Square Pegs in Round Holes: Organizational Diversity Between Early Moundville and Cahokia (original) (raw)
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… in Round Holes: Organizational Diversity Between Early Moundville …
Leadership and polity in …, 2006
Variation in the political economic organization of Mississippian polities has long been recognized. There have been few studies, however, that have examined these differences in any detail. We offer a comparison between Moundville and Cahokia, two of the largest and most complex Mississippian polities in the greater Southeast. Well-demarcated differences in settlement patterns, community patterns, and craft production reveal important organizational dissimilarities between Moundville and Cahokia during the early Mississippian period. By highlighting these differences we hope to problematize the overuse of societal types as a means of analyzing and comparing Mississippian polities.
American Antiquity, 2019
To aid our understanding of prehispanic social change in a subcontinental context, this article presents data and analysis relating to the occupational histories of 351 Mississippian platform mound sites in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Based on the premise that sites with platform mounds served as the administrative and ritual centers for Mississippian polities, our study demonstrates that polities in the study area rose and fell with some regularity, and in many cases, new polities succeeded old ones in the same locations. Our work expands on a previous analysis of 47 northern Georgia area sites. Through a theoretical framework tailored for macroregional processes and a rule-based approach in collecting and standardizing data from previous work, this study serves as an example for incorporating different processes and regions to provide a more coherent and complete picture of the Mississippian macroregion. Our results show that polity cycling was typical in our stu...
American Antiquity, 2020
This research seeks to understand the economic and social interaction patterns among dispersed Piedmont Village Tradition communities in the North American Southeast, AD 1200-1600. Piedmont Village Tradition communities lived adjacent to Mississippian societies and have been categorized as a peripheral society because of this spatial relationship. We examine economic behaviors by constructing fall-off curves of local versus nonlocal lithic material proportions at settlement sites and examining the reduction behaviors and tool types at sites. The results support a possible gateway model for the acquisition and distribution of nonlocal materials that linked spatially proximate communities. To examine social interaction patterns, we conducted a Brainerd-Robinson analysis of ceramic attributes from six sites and combined our results with work by Rogers (1993). The results show sites with stylistic similarities are not the same sites that share lithic resources. We conclude that these spatially non-overlapping artifact patterns result from a heterarchical social organization with a high degree of independence between economic and social interactions. Finally, we contextualize our results within the current knowledge of Mississippian and Piedmont Village Tradition societies in the region to broaden the discussion of gateways in reciprocity-based economies, societies traditionally thought of as peripheral to complex societies, and coalescence.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019
Network approaches in archaeology offer a promising avenue for facilitating bottom-up, comparative approaches to sociopolitical organization. While recent applications have focused primarily on migration and demographic trends, identity and identity politics, and the dynamics of geopolitical and regional interaction, little in the way of comparative sociopolitical organization has been attempted. In this study, I present an alternative approach to the use of sociotypological models across southern Appalachia. In particular, I demonstrate the value in employing network analyses as a mode of formally and quantitatively comparing the relational structures and organizations of sociopolitical landscapes; in this case, those traditionally characterized as constellations of chiefdoms. By approaching southern Appalachian histories through the relationships upon which social, political, and economic institutions were actually built, I move the study of southeastern political systems beyond the use of models that emphasize the behaviors of elites and the ruling class as inspired by the ethnographic and ethnohistoric records. To these ends, using a robust regional ceramic dataset, I compare network histories and political landscapes for the southern Appalachian region between ca. AD 800 and 1650. The results of these analyses contribute insights to the study of small-scale political organizations by demonstrating that (i) as chiefdoms developed, leaders drew on preexisting social and political conditions; (ii) while networks of chiefly interaction were defined by instability, wider networks of interaction were much more durable; and (iii) quantitative network analyses and qualitative ethnohistoric accounts can articulate with one another to shed light on indigenous political organization.
Transregional Social Fields of the Early Mississippian Midcontinent
Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 2020
This paper employs concepts from Bourdieu’s theory of social fields and contemporary research on transnationalism to explore the complicated history of population movement, culture contact, and interaction that fueled the origins of Mississippian society in the greater Cahokia area and closely related socio-political developments in the Central Illinois River Valley (CIRV) of west-central Illinois.We offer a new take on Mississippian origins and the history of culture contact in the CIRV, arguing that interregional simultaneity and inter-group collaboration played an important part of the early processes of Mississippianization in the North American Midwest. By decentering Cahokia in our explanation of Mississippian origins in the greater Midwest, we argue for a long-term persistence of traditional pre-Mississippian practices in the CIRV region, beginning with the first documented engagement among Cahokians and Illinois Valley groups in the early eleventh century until the beginning of the thirteenth century AD.
The structure and organization of macroregional networks have long captured the attention of archaeologists working in eastern North America, especially in regard to the overall character and spread of Mississippian culture across the midwestern and southeastern United States. In this paper, we use distributions of marine shell gorgets to evaluate the organization of relationships across the Mississippian world and to understand how social capital was accumulated and reciprocal relationships were established in the context of emerging organizational complexity. We use data on 1980 shell gorgets from 165 sites across eastern North America to investigate the social networks related to the distribution of these materials and, indirectly, to the types of social capital that were produced through regional social relationships. We employ a framework that articulates social network topologies with different forms of social capital to explicate the relational structure of Mississippian sociopolitics and to identify the sociospatial scales at which different forms of social capital, reciprocity, and relationships underwrote these structures. We conclude that resources (both material and immaterial) were likely drawn from community, local, regional, macroregional, and continental-scale networks while multiple types of networks were maintained across these multiscalar relational fields.
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.
The Early Mississippian Frontier in the Lower Chattahoochee- Apalachicola River Valley
2002
Explanations of Mississippian origins are sometimes presented as a choice between in situ cultural developments versus population movement. We examine these contrasting perspectives in the context of interaction among three regional populations with disparate material culture traditions and differing degreesof organizational complexity. We argue that population movement was the mechanism that established the initial Mississippian communities in the lower ChattahoocheeApalachicola region, and subsequent cultural developments among neighboring indigenous populations were influenced by the presence of immigrant settlers. We propose that the different ways in which regional populations responded to interaction across a geographical;cultural, and sociopolitical frontier placed them on divergent paths to Mississippianization. logists thought population movement a capnclOus historical event rather than a cultural process structured by recurrent principles. Lathrap argued against this persp...