Rather we find just the sort of ‘play farming’ familiar from our discussions in Chapter Six, as well as shamans and engineers who spent the overwhelming majority of their time with the same five or six companions, but who periodically walked out on to the stage of an extended society that encompassed much of the North American continent. It is all so strikingly different from anything we know of later Woodlands societies that it’s difficult to reconstruct exactly what these settlement patterns meant in practice. If nothing else, however, this overall situation illustrates the profound
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