them, within them, and communicate information about group identity and kinship to the participants of events held within them. Moreover, they likely serve as locales where information inherent to societies using them in a given situation was able to be passed along in conversation during community events (Levine & Stanish, 2020). In the LMV of North America we can see the residues of dynamic plaza use at places like Poverty Point, where recent geophysical surveys and coring have revealed the plaza in front of the concentric ridges at Poverty Point was defined through collective hunter-gatherer social practices that involved various circular architecture that Fig. 7 Photograph of Callacpuma’s (Peru) circular stone plaza. Image courtesy of Jason Toohey 13 16 Page 34 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 consisted of timber circles made from single-set posts and was later constructed by leveling the surface and reusing the space with additional timber circles with typical post holes, as well as likely large posts that resembled pits and were refilled with clay cooking balls, known as Poverty Point Objects (PPOs) (Clay, 2023; Greenlee & Dalan, 2022; Hargrave et al., 2021). This case exhibits the dynamic history of early plaza infrastructure to bring people and things together for socially important activities that invoked cohesion. Plaza and courtyard delineations are also a popular form of spatial infrastructure in the Late Woodland era (750–1000 AD) of Eastern North America. Barrier and Kassabaum’s (2018) work on elucidating the social benefits of making and using these spaces in Coles Creek societies of the LMV and Terminal Late Woodland/Emergent Mississippian in the American Bottom show a bifurcated benefit of plaza infrastructure. In Coles Creek life, plazas served to bring together dispersed communities for feasting, setting and pulling large ritual post markers, while among the nucleated villages in the American Bottom, plazas served to quell and work out social tensions through gatherings and public displays that and facilitated and negotiated ongoing corporate kinship bonds. In the North American Southwest, sunken plaza infrastructure analogous to our examples from the Andes might also be visible in the emergence of kiva architecture by Ancestral Puebloan communities. Kivas are semi-subterranean, often circular but sometimes rectangular, roofed structures used in public and private ceremonial events that exhibit centralized interior hearths, seating, and a sipapu—a small hole in the floor of a kiva that symbolizes the place from where the first people emerged from the underworld to become humans (Swentzell, 1990). Archaeologists consider the early emergence of kivas to reflect the need for communal ceremonial gatherings that were integrated into, but also extended beyond, the household level of kinship in settled villages (Douglass et al., 2019; Wilshusen, 1989). Kivas in some of their earliest iterations are thought to originate in Basketmaker III society (ca. 500–725 AD), where large circular pit structures emerge with architectural features corresponding to those we describe above for kiva material identifiers (Douglass et al., 2019; Van Dyke, 2002; Wilshusen, 1989). These features only grow in size and frequency during the Pueblo I period (ca. 750–950 AD) of settlement aggregation around the four corners region of the Southwest before continually expanding into great kivas of the Chacoan societies of the San Juan Basin (Van Dyke, 2002). Kivas communicated ideas of past and present rules inherent to society and coincided with household and community organization. They were also inherent to the movement of other objects (e.g., projectile points, pottery, turquoise, shell, quartz crystals) sometimes ritually offered during commemoration ceremonies that coincided with their construction and abandonment (Van Dyke, 2002; Walker & Berryman, 2023). Plazas and mounds serve as human-constructed (or modified) infrastructure that offer a platform through which societies operate by affording them opportunities for people and things to interact together in ways that ensure the durability of social situations. In addition, unique natural places can also serve as a type of material infrastructure that affords the creation and maintenance of social life by drawing together ideas, memories, and people and objects. To begin illustrating this notion, we draw on the archaeology of Chaco Canyon, and specifically, Fajada Butte (Fig. 8). This unique feature of the landscape is situated along the southeastern entrance to Chaco 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 35 of 57 16 Fig. 8 Fajada Butte, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, USA. Photograph by ERH Canyon. Van Dyke (2008, pp. 162–3) describes it as a visually dominant landform when traveling into the canyon from the east. Near the summit of Fajada Butte lies a small ledge with a series of stone slabs that cover a set of spiral petroglyphs. While there is some debate as to when and how the slabs and petroglyphs were arranged at Fajada Butte (Aveni, 2003, pp. 171–172), the butte is considered as a sacred place associated with several origin stories tied to Diné (Navajo) and Puebloan (e.g., Hopi, Zuni, Acoma, Zia) oral histories (Stoffle et al., 1994; Weiner & Kelley, 2021). It also serves to mark several solar and lunar events apart from the ‘sun dagger’ phenomenon, and presumably was used as rainmaking infrastructure (Sinclair et al., 1987; Sofaer et al., 2017; Weiner & Kelley, 2021). The slab and petroglyph arrangement itself alters the ways sunlight and moonlight pass in and around these slabs to mark solar solstice and equinox events, as well as lunar standstill events (Sinclair et al., 1987; Sofaer et al., 1979, 2017). Therefore, we believe that Fajada Butte represents a great example of the ways small-scale non-urban societies incorporate natural places as infrastructure to encourage and schedule movements of people and things between places for specific social purposes. Similarly unique geological features like erratics have a deep history of use as socio-material infrastructure similar to how we describe Fajada Butte as an infrastructural place. Zedeño et al. (2021) relate the ancestral Blackfoot connection to erratics along the Rocky Mountain Front (where the Rocky Mountains end in the Plains). In this transitional ecosystem, the glacially-formed Foothills Erratics Train (FET) spreads across the northern Plains, traversing the modern US and Canadian border states of Montana, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia (Zedeño et al., 2021). In the FET, several boulder-sized erratics were incorporated into deep-time oral histories and creation stories of the first Blackfoot Indians (i.e., Matumataapi). Stories of a creator that was represented by an old man named Napi are one way that Blackfoot oral histories work geological information into a reckoning of the duration of Blackfoot emplacement in the Rocky Mountain Front and Plains (Zedeño et al., 2021, pp. 309, 312–313). Specifically mentioned by Zedeño and colleagues in their 13 16 Page 36 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 discussion of Blackfoot emplacement at geological erratics along the FET are the ways these boulders are woven into stories featuring Napi, drawing in the placement of rock art and material offerings (Zedeño et al., 2021, pp. 317–318). Thus, by having Indigenous societies attach their memories of creation and the past use of the landscape to unique features on the FET landscape, we see these objects as the material infrastructure that facilitates social communication through oral histories and encourages the movement of people and objects to reinforce and restructure connections to place over very long periods of time. Our perspective that unique natural places serve as material infrastructure within non-urban societies should not overlook features like springs and caves. In the North American Southeast, springs and caves are considered among several American Indian societies to be places where access is possible to a watery underworld in cosmological narratives and oral histories (Campbell, 2017; Hudson, 1976; Romain, 2009a; Townsend, 2004). Springs are transformative places where cosmological ideas intrinsic to some American Indian societies could be participated in through ritual activities. O’Donoughue (2017, pp. 104–5) describes the springs of Florida’s St. John’s River Valley, and specifically the Silver Glen Springs complex, as a ‘transitional’ place that brought together people to engage in ritualized practices that mitigated relationships with humans and to interact with invisible Upper and Lower Worlds of American Indian cosmology. The relationship between humans and spring sites are visibly important enough to encourage non-urban precontact Indigenous societies to create other forms of earthen infrastructure we have discussed here (e.g., enclosures and mounds) near and/or around them (Henry, 2011; Henry et al., 2020a, b; O’Donoughue, 2017; Randall, 2014; Gilmore, 2014). Among the earliest evidence for the use of caves in this region rests within the Middle Archaic era (ca. cal 3940–3650 BC) and correlates with the drawing of pictographs (Simek et al., 2013). However, other evidence for the early use of caves by non-urban societies in the American Southeast rests in the exploration and mining of minerals like gypsum and selenite (Barrier & Byrd, 2008; Crothers, 2012; Crothers et al., 2002; Henry & Crothers, 2007). Crothers (2012) suggests that these mining activities might have served as initiation and integration rituals for societies moving from a hunting and gathering lifeway to one more focused on incipient forms of agriculture, and thus concerned with land rights and territories. In both the use of springs and caves in this region we see social connections to places that afford the movement of people to these places, and the movement of resources from these places, be it minerals or cosmological ideas, that allow the maintenance and reproduction of societies. We could envision springs and caves as the infrastructure for pilgrimage travel in the same sense that archaeologists have argued similarly for Middle Woodland enclosures in North America’s Midcontinent (cf. Carr & Case, 2005, pp. 582–585). In the American Southwest, we can trace similar historical connections and attitudes toward springs among non-urban Puebloan societies. In these social contexts they are integrated into narratives of cosmological significance and used for healing or ‘medicine’ (Titiev, 1937). Early southwestern ethnographers describe social attachments to springs by Puebloan societies as important for the acquisition of salt, freshwater, and to use for the placement of shrines (Benedict, 1930; Parsons, 1930; Titiev, 1937). In these accounts, the built connections to infrastructure like springs 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 37 of 57 16 enhance the importance of place in ways that endure to the present, an indication of the very significant and deep historical connections to these places (cf. Glowacka et al., 2009). Like the FET geological erratics among the Blackfoot Confederacy, springs and caves are infrastructurally important places for the preservation of cosmologies. Cosmological and functional connections to springs and caves, as noted by archaeologists working in the lowlands of Mesoamerica, also exist well before the rise of Mayan societies and their associated cities (Munro & De Lourdes Melo, 2011; Stemp et al., 2021). In this context, not only was freshwater acquired and used from cenotes, but these karst features were also used for religious offerings and caches, burials, and like societies in the American Southeast, considered portals to a cosmological underworld. The cosmos is also mapped through natural features among several small-scale societies who lived in South America. Walker’s (2012, pp. 328–334) discussion of South American landscapes speaks to the importance of Andean mountain peaks symbolizing apus (mountain spirits). While these phenomena are linked to certain Wari and Inca ritual ceremonies, there is evidence that these behaviors have great time-depth and were practiced well before the rise of urbanized societies. Within these examples of built and natural places we consider infrastructure among non-urban societies are instances where astronomical phenomena are tracked and facilitated the movement of people to and from these places at specific times. This occurred under the auspices of ceremonial events linked to solstices, equinoxes, and lunar minimum and maximum standstills. This is visible in several of the small and large Middle Woodland era geometric enclosures that are situated in the Middle Ohio Valley, US (Henry et al., 2020a; Hively & Horn, 2006; Lepper, 2006; Romain, 2000) and the alignment of mound groups to such events can be seen with the earliest examples of mound building at Watson Brake in the southern US (Romain, 2009b). The sun daggers at Fajada Butte we touched on earlier are another example from the US southwest (Sinclair et al., 1987; Sofaer et al., 1979, 2017). In addition to these examples, we would add the case of E-groups constructed in association with the earliest architectural plazas found in the Mesoamerican lowlands. E-groups consist of rectangular platforms, often oriented on their long axis roughly north–south, that include a pyramid constructed at the west-central edge of the platform, and a raised rectangular platform constructed along the eastern edge of the platform opposite the western pyramid (Freidel et al., 2017; Inomata et al., 2021; Stanton & Freidel, 2003; Šprajc, 2023; Šprajc et al., 2023). The orientation of the western pyramid aligns with features atop the eastern raised platform to mark the sun’s solstices and equinoxes. While E-groups were traditionally seen as ritual infrastructure celebrating the Maize God among urban Mayan societies and their elite rulers (Freidel et al., 2017; Stanton & Freidel, 2003), recent remote sensing work across the lowlands of Mexico (spanning the geographic heartlands of the Olmec and Maya) has identified that E-groups were common symbolic templates used among non-urban societies in the Olmec and Mayan world (Inomata et al., 2021, p. 1487), and the historical depth of E-group ceremonial infrastructure was integrated into later urbanized Mayan societies. In working through these case studies of built and natural sacred places and objects that societies draw upon to map out, and onto, ideas about their world and how it came to be, we drew attention to how both built and natural sacred places served infrastructural purposes in the past. While there are many ways these examples devi- 13 16 Page 38 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 ate from modern models of material infrastructure, we argue that they are operating in essentially the same way. Moreover, we find interesting parallels to Carse’s (2017) historical review of the ways infrastructure emerged in the modern vocabulary, as the preparation for a structure to exist, or the infra-structure. For instance, springs, rivers, caves, and geological erratics existed before humans were present in the New World but were incorporated into the flow of people, things, and ideas to and from their locations. Likewise, architectural remnants and midden deposits that underlie many earthen mound constructions in North and South America, or even the Bison traces that often preceded American Indian overland foot trails in the Eastern US, represent historical residues that afforded an infrastructural unit or network to emerge. Yet in these examples, what came before allowed the subsequent material form, or sociomaterial connection to place, to emerge and become critical for the interaction of people in the same way that a graded landform and gravel base might have allowed steel lines to be situated for a train’s railroad in early 20th century France. Our compilation of ways the non-urban small-scale societies in the Americas engaged in the creation of diverse forms of infrastructure highlights how infrastructure, while a modern conceptual addition to the global vocabulary, was not a modern invention. In the following discussion, we revisit why these case studies help illuminate the essential qualities of infrastructure. We also address more directly the productive tension of infrastructure that can both encourage and limit movement. Moreover, we work to situate non-urban infrastructure in a larger conversation with human cooperation and collective action that provided the infra-structure (i.e., foundation) for larger sociopolitical forms to co-opt social labor. In doing so, we argue that this growth in convincing societies to participate in infrastructural projects provided bureaucratic organizations the space to eventually emerge as codified institutions that led to the forms of infrastructure that are common to our modern lives. In doing so, we come back to former philosophical arguments about human social organization that have debated the nature/culture divide and questioned whether we have ever been modern (Latour, 1993). Discussing Infrastructure Beyond the Urban Sphere In a recent theoretical engagement with the archaeology of infrastructure, Wilkinson (2019a, p. 1238) writes, ‘(e)xploring how infrastructure relates to other indices of complexity like urbanism and hierarchy would thus seem to offer an interesting area for future research; especially since the patterns we see are quite variable.’ In this article we have tried to bring together insights and theoretical perspectives on infrastructure common in modern social science and archaeology to work toward expanding the archaeological study of infrastructure. Specifically, we demonstrate ways to identify and study infrastructure outside the influence of urbanism and states as markers of complexity for archaeologists and social scientists alike. We agree with Wilkinson (2019a) that typologies of infrastructure are inherently challenging and are subject to ever evolving historical perspectives on how they developed to fit a particular need in past societies, how those operations and mechanisms for maintenance changed, and at what points in the historical process of a given infrastructural 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 39 of 57 16 project it was deemed no longer necessary and required abandonment and/or total reconfiguration (cf. Henry, 2024). Like any use of typologies in comparative analyses, we have to be willing to take new information as it emerges and work against the boundaries that are inherent to the original formulation and use of a typology, so that it is redeveloped into something useful or else discarded for new foci of comparison (Henry et al., 2017). We propose that the case studies we bring together here show, if anything, that the human engagement with infrastructure extends well beyond human engagements with urbanism and state organization. Through our comparative evaluation of evidence for non-urban infrastructure, we presented several examples that showed how small-scale societies visible throughout the archaeological histories of the Americas developed and used infrastructure. Indeed, the motivation for this piece was to show that infrastructure is not inherently modern, nor simply a tool of city or state organization and/or bureaucratic control but a mechanism that supports human cooperation, collaboration, circulation, and interaction. To that end, let us return to some of the essential qualities of infrastructure as we have presented them, so we may summarize the ways our case studies represent instances of infrastructural engagements among non-urban and small-scale societies. In the opening sections of our article, we spoke of what infrastructure offers to people and things. We noted that infrastructure could be seen archaeologically in large and/or iterative and immobile built forms that exist at the landscape-scale. Throughout our case studies we see ways that these material forms were relational in their connections to collaborative and long-term social experiences. To this extent we maintain a connection to how non-urban infrastructure became invisible through its integration into the social fabric, making connections to Star’s (1999) seminal paper on the topic. We also outlined how infrastructures offer the context through which other humans and non-humans interact, often interconnecting with one another in the process. To reemphasize Larkin’s (2013) point about infrastructure being represented in matter that facilitates the movement of other matter and/or transmission of ideas, we presented case studies with evidence for networks of overland trails, roads, canals, rivers, and causeways that were built and used by non-urban small-scale societies across the Americas. In those examples, we traced the ways that these features emerged apart from urban or state development projects but functioned to facilitate interaction by guiding humans and objects across geographic space. In doing so, these infrastructural features also cited places along the way and represented endpoint destinations where they existed. Moreover, when people and things move, so do ideas. Thus, these travel networks also acted as non-urban corridors of communication in many of our case studies. However, where rivers, streams, and canals are concerned, once they became interconnected in the support of agricultural or economic activities, they likely became relied upon in a way that presented tremendous problems once they failed. This certainly would have been problematic in arid regions in the Andes and the North American Southwest where canals that transported water from river flows offered the infrastructure that made agriculture possible. Likewise, in constantly inundated landscapes in the LMV and Amazonia, canals that required draining land toward rivers or ponds to facilitate healthy crop growth would have been problematic if they collapsed. 13 16 Page 40 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 We also gave attention to built and natural sacred and ceremonial places that took on infrastructural roles in non-urban societies. This is because the construction of mounds and the importance of those natural places facilitated the movement of people through labor events and gatherings but also enabled the movement of things that were deposited in them: ancestors, artifacts, soils, and sediments. Mounds also communicated (signaled) information to the people who participated in their construction, or those who interacted with others at their locations. In short, mounds and important natural places also provide the grounds on which people and objects operated (see Larkin, 2013, p. 329). This is clear in several contexts across the Americas. However, the periodic movements to and from mound sites provided (whether for construction and modification events, occupation amidst the seasonal use of wetlands, or for ceremonial gatherings) the context where responsibilities pertaining to subsistence economies, place, and society were performed and communicated. We break with Wilkinson’s (2019a, p. 1222) separation between infrastructure and architecture here because we see places like plazas as an important dimension of non-urban infrastructure. In our case studies from the Andes, Southwestern North America, and the Eastern US, we showed how plazas were integrated into the practices of non-urban societies and exhibited several infrastructural qualities by offering the foundation on which periodic and repetitive social gatherings took place and included the incorporation of performative communication. The same goes for sacred natural features across landscapes in North and South America, whether it be geological erratics, springs, or caves. Perhaps these features would be best described as cosmological infrastructures where, especially in non-urban social contexts, they might not yet fall under a formalized religious or bureaucratic governance. Through some case studies we advocate for the presence of infrastructure that limits movement in non-urban societies, we highlight some examples of storage infrastructure as having such qualities. Cache pits are built and used to store food surplus, even in temporary situations, among hunter-gatherers in the Americas. Fish weirs, natural and artificial ponds, as well as clam gardens and oyster reefs operate on a generalized basis of storing and encouraging aquatic food surpluses. While one could argue that fish weirs could be moved, several of our case studies show that, synonymous with infrastructure, they are instead consistently maintained and rebuilt in tidal estuaries and channels due to the need to capitalize on localized changes in water level. Fish weirs and ponds also show an interesting interconnectedness or relationality with other infrastructure: canals. This is the case in Amazonia and Mesoamerica. Corrals can be large and small and could be rebuilt somewhere else, but where we see them employed in game drives, they also appear to be consistently repaired in place due to their integration with landscape features that encourage their usefulness. Where corrals exist in these circumstances, we also see similar interconnectedness in infrastructural projects. In the early case of camelid corrals at Asana in Southern Peru, there appears to be a historical connection to where corrals were rebuilt on the landscape (Aldenderfer, 1998). Our case studies that highlight burial mounds as storing ancestors, assess the concentration of deceased, but perhaps not lifeless, people in one place and through time as a compilation, or surplus, of ancestors that acts differently from any surplus of goods in common capitalist models of political economy. Instead, we argue 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 41 of 57 16 that engagements with burial mounds re-membered society and served as mnemonic infrastructure that was maintained when new ancestors were integrated into construction phases. This practice also offered new opportunities to draw upon personalities of the past when negotiating social dissonance in small-scale non-urban societies. Palisades also inhibit movement when used as either a defensive or symbolic form of infrastructure. In either case, they are communicating the perception of ‘us versus them’ or ‘inside versus outside’. Game drives, as we just mentioned, can interconnect with corrals or end in choke points where hunting blinds are located. The infrastructural qualities of game drives rest in their spatial expansiveness, ability to foster interaction and cooperation among humans, and facilitate interaction among humans and non-humans. Check dams can interconnect with other infrastructure like canals, as seen in non-urban Southwestern North American agricultural communities. Earthen enclosures share some similarities with plazas but also provide an inherent duality in how they provide a way to protect the outside world from supernatural forces exhibited in our discussion of geometric enclosures in Eastern North America and Amazonia. Our investigations into non-urban infrastructure built and used by small-scale societies led us to recognize ways in which some forms of non-urban infrastructure like earthen enclosures, plazas, and burial mounds operated on a basis of dualities. From one perspective or social situation, they exhibited qualities that appeared to enable movement, whether that be in the movements of humans and non-humans or through the communication of ideas, while in another situation they limited movement. In the case of earthen enclosures there is the notion that they function, at least in part, to hold gatherings of people and encourage pilgrimage travel (Skousen, 2018) to their locations for those gatherings. Where enclosures are made with adjacent ditches and embankments, we might see these infrastructure as requiring the movement of people periodically for their maintenance (for instance to clear out ditches, cf. Henry, 2011; Henry et al., 2021). Simultaneously, these features enclosed past events and potentially dangerous forces that were invoked while people interacted with these places. In the case of plazas, there is evidence that plazas can be public for some gatherings and private for others, falling into different classifications of encouraging or discouraging movement depending on the kind of event hosted in the plaza space. Likewise, burial mounds contain ancestors and define boundaries around who is and is not connected to that place and adjacent territory. However, burial mounds also facilitated movement to and from them as the mound is periodically added to during construction events, and during events when people memorialized the dead stored there. Dualistic purposes of infrastructure have been identified before (Wilkinson, 2019a, p. 1231). We see the tension as productive in the study of infrastructure because it forces archaeologists to fully wrestle with the periodization of infrastructure (Nemser, 2024). Because infrastructures are materially durable, they may shift in their uses as time and the social situations under which they are built and used change in the short or long term. This offers archaeologists a unique vantage from which the study of historicity embedded within infrastructure can be traced (Henry & SolinisCasparius, 2024). In closing our discussion, we engage with an interesting historical development in the infrastructural turn that we feel sets an important historical precedent for how non- 13 16 Page 42 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 urban societies might have influenced the infrastructure of early urban organization. Specifically, we are speaking of how the term infrastructure emerged amidst early modern and global development projects. Earlier, we cited the work of anthropologist Carse (2017), who examined how the word infrastructure emerged to describe work that preceded and prepared for construction projects we might recognize today as infrastructure. However, in recognizing how this word came to be used in global vocabularies we could not help but see a similarity in how this applies to our research here. In compiling our evidence for non-urban infrastructure, we kept coming across cases where non-urban infrastructure built by small-scale societies could be either linked to a historic precedent or found cases where the infrastructure built by those non-urban societies appeared to have direct connections to urban infrastructure that would succeed their projects. Thus, we find it important to reiterate the historicity of infrastructure. Infrastructure does not emerge from nothing. Instead, it develops from an existing base of socio-material conditions. The extent of those shared conditions might be reflected in how a particular infrastructural form is distributed. The construction of mounds across the Americas, often preceded by intensive use-histories of the landscape in various ways, might be one example from our work here that illustrates this notion. However, within these instances for conversion from pre- to post-infrastructural landscape there are causal connections to why a particular place might have infrastructure built there. The sub-mound activity areas and post-built architecture underlying Huaca Prieta or the burial mounds of Eastern North America are good examples of these historical trajectories. Nevertheless, from historical events come paths that societies can follow or reject, and under certain circumstances there are the unintended consequences of history that can become embedded in infrastructure (Henry & Solinis-Casparius, 2024). When we see the labor and territoriality that are embedded in the wetland isolate and sambaquis mounds of the Gulf Lowlands and portions of Amazonia, we might see the reflection of kin-based claims to resources but also the household organization of labor to mark such territories and protect resources (Van Valkenburgh & Osborne, 2012). In the isolate examples from the Gulf Lowlands, the early organization of labor into those mounds has been argued to have led to population increases and a tradition of social practice that could be drawn upon when the main terrace platform was leveled at San Lorenzo, what became an Olmec city (Cyphers & Zurita-Noguera, 2012). So, should we see those historical trajectories of small-scale non-urban infrastructure as the precedent to the consolidation and co-opting of labor or motivation to prepare for urban beginnings and consolidated state-like bureaucratic governance? A similar question resides in work by Inomata and colleagues (2020) at Aguada Fénix, where there is evidence for pre-urban plaza and ceremonial infrastructure. Does the early production of a terraformed platform and incipient E-group orientations provide an infrastructural foundation on which Mayan elites co-opted social dynamics and flourished? Certainly, the durability inherent to many of the infrastructures we discuss here opens them up to long historical shifts in how they were used and viewed. Huaca Prieta’s change from mound, to burial mound, to mound with a ramp and plaza helps illustrate this concept (Dillehay, 2017c). So does the incorporation of buffalo traces and overland trails across the eastern US into paved roads (cf. Raitz 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 43 of 57 16 & O’Malley, 2012). From these long histories come the possibility for unintended consequences to emerge in how infrastructure could be consolidated under different institutions and organizational forms of leadership and governance. Moreover, there are cases where infrastructure may no longer be supported by the social institutions that initiated it, and in these instances, we can see infrastructure abandoned, repurposed, or removed from the landscape. This is what Henry (2024) argues for when describing intentionally deconstructed earthen enclosures in Eastern North America. Consequently, there are many ways in which non-urban infrastructure can be identified, historically examined, and critically studied. Conclusion And what if we had never been modern? Comparative anthropology would then be possible. The networks would then have a place of their own. (Latour, 1993, p. 10) Due to its material nature, durability, and deep historical resonance, archaeologists are situated in a unique space to explore infrastructure past and present. This is because, as we have shown here, infrastructures of the past can have interesting bearings on the emergence of modern infrastructure we engage with today. For this reason, archaeological insights are important as the study of infrastructure emerges as a significant focus of the social sciences. Within this current academic zeitgeist, scholarship on infrastructure points to academics in the social sciences seeing this material phenomenon as a creation of modernity and a condition of post-state humanity (Anand et al., 2018; Attewell et al., 2023; Clot-Garrell & Wagner, 2025). However, we have argued here that the ways small-scale non-urban societies across the Americas constructed their environments and socially mapped onto unique places speaks to the ways infrastructure existed beyond situations where humans lived in urban forms. The notion that infrastructure is only a modern invention reproduces the schema that humans have purified themselves from nature in becoming modern (Latour, 1993, p. 10). Our review of several case studies where humans organized themselves apart from urbanism illustrates that, across the archaeological history of the Americas, non-urban social engagements with each other and with surrounding environments influence diverse historical trajectories through the creation of infrastructure. In comparing these examples, we expand the boundaries around the archaeological study of infrastructure, how we might identify it in the archaeological past, trace its physical and historical durability, and inform how characteristics of infrastructure are defined. This situates archaeological perspectives within larger conversations on infrastructure and how we might examine it from multiple lenses. Our article emphasized case studies that offer new ways to reassess where we see infrastructure, and what operated as infrastructure in the non-urban past. Some of our examples reflected a very long engagement with infrastructure comparable with seemingly modern practices (e.g., water management, storage, travel corridors) and offered new tensions to bring into conversations about the debate in divisions on nature and society (Latour, 1993; Haraway, 1991, 2003). Principally, such conversations reside in whether modernity is a point in time where humans purify themselves from, or conquer, nature and thereby 13 16 Page 44 of 57 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 change the nature between object/subject relationships. This creates what Latour (Latour, 1993, pp. 30–32, 58) has called the modern paradox, the ability of humans to move between the philosophical construction of society and nature in ways that justify one’s positionality to it, depending on the circumstances of necessity in a given situation. This creates quasi-objects and quasi-subjects in a process whereby humans negotiate the poles between nature and society, and in doing so form hybrids. In our examination of infrastructure as both a word that emerged from modern vocabularies and a human material phenomenon that developed alongside the need to exist in collective social spheres in the deep human past, we recognize the tension between our case studies and larger dialogues around nature/society binaries. Perhaps moving forward anthropological archaeologists and other social scientists can work to unpack the ways modern words and pre-modern activities make hybrid accountings of phenomena like infrastructure. Our own promotion of non-constructed features like rivers, unique geological erratics and forms, caves, and springs as infrastructure in the non-urban human past of the Americas make quasi-objects of these features. They are seemingly natural, not a direct product of society, but they remain collective in the sense that they attached people and ideas to one another to form social bonds, to provide the grounds on which people and objects operated (Larkin, 2013, p. 329; Latour, 1993, p. 89). Nevertheless, like the other examples of infrastructure we present, they need to be granted the historicity to be considered as infrastructural agents, affecting social change and operating outside of the domain of modernity. While infrastructure has operated as a modern word and influences how we see ourselves in comparison to people from the archaeological past, infrastructure is not a modern phenomenon that humans only invented in tandem with the industrial revolution. Societies across time and diverse geographies who lived apart from urban organizations consciously created and constructed infrastructure to support the interactions that sustained a society of humans and non-humans. This is why we contend infrastructure is not inherently tied to states or urbanism, but to humans, non-humans, and how they negotiate their collective lives. Because a characteristic of infrastructure is its durability, it inevitably becomes a component in, or of, history. From an archaeological viewpoint we are afforded a wide temporal window and broad geographic focus to trace how infrastructure emerges and how it changes. The archaeological ability to work with broad spatial and temporal information will offer scholars of infrastructure an opportunity to consider the depth of infrastructure, and archaeological insights on it, as they explore infrastructure on their own. And what if infrastructure was recognized as never being a product of modernity? Comparisons of infrastructure from the deep past to the present would then be possible. Social scientists could trace the ways infrastructures from the past to the present interfaced with one another in ways that anchored people to places, facilitated or inhibited movements and interactions of people, things, and places, situated and shifted forms of power, and communicated diverse ideas about the world across time and space. Acknowledgements Inspiration for this paper came from conversations between ERH and Darryl Wilkinson, Parker VanValkenburgh, Wesley Stoner, Carl Wendt, and T.R. Kidder, among others. It began during a semester-long independent study at Colorado State University taught by ERH that authors MGE and CMD attended. We thank Mica Glantz for helpful feedback on earlier drafts of the manuscript, and Jason Toohey for use of the photograph in Fig. 7. Two anonymous reviewers provided kind and thoughtful critique and 13 Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:16 Page 45 of 57 16 commentary that certainly helped make this a better article. We thank Michael Frachetti for supporting our initial submission. Finally, we wish to thank Timothy Taylor and Sarah Wright for their dedication to this journal. They kindly helped guide us through the publication process amidst a challenging time. Of course, any shortfalls are our own. Declarations Competing Interests We declare no conflicts of interest related to this journal article. No funding was acquired for its preparation or publication. References Admiraal, M., Colonese, A. C., & Milheira, R. G. (2025). Feasting on fish: Specialized function of precolonial pottery of the cerritos mound builders of Southern Brazil. PLOS ONE, 20(2). Public Library of Science: e0311192. Aldenderfer, M. S. (1998). Montane foragers: Asana and the South-Central Andean archaic. University of Iowa. Anand, N., Gupta, A., & Appel, H. (2018). The promise of infrastructure. Duke University Press. Angelbeck, B., & Grier, C. (2012). 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Cultural Anthropology, 30(3), 501–524. Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law. Authors and Affiliations Edward R. Henry1,2 · M. Grace Ellis1,3 · Carly M. DeSanto4 Edward R. Henry

1 Department of Anthropology and Geography, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA 2 Center for Research in Archaeogeophysics and Geoarchaeology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA 3 Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and the Evolution of Human Behavior, Universidade do Algarve, Faro, Portugal 4 Chronicle Heritage, Albuquerque, NM, USA 13