A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Focuses on both the small- and large-scale Mississippian societies in the Tombigbee-Black Warrior River region of Alabama and Mississippi
Within the last 50 years archaeologists have discovered that around the 10th century AD, native southeastern peoples began a process of cultural change far more complex than anything that had occurred previously. These late prehistoric societies—known as Mississippian—have come to be regarded as chiefdoms. The chiefdoms are of great anthropological interest because in these kinds of societies social hierarchies or rank and status were first institutionalized.
Ancient Chiefdoms of the Tombigbee focuses on both the small- and large-scale Mississippian societies in the Tombigbee-Black Warrior River region of Alabama and Mississippi. Exploring the relationships involving polity size, degree of social ranking, and resource control provides insights into cycles of chiefdom development and fragmentation. Blitz concludes that the sanctified, security maintenance roles of communal food storage management and war leadership were a sufficient basis for formal chiefly authority but insufficient for economically based social stratification.
Between AD 900-1600, the native peoples of the Mississippi River Valley and other areas of the Eastern Woodlands of the United States conceived and executed one of the greatest artistic traditions of the Precolumbian Americas. Created in the media of copper, shell, stone, clay, and wood, and incised or carved with a complex set of symbols and motifs, this seven-hundred-year-old artistic tradition functioned within a multiethnic landscape centered on communities dominated by earthen mounds and plazas. Previous researchers have referred to this material as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC).
This groundbreaking volume brings together ten essays by leading anthropologists, archaeologists, and art historians, who analyze the iconography of Mississippian art in order to reconstruct the ritual activities, cosmological vision, and ideology of these ancient precursors to several groups of contemporary Native Americans. Significantly, the authors correlate archaeological, ethnographic, and art historical data that illustrate the stylistic differences within Mississippian art as well as the numerous changes that occur through time. The research also demonstrates the inadequacy of the SECC label, since Mississippian art is not limited to the Southeast and reflects stylistic changes over time among several linked but distinct religious traditions. The term Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere (MIIS) more adequately describes the corpus of this Mississippian art. Most important, the authors illustrate the overarching nature of the ancient Native American religious system, as a creation unique to the native American cultures of the eastern United States.
Complex Mississippian polities were neither developed nor sustained in a vacuum. A broad range of small-scale social groups played a variety of roles in the emergence of regionally organized political hierarchies that governed large-scale ceremonial centers. Recent research has revealed the extent to which interactions among corporately organized clans led to the development, success, and collapse of Moundville. These insights into Moundville’s social complexity are based primarily on the study of monumental architecture and mortuary ceremonialism. Less is known about how everyday domestic practices produced and were produced by broader networks of power and inequality in the region.
Wilson’s research addresses this gap in our understanding by analyzing and interpreting large-scale architectural and ceramic data sets from domestic contexts. This study has revealed that the early Mississippian Moundville community consisted of numerous spatially discrete multi-household groups, similar to ethnohistorically described kin groups from the southeastern United States. Hosting feasts, dances, and other ceremonial events were important strategies by which elite groups created social debts and legitimized their positions of authority. Non-elite groups, on the other hand, maintained considerable economic and ritual autonomy through diversified production activities, risk sharing, and household ceremonialism. Organizational changes in Moundville’s residential occupation highlight the different ways kin groups defined and redefined their corporate status and identities over the long term.
The earliest recorded description of the Central Mississippi Valley and its inhabitants is contained within the DeSoto chronicles written after the conquistadors passed through the area between 1539 and 1543. In 1882 a field agent for the Bureau of American Ethnology conducted the first systematic archaeological survey of the region, an area that extends from near the mouth of the Ohio River to the mouth of the Arkansas River, bounded on the east by the Mississippi River and on the west by the Ozark Highlands and Grand Prairie. One hundred years later, the authors produced this first comprehensive overview of all of the archaeological research conducted in the valley during the interim. It is a well-organized compendium, written with both the professional archaeologist and the layperson in mind, and is profusely illustrated with maps, charts, artifact photographs, and drawings. This volume was the first published history of the archaeology of the region and stands as the basic resource for that work today.
Built on a flat terrace overlooking the Black Warrior River in Alabama, the Moundville ceremonial center was at its height a densely occupied town of approximately 1,000 residents, with at least 29 earthen mounds surrounding a central plaza. Today Moundville is not only one of the largest and best-preserved Mississippian sites in the United States but also one of the most intensively studied. This volume brings together nine Moundville specialists who trace the site’s evolution and eventual decline.
The sequence of change for public architecture during the Mississippian period may reflect a centralization of political power through time. In the research presented here, some of the community-level assumptions attributed to the appearance of Mississippian mounds are tested against the archaeological record of the Town Creek site—the remains of a town located on the northeastern edge of the Mississippian culture area. In particular, the archaeological record of Town Creek is used to test the idea that the appearance of Mississippian platform mounds was accompanied by the centralization of political authority in the hands of a powerful chief.
A compelling argument has been made that mounds were the seats and symbols of political power within Mississippian societies. While platform mounds have been a part of Southeastern Native American communities since at least 100 B.C., around A.D. 400 leaders in some communities began to place their houses on top of earthen mounds—an act that has been interpreted as an attempt to legitimize personal authority by a community leader through the appropriation of a powerful, traditional, community-oriented symbol. Platform mounds at a number of sites were preceded by a distinctive type of building called an earthlodge—a structure with earth-embanked walls and an entrance indicated by short, parallel wall trenches. Earthlodges in the Southeast have been interpreted as places where a council of community leaders came together to make decisions based on consensus. In contrast to the more inclusive function proposed for premound earthlodges, it has been argued that access to the buildings on top of Mississippian platform mounds was limited to a much smaller subset of the community. If this was the case and if ground-level earthlodges were more accessible than mound-summit structures, then access to leaders and leadership may have decreased through time.
Excavations at the Town Creek archaeological site have shown that the public architecture there follows the earthlodge-to-platform mound sequence that is well known across the South Appalachian subarea of the Mississippian world. The clear changes in public architecture coupled with the extensive exposure of the site's domestic sphere make Town Creek an excellent case study for examining the relationship among changes in public architecture and leadership within a Mississippian society.
Some of the most visible expressions of human culture are illustrated architecturally. Unfortunately for archaeologists, the architecture being studied is not always visible and must be inferred from soil inconsistencies or charred remains. This study deals with research into roughly a millennium of Native American architecture in the Southeast and includes research on the variation of construction techniques employed both above and below ground. Most of the architecture discussed is that of domestic houses with some emphasis on large public buildings and sweat lodges. The authors use an array of methods and techniques in examining native architecture including experimental archaeology, ethnohistory, ethnography, multi-variant analysis, structural engineering, and wood science technology. A major portion of the work, and probably the most important in terms of overall significance, is that it addresses the debate of early Mississippian houses and what they looked like above ground and the changes that occurred both before and after the arrival of Europeans.
Considering Cahokia in terms of class struggle, Pauketat claims that the political consolidation in this region of the Mississippi Valley happened quite suddenly, around A.D. 1000, after which the lords of Cahokia innovated strategies to preserve their power and ultimately emerged as divine chiefs. The new ideas and new data in this volume will invigorate the debate surrounding one of the most important developments in North American prehistory.
Birmingham and Goldstein attempt to unlock some of the mysteries, providing insights and information about the group of people who first settled here in 1100 AD. Filled with maps, drawings, and photographs of artifacts, this small volume examines a time before modern Native American people settled in this area.
Investigations of skeletal remains from key archaeological sites reveal new data and offer insights on prehistoric life and health in the Southeast.
The shift from foraging to farming had important health consequences for prehistoric peoples, but variations in health existed within communities that had made this transition. This new collection draws on the rich bioarchaeological record of the Southeastern United States to explore variability in health and behavior within the age of agriculture. It offers new perspectives on human adaptation to various geographic and cultural landscapes across the entire Southeast, from Texas to Virginia, and presents new data from both classic and little-known sites.
The contributors question the reliance on simple cause-and-effect relationships in human health and behavior by addressing such key bioarchaeological issues as disease history and epidemiology, dietary composition and sufficiency, workload stress, patterns of violence, mortuary practices, and biological consequences of European contact. They also advance our understanding of agriculture by showing that uses of maize were more varied than has been previously supposed.
Representing some of the best work being done today by physical anthropologists, this volume provides new insights into human adaptation for both archaeologists and osteologists. It attests to the heterogeneous character of Southeastern societies during the late prehistoric and early historic periods while effectively detailing the many factors that have shaped biocultural evolution.
The first comprehensive study and analysis of the most important Mississippian mound site on the north-central Gulf coast
Consisting of 18 earthen mounds and numerous additional habitation areas dating to A.D. 1250-1550, the Bottle Creek site was first professionally investigated in 1932 when David L. DeJarnette of the Alabama Museum of Natural History began work there to determine if the site had a cultural relationship with Moundville, connected to the north by a river system. Although partially mapped in the 1880s, Bottle Creek's location in the vast Mobile-Tensaw Delta of Baldwin County completely surrounded by swamp made it inaccessible and protected it from most of the plunder experienced by similar sites in the Southeast.
This volume builds on earlier investigations to present extensive recent data from major excavations conducted from 1991 to 1994 and supported in part by an NEH grant. Ten anthropologists examine various aspects of the site, including mound architecture, prehistoric diet, pottery classification, vessel forms, textiles used to make pottery impressions, a microlithic stone tool industry, water travel, the persistence of mound use into historic times, and the position of Bottle Creek in the protohistoric world.
The site is concluded to be the best remaining example of Pensacola culture, an archaeological variant of the widespread Mississippian tradition identified by a shell-tempered pottery complex and by its geographic association with the north-central coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Occupied for three centuries by a thriving native culture, Bottle Creek is an important remnant of North American peoples and as such is designated a National Historic Landmark. This published compilation of the research data should establish a base for future scholarly investigation and interpretation.
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
Caborn-Welborn, a late Mississippian (A.D. 1400-1700) farming society centered at the confluence of the Ohio and Wabash Rivers (in what is now southwestern Indiana, southeastern Illinois, and northwestern Kentucky), developed following the collapse of the Angel chiefdom (A.D. 1000-1400). Using ceramic and settlement data, David Pollack examines the ways in which that new society reconstructed social, political, and economic relationships from the remnants of the Angel chiefdom. Unlike most instances of the demise of a complex society led by elites, the Caborn-Welborn population did not become more inward-looking, as indicated by an increase in extraregional interaction, nor did they disperse to smaller more widely scattered settlements, as evidenced by a continuation of a hierarchy that included large villages.
This book makes available for the first time detailed, well-illustrated descriptions of Caborn-Welborn ceramics, identifies ceramic types and attributes that reflect Caborn-Welborn interaction with Oneota tribal groups and central Mississippi valley Mississippian groups, and offers an internal regional chronology. Based on intraregional differences in ceramic decoration, the types of vessels interred with the dead, and cemetery location, Pollack suggests that in addition to the former Angel population, Caborn-Welborn society may have included households that relocated to the Ohio/Wabash confluence from nearby collapsing polities, and that Caborn-Welborn’s sociopolitical organization could be better considered as a riverine confederacy.
Examines the authority a ruling elite exercised over the surrounding countryside through a complex of social, political, and religious symbolism
This study uses the theoretical concepts of agency, power, and ideology to explore the development of cultural complexity within the hierarchically organized Cahokia Middle Mississippian society of the American Bottom from the 11th to the 13th centuries. By scrutinizing the available archaeological settlement and symbolic evidence, Emerson demonstrates that many sites previously identified as farmsteads were actually nodal centers with specialized political, religious, and economic functions integrated into a centralized administrative organization. These centers consolidated the symbolism of such 'artifacts of power' as figurines, ritual vessels, and sacred plants into a rural cult that marked the expropriation of the cosmos as part of the increasing power of the Cahokian rulers.
During the height of Cahokian centralized power, it is argued, the elites had convinced their subjects that they ruled both the physical and the spiritual worlds. Emerson concludes that Cahokian complexity differs significantly in degree and form from previously studied Eastern Woodlands chiefdoms and opens new discussion about the role of rural support for the Cahokian ceremonial center.
Chappell seeks to answer fundamental questions about this unique, yet still relatively unknown space, which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982. How did this swampy land become so amenable to human life? Who were the remarkable people who lived here before the Europeans came? Why did the whole civilization disappear so rapidly? What became of the land in the centuries after the Mississippians abandoned it? And finally, what can we learn about ourselves as we look into the changing meaning of Cahokia through the ages?
To explore these questions, Chappell probes a wide range of sources, including the work of astronomers, geographers, geologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists. Archival photographs and newspaper accounts, as well as interviews with those who work at the site and Native Americans on their annual pilgrimage to the site, bring the story up to the present.
Tying together these many threads, Chappell weaves a rich tale of how different people conferred their values on the same piece of land and how the transformed landscape, in turn, inspired different values in them-cultural, spiritual, agricultural, economic, and humanistic.
The reasons for the rise and fall of early cities and ceremonial centers around the world have been sought for centuries. In the United States, Cahokia has been the focus of intense archaeological work to explain its mysteries. Cahokia was the first and exponentially the largest of the Mississippian centers that appeared across the Midwest and Southeast after AD 1000. Located near present-day East St. Louis, Illinois, the central complex of Cahokia spanned more than 12 square kilometers and encompassed more than 120 earthen mounds.
As one of the foremost experts on Cahokia, Susan M. Alt addresses long-standing considerations of eastern Woodlands archaeology—the beginnings, character, and ending of Mississippian culture (AD 1050–1600)—from a novel theoretical and empirical vantage point. Through this case study on farmers’ immigration and resettling, Alt’s narrative reanalyzes the relationship between administration and diversity, incorporating critical new discoveries and archaeological patterns from outside of Cahokia.
Alt examines the cultural landscape of the Cahokia flood plain and the layout of one extraordinary upland site, Grossman, as an administrative settlement where local farmers might have seen or participated in Cahokian rituals and ceremonies involving a web of ancestors, powers, and places. Alt argues that a farming district outside the center provides definitive evidences of the attempted centralized administration of a rural hinterland.
By the 18th century, the modern Catawba Indians were living along the river and throughout the valley that bears their name near the present North Carolina-South Carolina border, but little was known of their history and origins. With this elegant study, David Moore proposes a model that bridges the archaeological record of the protohistoric Catawba Valley with written accounts of the Catawba Indians from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, thus providing an ethnogenesis theory for these Native Americans.
Because the Catawba Confederacy had a long tradition of pottery making, dating ceramics and using them for temporal control was central to establishing a regional cultural chronology. Moore accomplishes this with a careful, thorough review and analysis of disparate data from the whole valley. His archaeological discoveries support documentary evidence of 16th century Spaniards in the region interacting with the resident Indians. By tracking the Spanish routes through the Catawba River valley and comparing their reported interactions with the native population with known archaeological sites and artifacts, he provides a firm chronological and spatial framework for Catawba Indian prehistory.
With excellent artifact photographs and data-rich appendixes, this book is a model study that induces us to contemplate a Catawba genesis and homeland more significant than traditionally supposed. It will appeal to professional archaeologists concerned with many topics—Mississippian, Lamar, early historic Indians, de Soto, Pardo, and chiefdom studies—as well as to the broader public interested in the archaeology of the Carolinas.
Moundville, located on the Black Warrior River in west-central Alabama, is one of the best known and most intensively studied archaeological sites in North America. Yet, in spite of all these investigations, many aspects of the site's internal chronology remained unknown until the original 1983 publication of this volume. The author embarked on a detailed study of Moundville ceramics housed in museums and collections, and hammered out a new chronology for Moundville.This volume is a clearly written description of the analytical procedures employed on these ceramic samples and the new chronology this study revealed. Using the refined techniques outlined in this volume, it was possible for the author to trace changes in community patterns, which in turn shed light on Moundville's internal development and its place among North America's ancient cultures.
Fourteen experts examine the current state of Central Valley prehistoric research and provide an important touchstone for future archaeological study of the region
The Mississippi Valley region has long played a critical role in the development of American archaeology and continues to be widely known for the major research of the early 1950s. To bring the archaeological record up to date, fourteen Central Valley experts address diverse topics including the distribution of artifacts across the landscape, internal configurations of large fortified settlements, human-bone chemistry, and ceramic technology.
The authors demonstrate that much is to be learned from the rich and varied archaeological record of the region and that the methods and techniques used to study the record have changed dramatically over the past half century. Operating at the cutting edge of current research strategies, these archaeologists provide a fresh look at old problems in central Mississippi Valley research.
As objects from the mounds were unearthed, occasionally illustrated and discussed in print, attention became focused on the aesthetic qualities of the artifacts, the origins of the remains, and the possible relationship to the Creek Indians. Beginning in the 20th century, new concerns emerged as the developing science of archaeology was introduced to the region. As many of the sites became threatened or destroyed by reservoir construction, trained archaeologists initiated extensive excavations of the mounds. Although classification of artifacts and sites into a chronological progression of cultures was the main objective of this effort, a second concern, sometimes more latent than manifest, was the reconstruction of a past way of life. Archaeologists hoped to achieve a better understanding of the sociopolitical organization of the peoples who built the mounds and of how those organizations changed through time.
Contemporary archaeologists, while in agreement on many aspects of the ancient cultures, debate the causes, forms, and degrees of sociopolitical complexity in the ancient Southeast. Do the mounds mark the capitals of political territories? If so, what was the scale and scope of these ancient “provinces”? What manner of society constructed the mound settlements? What was the sociopolitical organization of these long-dead populations? How can archaeologists answer such queries with the mute and sometimes ordinary materials with which they work: pottery, stone tools, organic residues, and the strata of remnant settlements, buildings, and mounds?
Climate change is today’s news, but it isn’t a new phenomenon. Centuries-long cycles of heating and cooling are well documented for Europe and the North Atlantic. These variations in climate, including the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), AD 900 to 1300, and the early centuries of the Little Ice Age (LIA), AD 1300 to 1600, had a substantial impact on the cultural history of Europe. In this pathfinding volume, William C. Foster marshals extensive evidence that the heating and cooling of the MWP and LIA also occurred in North America and significantly affected the cultural history of Native peoples of the American Southwest, Southern Plains, and Southeast.
Correlating climate change data with studies of archaeological sites across the Southwest, Southern Plains, and Southeast, Foster presents the first comprehensive overview of how Native American societies responded to climate variations over seven centuries. He describes how, as in Europe, the MWP ushered in a cultural renaissance, during which population levels surged and Native peoples substantially intensified agriculture, constructed monumental architecture, and produced sophisticated works of art. Foster follows the rise of three dominant cultural centers—Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, Cahokia on the middle Mississippi River, and Casas Grandes in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico—that reached population levels comparable to those of London and Paris. Then he shows how the LIA reversed the gains of the MWP as population levels and agricultural production sharply declined; Chaco Canyon, Cahokia, and Casas Grandes collapsed; and dozens of smaller villages also collapsed or became fortresses.
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
Detailed reconstruction of the waxing and waning of political fortunes among the chiefly elites at an important center of the prehistoric world
At the time the first Europeans arrived in the New World, thousands of earthen platform mounds dotted the landscape of eastern North America. Only a few of the mound sites have survived the ravages of time and the devastation of pilferers; one of these valuable monuments is Etowah, located near Cartersville in northern Georgia. Over a period of more than 100 years, excavations of the site’s six mounds, and in particular Mound C, have yielded a wealth of artifacts, including marble statues, copper embossed plates, ceremonial items, and personal adornments. These objects indicate an extensive trading network between Mississippian centers and confirm contact with Spanish conquistadores near Etowah in the mid-1500s.
Adam King has analyzed the architecture and artifacts of Etowah and deduced its vital role in the prehistory of the area. He advances a plausible historical sequence and a model for the ancient town's complex political structure. The chiefdom society relied upon institutional social ranking, permanent political offices, religious ideology, a redistribution of goods and services, and the willing support of the constituent population. King reveals strategies used by the paramount chiefs to maintain their sources of power and to control changes in the social organization. Elite alliances did not necessarily involve the extreme asymmetry of political domination and tribute extraction. King's use of ceramic assemblages recovered from Etowah to determine the occupation history and the construction sequence of public facilities (mounds and plazas) at the center is significant.
This fresh interpretation of the Etowah site places it in a contemporary social and political context with other Mississippian cultures. It is a one-volume sourcebook for the Etowah polity and its neighbors and will, therefore, command an eager audience of scholars and generalists.
Wesler provides an impressive and definitive compilation of more than 70 years of archaeological excavations at one of the most important
archaeological sites in Kentucky.
The Wickliffe Mounds site is located on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River in Ballard County, Kentucky, about three miles south of the mouth of the Ohio River. Around A.D. 1100, Mississippian people--farmers and traders with a culture closely related to the historic cultures of the Southeast (Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and others)—created a settlement there on which they lived for approximately 250 years before moving on.
In 1930 road construction cut a channel through the site, revealing archaeological deposits and bringing the area to the attention of Fain King, a local lumberman and entrepreneur. King bought the site in hopes of turning it into an attraction for the education and entertainment of the public, and not incidentally for his own profit. For more than 50 years the area was subjected to excavations ranging from looting to professional research efforts. In 1983, the site was finally turned over to Murray State University to be developed into an academic facility dedicated to research, student training, public education, and preservation of the site and its collections. Fortunately, the Wickliffe collections include all the early excavation records as well as more than 85,000 artifacts, 90% of which had been catalogued. Between 1984 and 1996 excavations were conducted specifically to affirm questionable data and/or fill in gaps in the Wickliffe archaeological record.
In this volume, Wesler and his colleagues have compiled data from almost seven decades of excavations at Wickliffe Mounds, providing the first comprehensive study of this important site. The paperback version of the book is accompanied by a CD-ROM that contains contributions from a wide range of archaeological specialists and includes archaeological data, site maps, database files, plats of excavations, artifact descriptions, and photographs, compiling in one place the entire archaeological record for this very important eastern North American site.
From Quarry to Cornfield provides an innovative model for examining the technology of hoe production and its contribution to the agriculture of Mississippian communities.
Lithic specialist Charles Cobb examines the political economy in Mississippian communities through a case study of raw material procurement and hoe production and usage at the Mill Creek site on Dillow Ridge in southwest Illinois. Cobb outlines the day-to-day activities in a Mississippian chiefdom village that flourished from about A.D. 1250 to 1500. In so doing, he provides a fascinating window into the specialized tasks of a variety of "day laborers" whose contribution to the community rested on their production of stone hoes necessary in the task of feeding the village. Overlooked in most previous studies, the skills and creativity of the makers of the hoes used in village farming provide a basis for broader analysis of the technology of hoe use in Mississippian times.
Although Cobb's work focuses on Mill Creek, his findings at this site are representative of the agricultural practices of Mississippian communities throughout the eastern United States. The theoretical underpinnings of Cobb's study make a clear case for a reexamination of the accepted definition of chiefdom, the mobilization of surplus labor, and issues of power, history, and agency in Mississippian times. In a well-crafted piece of writing, Cobb distinguishes himself as one of the leaders in the study of lithic technology. From Quarry to Cornfield will find a well-deserved place in the ongoing discussions of power and production in the Mississippian political economy.
At the time of Spanish contact in A.D. 1540, the Mississippian inhabitants of the great valley in northwestern Georgia and adjacent portions of Alabama and Tennessee were organized into a number of chiefdoms distributed along the Coosa and Tennessee rivers and their major tributaries. The administrative centers of these polities were large settlements with one or more platforms mounds and a plaza. Each had a large resident population, but most polity members lived in a half dozen or so towns located within a day’s walk of the center. This book is about one such town, located on the Coosa River in Georgia and known to archaeologists as the King site.
Excavations of two-thirds of the 5.1 acre King site reveal a detailed picture of the town’s domestic and public architecture and overall settlement plan. Intensive analysis of architectural features, especially of domestic structures, enables a better understanding of the variation in structure size, compass orientation, construction stages, and symbolic cosmological associations; the identification of multi-family households; and the position of individual structures within the town’s occupation sequence or life history. Comparison of domestic architecture and burials reveals considerable variation between households in house size, shell bead wealth, and prominence of adult members. One household is preeminent in all these characteristics and may represent the household of the town chief or his matrilineal extended family. Analysis of public architectural features has revealed the existence of a large meeting house with likely historical connections to 18th-century Creek town houses; a probable cosmological basis for the town’s physical layout; and an impressive stockade-and-ditch defensive perimeter.
The King site represents a nearly ideal opportunity to identify the kinds of status positions that were held by individual inhabitants; analyze individual households and investigate the roles they played in King site society; reconstruct the community that existed at King, including size, life history, symbolic associations, and integrative mechanisms; and place King in the larger regional political system. With excavations dating back to 1973, and supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Geographic Society, this is social archaeology at its best.
Cahokia, the largest city of the Mississippian mound cultures, lies outside present-day East St. Louis. Land of Water, City of the Dead reconceptualizes Cahokia’s emergence and expansion (ca. 1050–1200), focusing on understanding a newly imagined religion and complexity through a non-Western lens. Sarah E. Baires argues that this system of beliefs was a dynamic, lived component, based on a broader ontology, with roots in other mound societies. This religion was realized through novel mortuary practices and burial mounds as well as through the careful planning and development of this early city’s urban landscape.
Baires analyzes the organization and alignment of the precinct of downtown Cahokia with a specific focus on the newly discovered and excavated Rattlesnake Causeway and the ridge-top mortuary mounds located along the site axes. Land of Water, City of the Dead also presents new data from the 1954 excavations of the ridge-top mortuary Wilson Mound and a complete analysis of the associated human remains. Through this skeletal analysis, Baires discusses the ways that Cahokians processed and buried their ancestors, identifying unique mortuary practices that include the intentional dismemberment of human bodies and burial with marine shell beads and other materials.
In Life in a Mississippian Warscape: Common Field, Cahokia, and the Effects of Warfare Meghan E. Buchanan posits that to understand the big histories of warfare, political fragmentation, and resilience in the past archaeologists must also analyze and interpret the microscale actions of the past. These are the daily activities of people before, during, and after historical events. Within warscapes, battles take place in peoples’ front yards, family members die, and the impacts of violence in near and distant places are experienced on a daily basis. This book explores the microscale of daily lives of people living at Common Field, a large, palisaded mound center, during the period of Cahokia’s abandonment and the spread of violence and warfare throughout the Southeast.
Linking together ethnographic, historic, and archaeological sources, Buchanan discusses the evidence that the people of Common Field engaged in novel and hybrid practices in these dangerous times. At the microscale, they adopted new ceramic tempering techniques, produced large numbers of serving vessels decorated with warfare-related imagery, adapted their food practices, and erected a substantial palisade with specially prepared deposits. The overall picture that emerges at Common Field is of a people who engaged in risk-averse practices that minimized their exposure to outside of the palisade and attempted to seek intercession from otherworldly realms through public ceremonies involving warfare-related iconography.
The scholarship underlying this shift comes from many directions, but much of the groundwork can be attributed to Charles Hudson. The papers in this volume were contributed by Hudson’s colleagues and former students (many now leading scholars themselves) in his honor. The assumption links these papers is that of a historical transformation between Mississippian societies and the Indian societies of the historic era that requires explanation and critical analysis.
In all of the chapters, the legacy of Hudson’s work is evident. Anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians are storming the bridge that connects prehistory and history in a manner unimaginable 20 years ago. While there remains much work to do on the path toward understanding this transformation and constructing a complete social history of the Southeastern Indians, the work of Charles Hudson and his colleagues have shown the way.
Was Nashville once home to a giant race of humans?
No, but in 1845, you could have paid a quarter to see the remains of one who allegedly lived here before The Flood. That summer, Middle Tennessee well diggers had unearthed the skeleton of an American mastodon. Before it went on display, it was modified and augmented with wooden “bones” to make it look more like a human being and passed off as an antediluvian giant. Then, like so many Nashvillians, after a little success here, it went on tour and disappeared from history.
But this fake history of a race of Pre-Nashville Giants isn’t the only bad history of what, and who, was here before Nashville. Sources written for schoolchildren and the public lead us to believe that the first Euro-Americans arrived in Nashville to find a pristine landscape inhabited only by the buffalo and boundless nature, entirely untouched by human hands. Instead, the roots of our city extend some 14,000 years before Illinois lieutenant-governor-turned-fur-trader Timothy Demonbreun set foot at Sulphur Dell.
During the period between about AD 1000 and 1425, a thriving Native American culture known to archaeologists as the Middle Cumberland Mississippian lived along the Cumberland River and its tributaries in today’s Davidson County. Earthen mounds built to hold the houses or burials of the upper class overlooked both banks of the Cumberland near what is now downtown Nashville. Surrounding densely packed village areas including family homes, cemeteries, and public spaces stretched for several miles through Shelby Bottoms, and the McFerrin Park, Bicentennial Mall, and Germantown neighborhoods. Other villages were scattered across the Nashville landscape, including in the modern neighborhoods of Richland, Sylvan Park, Lipscomb, Duncan Wood, Centennial Park, Belle Meade, White Bridge, and Cherokee Park.
This book is the first public-facing effort by legitimate archaeologists to articulate the history of what happened here before Nashville happened.
A prevailing enigma in American archaeology is why vast swaths of land in the Southeast and Southwest were abandoned between AD 1200 and 1500. The most well-known abandonments occurred in the Four Corners and Mimbres areas of the Southwest and the central Mississippi valley in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and in southern Arizona and the Ohio Valley during the fifteenth century. In Megadrought in the Carolinas: The Archaeology of Mississippian Collapse, Abandonment, and Coalescence, John S. Cable demonstrates through the application of innovative ceramic analysis that yet another fifteenth-century abandonment event took place across an area of some 34.5 million acres centered on the South Carolina coast.
Most would agree that these sweeping changes were at least in part the consequence of prolonged droughts associated with a period of global warming known as the Medieval Climatic Anomaly. Cable strengthens this inference by showing that these events correspond exactly with the timing of two different geographic patterns of megadrought as defined by modern climate models.
Cable extends his study by testing the proposition that the former residents of the coastal zone migrated to surrounding interior regions where the effects of drought were less severe. Abundant support for this expectation is found in the archaeology of these regions, including evidence of accelerated population growth, crowding, and increased regional hostilities. Another important implication of immigration is the eventual coalescence of ethnic and/or culturally different social groups and the ultimate transformation of societies into new cultural syntheses. Evidence for this process is not yet well documented in the Southeast, but Cable draws on his familiarity with the drought-related Puebloan intrusions into the Hohokam Core Area of southern Arizona during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to suggest strategies for examining coalescence in the Southeast. The narrative concludes by addressing the broad implications of late prehistoric societal collapse for today’s human-propelled global warming era that portends similar but much more long-lasting consequences.
During the Mississippian period (approximately A.D. 1000-1600) in the midwestern and southeastern United States a variety of greater and lesser chiefdoms took shape. Archaeologists have for many years explored the nature of these chiefdoms from the perspective common in archaeological investigations—from the top down, investigating ceremonial elite mound structures and predicting the basic domestic unit from that data. Because of the increased number of field investigations at the community level in recent years, this volume is able to move the scale of investigation down to the level of community and household, and it contributes to major revisions of settlement hierarchy concepts.
The definition of the regional limits of chiefly influence during the Mississippian period in the southeastern United States remains unresolved. In the Gulf Coastal Plain between the Mississippi and Black Warrior rivers, some studies have explored the role that interpolity interactions played in influencing a polity’s social and political complexity through time. It has been argued that the larger, more complex polities were able to preempt the development of more complex political structures among the smaller polities.
Using research at the Pevey (22Lw510) and Lowe-Steen (22Lw511) mound sites on the Pearl River in Lawrence County, Mississippi, this book explores the social and political mechanisms by which these polities may have interacted with each other and the geographic limit to the effects of inter-polity competition. The Pevey site is a nine-mound Mississippian site and Lowe-Steen is a two-mound site located 18 kilometers to the north of Pevey. These sites provide a “missing link” of sorts to explore questions about inter-polity interactions because of their centrality to the study region and their unusual size. By filling a void in the regional dataset, this study allows us to better understand the capacity of the largest polities to negatively effect the political development of their smaller neighbors.
Archaeologists and architects draw upon theoretical perspectives from their fields to provide valuable insights into the structure, development, and meaning of prehistoric communities.
Architecture is the most visible physical manifestation of human culture. The built environment envelops our lives and projects our distinctive regional and ethnic identities to the world around us. Archaeology and architecture find common theoretical ground in their perspectives of the homes, spaces, and communities that people create for themselves. Although archaeologists and architects may ask different questions and apply different methods, the results are the same—a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.
In this volume, prominent archaeologists examine the architectural design spaces of Mississippian towns and mound centers of the eastern United States. The diverse Mississippian societies, which existed between A.D. 900 and 1700, created some of the largest and most complex Native American archaeological sites in the United States. The dominant architectural feature shared by these communities was one or more large plazas, each of which was often flanked by buildings set on platform mounds. The authors describe the major dimensions of an architectural grammar, centered on the design of the plaza and mound complex that was shared by different societies across the Mississippian world. They then explore these shared architectural features as physical representations or metaphors for Mississippian world views and culture.
Because textiles rarely are preserved in the archaeological record outside of deserts and permafrost areas, in many regions of the world very little is known about their characteristics, functions, production technology, or socioeconomic importance. While this fact is also true of organic fabrics produced during the Mississippian period in southeastern North Anerica, a wide variety of Mississippian textiles has been preserved in the form of impressions on large pottery vessels. From attribute analysis of 1,574 fabrics impressed on Wickliffe pottery sherds and comparison of the impressions with extant Mississippian textile artifacts, Drooker presents the first comparative analysis of these materials and the most inclusive available summary of information on Mississippian textiles.
In Illinois, the one-hundred-foot Cahokia Mound spreads impressively across sixteen acres, and as many as ten thousand more mounds dot the Ohio River Valley alone. The Mound Builders traces the speculation surrounding these monuments and the scientific excavations which uncovered the history and culture of the ancient Americans who built them.
The mounds were constructed for religious and secular purposes some time between 1000 B.C. and 1000 A.D., and they have prompted curiosity and speculation from very early times. European settlers found them evidence of some ancient and glorious people. Even as eminent an American as Thomas Jefferson joined the controversy, though his conclusions—that the mounds were actually cemeteries of ancient Indians—remained unpopular for nearly a century.
Only in the late 19th century, as Smithsonian Institution investigators developed careful methodologies and reliable records, did the period of scientific investigation of the mounds and their builders begin. Silverberg follows these excavations and then recounts the story they revealed of the origins, development, and demise of the mound builder culture.
How social and political power was wielded in order to build Moundville
Inaugural pocket guide from our new series of illustrated guidebooks
In the 13th century, Moundville was one of the largest Native American settlements north of Mexico. Spread over 325 acres were 29 earthen mounds arranged around a great plaza, a mile-long stockade, and dozens of dwellings for thousands of people. Moundville, in size and complexity second only to the Cahokia site in Illinois, was a heavily populated town, as well as a political and religious center.
Moundville was sustained by tribute of food and labor provided by the people who lived in the nearby floodplain as well as other smaller mound centers. The immediate area appears to have been thickly populated, but by about A.D. 1350, Moundville retained only ceremonial and political functions. A decline ensued, and by the 1500s the area was abandoned. By the time the first Europeans reached the Southeast in the 1540s, the precise links between Moundville's inhabitants and what became the historic Native American tribes had become a mystery.
Illustrated with 50 color photos, maps, and figures, Moundville tells the story of the ancient people who lived there, the modern struggle to save the site from destruction, and the scientific saga of the archaeologists who brought the story to life. Moundville is the book to read before, during, or after a visit to Alabama’s prehistoric metropolis.
The two works reprinted in this volume represent the pinnacle of the career of one of the most remarkable American archaeologists of the early 20th century, Clarence Bloomfield Moore.
Moore's Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Black Warrior River (1905) and Moundville Revisited (1907) brought the Moundville site in Alabama to the attention of the scholarly world in dramatic fashion by offering a splendid photographic display and expert commentary on its artifactual richness. Moore was the leading southeastern specialist of his day and the most prolific excavator of southern sites during the early part of the 20th century. Today Moore gives the impression of having been everywhere, having excavated everything, and having published on all of it. Moundville Expeditions contains facsimile reprints of these two classic works, along with a new scholarly introduction by one of the leading authorities on the Moundville archaeological site. Once again these rare materials on Moundville are available both for scholars and for a general audience.
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
Anthropologists have long talked about chiefdoms as a form of sociopolitical organization, and for several decades Elman Service's description of chiefdoms has been widely accepted as definitive. Nevertheless, in the 1970s, scholars began to question whether all, or any, chiefdoms had the entire range of characteristics described by Service. Most of the questions focused on the (nonmarket) economic organization of these polities, and several contrasting economic models were suggested. None of the models, however, was comprehensively tested against actual chiefdom economies.
This study examines the economic organization of the late prehistoric (A.D. 1000 to 1540) chiefdom centered at Moundville, Alabama. Rather than attempting to show that this case fits one or another model, the economic organization is determined empirically using archaeological data. The pattern of production and distribution of subsistence goods, domestic nonutilitarian goods, and imported prestige goods does not fit precisely any of the extant models. Because Moundville's economy was organized in a way that promoted stability, it may be no accident that Moundville was the dominant regional polity for several hundred years. This research opens a new field of archaeological investigation: the relationship between fine details of economic organization and large-scale political fortunes.
By analyzing the pottery found at a well-known archaeological site, Hilgeman constructs the long-awaited timeline for the rise and decline of this ancient society.
Located near present-day Evansville, Indiana, the Angel site is one of the important archaeological towns associated with prehistoric Mississippian society. More than two million artifacts were collected from this site during excavations from 1939 to 1989, but, until now, no systematic survey of the pottery sherds had been conducted. This volume, documenting the first in-depth analysis of Angel site pottery, also provides scholars of Mississippian culture with a chronology of this important site.
Angel is generally thought to have been occupied from before A.D. 1200 to 1450, but scholars have been forced to treat this period as one chronological unit without any sense of the growth and decline of the society that occupied it. Using radiocarbon assays and an analysis of its morphological and stylistic attributes of pottery, Sherri Hilgeman is able to divide the occupation of Angel into a series of recognizable stages. She then correlates those stages with similar ones at other archaeological excavations—especially nearby Kincaid—making it possible to compare Angel society with other native cultures of the lower Ohio Valley. Through this important contribution to native pottery studies, Hilgeman opens a window into the lifeways of prehistoric Angel society and places that society in the larger context of Mississippian culture.
The Central Mississippi Valley, defined as the region along the Mississippi River from where the Ohio River joins in the north to its confluence with the Arkansas River in the south, lies between the two most important archaeological areas of the Southeast: American Bottom/Cahokia and the Lower Yazoo Basin. The valley has been influenced by these major centers and has a complex history of its own. Contributions from experts throughout the region present current, if sometimes conflicting, views of the regional cultural sequences supported by data from recent surveys and excavations, as well as radiocarbon and chronometric determinations. By examining this new information and reevaluating earlier interpretations of local archaeological sequences, this volume provides a comprehensive overview of the valley and defines future research goals.
Published in 1995, Mississippian Communities and Households, edited by J. Daniel Rogers and Bruce D. Smith, was a foundational text that advanced southeastern archaeology in significant ways and brought household-level archaeology to the forefront of the field. Reconsidering Mississippian Communitiesand Households revisits and builds on what has been learned in the years since the Rogers and Smith volume, advancing the field further with the diverse perspectives of current social theory and methods and big data as applied to communities in Native America from the AD 900s to 1700s and from northeast Florida to southwest Arkansas.
Watts Malouchos and Betzenhauser bring together scholars researching diverse Mississippian Southeast and Midwest sites to investigate aspects of community and household construction, maintenance, and dissolution. Thirteen original case studies prove that community can be enacted and expressed in various ways, including in feasting, pottery styles, war and conflict, and mortuary treatments.
Reassesses the ancient Indigenous McKeithen site in northern Florida in light of new data, analyses, and theories
Revisiting McKeithen Weeden Island further illuminates an Indigenous Late Woodland (ca. AD 200–900) mound-and-village community in northern Florida that was first excavated in the late 1970s. Since then, some artifacts received additional analyses, and the topic of prechiefdom societies has been broadly reconsidered in anthropology and archaeology. These developments allow new perspectives on McKeithen’s history and significance.
Prudence M. Rice, a Mayanist who began her career at the University of Florida, revisits what is known about McKeithen and recontextualizes the 1970s excavations. Weeden Island and McKeithen are best known through mortuary mounds and mortuary ritual, mainly involving unusual pottery bird effigies. Rice discusses current theoretical trends in studies of ritual and belief systems and their relation to mound-building at McKeithen in early stages of developing societal complexity.
Revisiting McKeithen Weeden Island serves as a masterful example of an esteemed archaeologist advancing the field through rethought and updated interpretations of the site and its significance, primarily through its pottery. Rice’s case study ultimately also fosters understanding of later Mississippian society and other civilizations around the world at this time period. Archaeologists, anthropologists, and social historians as well as students and avocational readers will welcome Rice’s insight.
This volume explores political change in chiefdoms, specifically how complex chiefdoms emerge and collapse, and how this process—called cycling—can be examined using archaeological, ethnohistoric, paleoclimatic, paleosubsistence, and physical anthropological data. The focus for the research is the prehistoric and initial contact-era Mississippian chiefdoms of the Southeastern United States, specifically the societies occupying the Savannah River basin from ca. A.D. 1000 to 1600. This regional focus and the multidisciplinary nature of the investigation provide a solid introduction to the Southeastern Mississippian archaeological record and the study of cultural evolution in general.
A timely, comprehensive reevaluation of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex.
One of the most venerable concepts in Southeastern archaeology is that of the Southern Cult. The idea has its roots in the intensely productive decade (archaeologically) of the 1930s and is fundamentally tied to yet another venerable concept—Mississippian culture. The last comprehensive study of the melding of these two concepts into the term Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC) is more than two decades old, yet our understanding of the objects, themes, and artistic styles associated with the SECC have changed a great deal. New primary data have come to light that bear directly on the complex, requiring a thorough reanalysis of both concepts and dating. Recent publications have ignited many debates about the dating and the nature of the SECC.
This work presents new data and new ideas on the temporal and social contexts, artistic styles, and symbolic themes included in the complex. It also demonstrates that engraved shell gorgets, along with other SECC materials, were
produced before A.D. 1400.
When European explorers began their initial forays into southeastern North America in the 16th and 17th centuries they encountered what they called temples and shrines of native peoples, often decorated with idols in human form made of wood, pottery, or stone. The idols were fascinating to write about, but having no value to explorers searching for gold or land, there are no records of these idols being transported to the Old World, and mention of them seems to cease about the 1700s. However, with the settling of the fledgling United States in the 1800s, farming colonists began to unearth stone images in human form from land formerly inhabited by the native peoples. With little access to the records of the 16th and 17th centuries, debate and speculation abounded by the public and scholars alike concerning their origin and meaning.
During the last twenty years the authors have researched over 88 possible examples of southeastern Mississippian stone statuary, dating as far back as 1,000 years ago, and discovered along the river valleys of the interior Southeast. Independently and in conjunction, they have measured, analyzed, photographed, and traced the known history of the 42 that appear in this volume. Compiling the data from both early documents and public and private collections, the authors remind us that the statuary should not be viewed in isolation, but rather as regional expressions of a much broader body of art, ritual, and belief.
The last prehistoric cultures to inhabit the Middle Ohio Valley (ca. A.D. 1000–1650) are referred to as Fort Ancient societies, which exhibited a wide variety of Mississippian period characteristics. What is less well-known and little understood are the social processes by which Mississippian characteristics spread to Fort Ancient communities. Through a comprehensive study of SunWatch, one of the few thoroughly excavated Fort Ancient settlements, the author focuses on the development of village social structure within a broad geographic and temporal framework, recognizing border areas as particularly dynamic contexts of social change. As a fundamental study of social patterning of Fort Ancient villages, this work reveals the interrelationships of small social units in culture change and social structure development and provides a full reconsideration of the Mississippian dimensions of Fort Ancient societies and a model for future investigations of larger patterning in the lateprehistory of the region.
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
Specialists from archaeology, ethnohistory, physical anthropology, and cultural anthropology bring their varied points of view to this subject in an attempt to answer basic questions about the nature and extent of social change within the time period. The scholars' overriding concerns include presentation of a scientifically accurate depiction of the native cultures in the Central Mississippi Valley prior and immediately subsequent to European contact and the need to document the ensuing social and biological changes that eventually led to the widespread depopulation and cultural reorientation. Their findings lead to three basic hypotheses that will focus the scholarly research for decades to come.
Contributors include:
George J. Armelagos, Ian W. Brown, Chester B. DePratter, George F. Fielder, Jr., James B. Griffin, M. Cassandra Hill, Michael P. Hoffman, Charles Hudson, R. Barry Lewis, Dan F. Morse, Phyllis A. Morse, Mary Lucas Powell, Cynthia R. Price, James F. Price, Gerald P. Smith, Marvin T. Smith, and Stephen Williams
The prehistoric native peoples of the Mississippi River Valley and other areas of the Eastern Woodlands of the United States shared a complex set of symbols and motifs that constituted one of the greatest artistic traditions of the pre-Columbian Americas. Traditionally known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, these artifacts of copper, shell, stone, clay, and wood were the subject of the groundbreaking 2007 book Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms: Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography, which presented a major reconstruction of the rituals, cosmology, ideology, and political structures of the Mississippian peoples.
Visualizing the Sacred advances the study of Mississippian iconography by delving into the regional variations within what is now known as the Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere (MIIS). Bringing archaeological, ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and iconographic perspectives to the analysis of Mississippian art, contributors from several disciplines discuss variations in symbols and motifs among major sites and regions across a wide span of time and also consider what visual symbols reveal about elite status in diverse political environments. These findings represent the first formal identification of style regions within the Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere and call for a new understanding of the MIIS as a network of localized, yet interrelated religious systems that experienced both continuity and change over time.
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