Native American Monuments and Landscape in the Lower Mississippi Valley (original) (raw)
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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.
PhD Dissertation, Tulane University, Department of Anthropology, 2023
The research presented in this dissertation focuses on archaeological investigations of the Hollywood Mounds site, one of several large Mississippian mound centers located in the northern Yazoo Basin of northwestern Mississippi. On a site level, the goal of the research is to delineate Hollywood Mounds’ structure and layout, and to understand how it changed during its occupation. These goals were explored through the multivariate analysis of artifacts recovered during an earlier systematic surface collection, acquisition and analyses of high-density geophysical data, excavations of areas associated with structures and other features, and radiometric dating of samples recovered during this project and previous projects. These data indicate there were three phases of occupation consisting of: (1) a village; (2) a mound center with several small mounds situated around a plaza; and (3) a mound center with one large mound and several small mounds organized around an artificially raised plaza. I propose that these occupational phases correspond to sociopolitical changes. This occupational sequence began in the mid-thirteenth century A.D. and lasted through the mid-sixteenth century A.D., and the latest occupation stage may postdate the 1541 visit to the region by the Hernando de Soto expedition. This dissertation explores the regional perspective through the analysis of mound site location, historical accounts of the Soto expedition, radiometric dating, and the multivariate analysis of previous surface collections. These analyses indicate that the northern Yazoo Basin contained a uniquely dense assortment of mound centers that formed a complex arrangement of polities. Different patterns of spacing and organization were present than those seen in other areas of the Mississippian world.
Southeastern Archaeology, 2017
Investigations at the Carson site (22CO505), located in Coahoma County, Mississippi, have uncovered data on the development of a large Mississippian mound center dating to the period from A.D. 1200 through European contact. Recent sediment coring, excavation, artifact analyses, and radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating shed light on earthworks and household structures at Carson, and on Mississippian culture in the Yazoo Basin more generally. Sediment coring demonstrates a laterally transgressing Mississippi River system deposited coarse sandy ridges and clay-filled swales underneath a surface horizon comprised of variously coarse to medium-fine sediment originating from generalized overbank flooding. In some instances, flood-borne sediments were found on mound flanks, indicating that at times river-based flooding may have interrupted mound construction. Sediment coring and trench excavation also demonstrate that Carson’s Mound D was built in four stages, with Stages II and III comprising the major stages of earth moving. Excavations on the mound summit reveal evidence of several superimposed structures that were burned in place and likely used for the production of stone, shell, and wooden craft items, perhaps related to Mississippi Ideational Interaction Sphere (MIIS) paraphernalia. Here we describe recent investigations at Carson and present preliminary findings; forthcoming publications will emphasize strategies of power, monumentality, craft production, and Mississippian exchange systems.
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.
Early New World Monumentality, edited by Richard L. Burger and Robert M. Rosenwig, pp. 78–108. University of Florida Press, Gainesville, Florida. , 2012
In this chapter what is meant by monumentality during the Mississippian period is explored, with a particular emphasis on its origins and on the ways the subject is currently being examined by local archaeologists. Mound and plaza arrangements have great time depth in eastern North America. The existence of an architectural grammar, or an appropriate way to design communities, has long been assumed to exist within Mississippian culture. Indeed, some have argued that such a grammar was cosmologically grounded, ritually proscribed, and precisely determined and had great time depth in the region and perhaps across the Americas. In particular, dispersed populations appear to have periodically come together at specific and perhaps special (resource-rich, sacred) locations throughout much of prehistory, perhaps seasonally, annually, or less frequently, to engage in information exchange, ritual and ceremony, and the maintenance of populations through the regulation of kin and mating networks, activities that all served to promote group and cultural identity. Indeed, such patterns appear to date back to the earliest readily identifiable occupation of the region.