The Winter Village Pattern on the Plateau of Northwestern North America

Development of the historic Plateau cultures is not one of gradual in situ change across the millennia of the Holocene. Rather, recent evidence suggests a far more complex history involving local change, cultural extinctions, and major intra- and extraregional population expansions and contractions. This article offers a short overview of major trends in this history and considers a range of explanatory arguments, particularly focusing on the evolution of variation in Plateau villages. More specifically, it argues that Plateau archaeologists need to draw a distinction between socioeconomically "complex" communities and those designated as "sociopolitically" complex because different processes affected their respective evolution (i.e., the process of historical development that excludes any teleological assumptions).