" Alice Wright (University of Michigan) Southeastern Archaeological Conference 2011 “Re-Conceptualizing the Southeast from the Bottom Up: A Survey of New Theoretical Perspectives” (Organizers: D. Shane Miller and Matt Sanger) Comparisons of Practice: A Multi-Scalar Approach to Structured Deposition in the Southeast Title slide: A practice-based approach to the archaeological record entails a consideration of how material remains of on-the-ground activities shaped and were shaped by certain social, religious, political, or economic structures (Ortner 2006). Unlike ethnographers who engage practice theory, archaeologists – especially those working on time periods that evade straightforward application of ethnographic/enthnohistoric analogy – can rarely (with certainty) assume exactly what sorts of structures were at work at a particular site at a particular moment. As a result, we must work inductively from the archaeological record to trace patterns of continuity and change in various practices, from which we can infer structures of social organization, economic interaction, and ritual performance. Outline slide: In this paper, I argue that archaeological features are a particularly rich form of material evidence for elucidating practices and their relationships with such social structures in the past. Some archaeologists in the Southeast have already demonstrated the potential of this unit of analysis in a diachronic perspective by tracing the histories or genealogies of practices through time. I suggest than an equally productive approach entails a broadly synchronic consideration of certain feature classes and the practices related to them. A comparison of contemporaneous features across space has the potential to reveal contemporaneous practices representative of the