Henry, Edward R.Ellis, GraceDeSanto, Carly M.2025-12-302025-12-302025-120892-75371573-7802http://hdl.handle.net/10400.1/28031The 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.engInfrastructureSmall-scale societiesBuilt environmentsPlacemakingLandscape archaeologyjournal article10.1007/s10963-025-09203-6