Master's Thesis (2011) RAISED GROUND, RAZED STRUCTURE: CERAMIC CHRONOLOGY, OCCUPATION AND CHIEFLY AUTHORITY ON MOUND P AT MOUNDVILLE (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
Research addressing the social collapse and reorganization of the Moundville polity (A.D. 1400-1520) has been limited by a lack of deposits dating to the latest phase of occupation of the ceremonial center. This paper will address how social and ceremonial structures shifted at Moundville during a time when older aspects of the polity were in decline. It will present archaeological data from recently excavated midden deposits and ceremonial items recovered from Mound P. These indicate that while some elements of ceremonial activity had halted, others were maintained and emphasized, contributing to a reorganization of ceremonial and social structures.
Moundbuilders of Ancient America: A Legacy Reclaimed, (2018), 175 pages, $14.99
I am a descendant of a Cofetazque Queen, known in Western Literature as the “Lady of Cofitachiqui”. She graciously greeted Hernando di Soto and his Expedition on their 1540 trek through South Carolina’s Low Country. In his Journal, he’s said to have described her Mound’s, Grand Lodge as, “The Richest I’d seen in either Peru or Mexico”. Mounds are Man- made Pyramid type, Flat-topped, Earthen Structures and were used for various reasons, including Habitation, Ceremonial and Astronomical purposes. Some 10,000 plus mounds dotted the landscape along the Mississippi River Valleys, of Ohio and Illinois during the height of Moundbuilding Civilization, and they have been found as far West as, Balboa Mound in California. Much has been written, but little is known about these Pre-Columbian Native Americans, who had a complex Social Order; thriving City States across the Americas, with Trade Routes to Central & South America, and a Spiritual Cosmology, in times of Antiquity. 30+ years of research and chelatest DNA Technology go into Ms. Giza's book, Moundbuilders of Ancient America: A Legacy Reclaimed.
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.
2019
Platform mounds and plazas have a 5000-year-long history in the eastern United States but are often viewed through the lens of late prehistoric and early historic understandings of mound use. This review approaches the history of these important landscape features via a forward-looking temporal framework that emphasizes the variability in their construction and use through time and across space. I suggest that by viewing platform mounds in their historical contexts, emphasizing the construction process over final form, and focusing on nonmound sites and off-mound areas such as plazas, we can build a less biased and more complex understanding of early Native American monumentality.