MISSISSIPPIAN POLITIES OF THE NORTHERN YAZOO BASIN: ARCHAEOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS AT HOLLYWOOD MOUNDS (original) (raw)
Related papers
Decoding Hollywood: Interpreting the Built Environment of a Mississippian Mound Center
Paper presented at the 2012 Society for American Archaeology Confefence, Memphis, TN.
The natural and cultural landscapes ordered Mississippian society. In the Yazoo Basin, the natural environment was dominated by the Mississippi River, which carved out the valley, leaving behind oxbow lakes and the natural levee surfaces that were the preferred locations for towns. The most characteristic features of the cultural landscape were earthen mounds and there is perhaps a higher density of these in the Yazoo Basin than anywhere else in the Mississippian Southeast. This paper presents an analysis of the monumental architecture at the Hollywood site and surrounding sites for the purpose of better understanding the nature of Mississippian political power in the Yazoo Basin.
Archaeological Prospection, 2014
Hollywood Mounds is a late Mississippian mound centre located in northwestern Mississippi, USA. Although only four mounds are visible today topographically, prospection techniques have revealed additional mounds and other buried features that extend well beyond the site core. These features were burned, which allows them to produce highcontrast magnetic gradient anomalies. By augmenting this data with an efficient excavation strategy, the sequence of this unique cultural landscape has been reconstructed. These findings provide insight into the development of a Mississippian mound centre in this arearesults that would not be possible without archaeological prospection.
The Mazique site (22Ad502), in Adams County, Mississippi, is believed to have been occupied during both the Coles Creek (A.D. 700-1000) and Mississippi periods (A.D. 1000-1680). However, Ian W. Brown (2007) has suggested that mound building at Mazique was primarily a result of Plaquemine activity. This thesis presents new evidence suggesting that mound construction at Mazique occurred primarily during the Coles Creek period and that the Plaquemine presence here during the Mississippi period has been overestimated. The larger implications of these conclusions are that the construction, arrangement, and use of flat top mounds and plaza complexes was an indigenous development of the Coles Creek period in the Natchez bluffs region as it was in the greater Lower Mississippi Valley, and that the characterization of the Plaquemine culture as a hybridization of Coles Creek and Mississippian cultures should not be discarded as a theory of cultural interaction in the region.
North American Archaeologist, 2019
Significant scholarly attention has been paid to monument construction, craft production , and leadership strategies in the Mississippian world (A.D. 1000 to A.D. 1540) of the Southeastern and Midcontinental United States. As new sites are discovered and new data brought into consideration, greater consideration can be made linking the building of large earthen mounds to social and political relationships. This article presents an archaeological and ethnohistoric consideration of mound building and mound summit use at Mound D at the Carson site, located in northwest Mississippi. Data from earthen mound excavation, mound summit architecture , material culture, and optically stimulated luminescence and radiocarbon (accelerator mass spectrometry) dating are used to discuss the formation of the monumental landscape beginning in the early 13th century. Several postulates are offered for the interpretation of mound construction and mound summit use.
TOWNSCAPE ARCHAEOLOGY AT ANGEL MOUNDS, INDIANA: MISSISSIPPIAN SPATIALITY AND COMMUNITY
2010
TOWNSCAPE ARCHAEOLOGY AT ANGEL MOUNDS, INDIANA: MISSISSIPPIAN SPATIALITY AND COMMUNITY This townscape archaeological study investigates the manner in which a large prehistoric urban settlement became organized, flourished and declined, using new and legacy data from the Mississippian town of Angel Mounds (ca. 1100-1400 AD) on the Ohio River near present day Evansville, Indiana. The attributes and distribution of architecture including plaza, earthen mounds, palisades, houses and sacred or civic architecture are identified via a large scale subsurface imaging survey and then placed into a chronological framework.
Sociopolitical Implications of Mississippian Mound
2016
, and several anonymous reviewers for reading earlier drafts of this article, the content of which was greatly improved by their comments. Several individuals shared their knowledge of specific mounds. We are grateful for this generosity and acknowledge their contributions in the references. Lesley Rankin-Hill translated the abstract into Spanish. The kind assistance of the
Excavating a Mississippian Frontier: Fieldwork at the Carter Robinson Mound Site
Native South, 2008
The Mississippian period (AD 900-1550) in the Southern United States is typified by corn agriculture, earthen mound construction, and extensive trade networks. 1 Although many of these traits had existed before this time, it was during the Mississippian period that institutionalized hierarchy became part of Southern cultures. Societies now had permanent leaders, and those leaders (and their retinues) had access to more and better material culture, seen archaeologically as larger houses located close to mounds; more varied diets, including choice foods; and burials accompanied by exotic artifacts. Chiefs, in turn, may have provided protection or stability to the inhabitants of the chiefdom. Chiefdoms were present throughout the South at this time, starting most notably at Cahokia in Illinois near present-day St. Louis, whose size and magnitude were not replicated again; however, large chiefdoms were also located at Moundville in central Alabama and at Etowah and later Coosa in northwestern Georgia. Many studies have attempted to better define Southern chiefly economies, politics, settlement patterns, diet, and interactions, so that we now know more about the nature of Southern chiefdoms than ever before. 2 As a result, researchers recognize the large amount of variation in Mississippian chiefdoms; although they are generally alike, there are also marked differences within and between regions. Examining such variation is one avenue toward better understanding the nature of these societies. One way to identify variation is by studying the societies that were located on the frontier of the Mississippian world. The study of frontiers of any culture is important because frontiers are areas where multiple identities intersect, and where power can be recreated or reconfigured.
Mound P is the largest mound on the western plaza periphery at Moundville in westcentral Alabama. Excavations on the western mound flank revealed at least two mound construction episodes and a large amount of modern disturbance. Excavations on the mound summit intersected a large burnt daub structure that was previously indicated by a magnetometer survey. Moundville was depopulated around A.D. 1400 and the occupation of mound summits after this time indicates that leadership positions in the region were still important. Mounds were used as symbols of authority that leaders could co-opt to legitimize their position. A ceramic chronology was developed based on the site's type-variety system for the mound to determine the date of terminal occupation on the summit of the mound. This revealed that the mound was used lightly during the Moundville IV (A.D. 1520-1650) ceramic phase. Other artifacts from the mound suggest that the pigment complex was in use on the summit but a stone manufacturing industry was not. It is suggested that Mound P was occupied late in Moundville's history but abandoned prior to the Protohistoric period and the Spanish intrusion into the Southeastern United States.