{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.030867482703565728, 'fraction_numerical': 0.009047365620010643, 'mean_word_length': 5.1216069489685125, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Early Mesoamerican Village. Kent V. Flannery, editor. Academic Press, New York, 1976. xi + 377 pp., illus. $14.50.

I swore off writing book reviews 10 years ago, but this outstanding volume lured me out of retirement. It is at least three treats in one package: (1) a significant contribution to one of the least understood topics of Mesoamerican archaeology-the Formative or Preclassic village; (2) an excellent exposition and application of various archaeological analytical methods; and (3) a whale of a lot of fun to read. First of all we should meet the allegorical characters whom Flannery has created for his running "parables," and who represent the attitudes of current archaeologists of three persuasions: The "Real Mesoamerican Archaeologist" (R.M.A.) is a wellintentioned digger of the Old School, whose announced project goals are praiseworthy, but whose methods are antiquated and inadequate, consisting mainly of "telephone booth" test pits and long exploratory trenches, all dug in arbitrary 10-cm levels. One of these results, for instance, in his assigning a house's postholes, clay floor, and collapsed wattleand-daub debris to a three-layer stratigraphy of three separate ceramic phases, thus presenting something truly remarkable-a house whose postmolds were 300 years older than its roof. R.M.A. makes no effort to conceal his scorn for S.G.S., the Skeptical Graduate Student, an ardent devotee of the New Archaeology, who is "obnoxiously smart, and has only a vestigial respect for established authority." He has to sneak back to R.M.A.'s trenches to try to recover meaningful anthropological data, and his spirited exchanges with his mentor will strike a familiar note with many readers. The third character is G.S., the Great Synthesizer, who gave up digging to synthesize and reinterpret and review other people's data. Flannery occasionally uses him to make rather stuffy summaries and conclusions, followed by predictably contrasted reactions from R.M.A. and S.G.S. This interchange of views threads in and out through the archaeological reports, enlivened by Flannery's own comments. Thus, in lighthearted words but with serious effect, the techniques employed in the field work and analysis are described and their advantages or weaknesses discussed at almost every step of the presentation. Flannery prefaces the chapter, "Analysis on the Household Level," with a reminder that previous work in Mesoamerica has provided no information on either the range of dwelling types within a region or the range of differences between regions. He attempts to correct this situation for the period 1500-850 B.C. by reviewing data from various areas, chiefly the Valley of Oaxaca, where his project recovered the remains of about 20 Early Formative dwellings. He describes many details of their construction and concludes that the Mesoamerican houses so far adequately investigated were intended for nuclear families. Marcus C. Winter describes "household clusters"the house plus such things as associated burials, storage features, activity areas, pits, ovens, and midden deposits. He notes the usefulness of these in attempts to reconstruct the composition of prehistoric households and the activities carried out by their members. Flannery reconstructs the household cluster at a site on the Guatemala Pacific coast, originally analyzed by arbitrary stratigraphic levels. Flannery and Winter together study household activities on the basis of presumed artifact functions and their distribution, obtaining information on such things as universal household activities, possible household, regional, and unique specializations, and possible male and female work areas. Chapter 3, "Analysis on the Community Level," presents two sampling techniques: one for the intensive surface collection of a Formative community, the other for excavating a representative sample of such a community. Winter estimates that Tierras Largas, Oaxaca, during any one period, was composed of 8-12 household clusters separated by courtyards or open work areas. Deeper sites were excavated in long vertical "cut banks" or transect samples. Flannery notes that prehistoric filling of arroyos had so mixed the stratigraphy that a single test pit would have only a 20% chance of hitting undisturbed primary deposits-something test pit addicts should take to heart. Between the household cluster and the community there appear to be two units of analysis: the courtyard group and the residential ward. Michael E. Whalen describes an example of the division of an early village into three functionally different zones involving some of these analytic units: an area of relatively higher status residences, one of relatively lower status residences, and a cemetery. At Tomaltepec, Oaxaca, the location within the village chosen by higher status families was apparently not of significance, and Whalen suggests that at this stage of cultural evolution community plans were relatively informal. No infants or children were present in the cemetery; Whalen proposes that only initiated adults were buried there. Joyce Marcus tackles the always difficult problem of the size of the villages, both extent and population. She provides estimates for Early and Middle Formative villages in two highland and two lowland sites. About 90% of the carefully measured sites were small hamlets less than 2 ha in size, perhaps the result of village fissioning. Certain villages, "monsters" of this early period, reached 20-50 ha and still remained nucleated, with populations of around 1,000-2,000. A "monster" may be surrounded by small hamlets. Since their