Mississippian (Other Keyword)
126-150 (256 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnohistoric and ethnographic evidence demonstrates that various factors can influence kinship patterns, but among the most influential are those related to subsistence. However, such findings are rarely applied to the prehistoric American South, where researchers largely project the matrilineal...
Maize’s Role in the Diets of Late Prehistoric People Living in the Prairie Peninsula (2018)
Population aggregation and shifts in material culture of the Late Prehistoric Eastern Woodlands (AD900-1100) has often been linked to the increase in the importance of maize in the human diet. In the Midwest, the development of distinct contemporaneous archaeological cultures (e.g., Oneota, Langford and Middle Mississippian) has often been connected to assumed differences in maize consumption. A commonly used model is that increased complexity in social structures result from, and/or are...
Making Active Learning Practical (2018)
This poster presents the outcomes of my efforts to make active learning activities an integral component of undergraduate courses in archaeology. For the past three years I have taken my Southeastern Archaeology course from a typical lecture-based class to a more active learning environment that includes hands-on lab activities, participation in fieldwork, field trips to archaeological sites, and service learning opportunities at our campus museum and local research station of the Arkansas...
Measures of Inequality in the Mississippian Heartland (2016)
Cahokia, the earliest and largest Mississippian (A.D. 1050–1400) mound complex, is situated in the American Bottom of Illinois. It is widely considered to be the center of a regionally integrated polity complete with subsidiary centers, specialized settlements, and rural farmsteads. Investigations at Cahokia proper and in the surrounding countryside over the past 50 years have provided a wealth of data concerning settlement layout, structure size and shape, and the differential distribution of...
Measures of Influence: Volumetric Assessment of Earthworks at Angel Mounds Using Drone-Based Lidar (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Angel Mounds State Historic Site, a Middle Mississippian fortified mound center along the Ohio River, is home to 11 man-made earthworks which make up the largest known archaeological site in Indiana. Angel’s occupation coincides with the regional changes in social organization that characterize Mississippian society. Many archaeologists have discussed mound...
Mediating Powers, Negotiating Inequalities: Ecological Politics at Cahokia (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Native American city of Cahokia originates in the creation of a cosmologically powerful landscape formed by the gathering of human and other-than-human participants (including earth, water, and fire) (see Pauketat 2013). At this center humans and their nonhuman partners mediated relationships between Worlds (Upper,...
Middle Cumberland to Dallas: Constructing Peace in the Valley (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Migration and Climate Change: The Spread of Mississippian Culture" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Based on artifact styles, regional archaeologists in the 1940s first proposed movement of Mississippian people from the Middle Cumberland Region to the Great Valley of East Tennessee. Lacking absolute dating techniques, these researchers had limited understanding of the timing or contemporaneity of the archaeological...
Migration and Climate Change in Mississippian Archaeology: An Introduction and Brief History (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Migration and Climate Change: The Spread of Mississippian Culture" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper introduces the symposium "Migration and Climate Change: The Spread of Mississippian Culture ca. A.D. 1050-1400." I provide a brief history of migration and climate change research in the archaeology of Mississippian societies. These earlier research efforts -- the theoretical contexts in which they occurred,...
Migration and Cohabitation at Morton Village: Future Research Directions (2015)
New evidence for Oneota/Mississippian cohabitation at Morton Village leads us to develop novel questions and models for understanding the nature of social interaction at the site, while also recontextualizing previous analyses and interpretations within a revised framework of migration, cooperation, and ethnogenesis. In addition to carrying out additional excavations to further test hypotheses about the nature of co-habitation and social stress at the site by examining site structure, foodways,...
Migration and Cultural Emplacement on the Mississippian Periphery: A Fort Ancient Example (2017)
Recent excavations at the Turpin site (33HA19) in southwest Ohio, have reestablished the importance of population movement in cultural emplacement in this region. Although the predominant model for Fort Ancient evolution in the Middle Ohio Valley posits gradual village development and relatively late (post-AD 1400) Mississippian influence, work at Turpin and other sites in the lower Miami Valleys suggests that the movement of Mississippian people acted as a catalyst for change beginning around...
Migration and Ethnic Hybridity: Examining the Middle Ohio Valley Mississippian Periphery (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Migration and Climate Change: The Spread of Mississippian Culture" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent research on the Fort Ancient culture of the Middle Ohio Valley has considerably improved our understanding of the motivation for and subsequent role of Mississippian migrations along a Mississippian periphery. A plethora of new radiocarbon dates on multiple media, strontium and biodistance analyses of human bone,...
Migration, Population Change, and Climate at Cahokia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Migration and Climate Change: The Spread of Mississippian Culture" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we explore sociopolitical, economic, and climatological aspects of the population history of Cahokia and compare these with the timing of the appearance of Cahokia materials at hinterland sites to better understand some of the factors that may have contributed to the migration of people out of the American...
Migration, Ritual, and the Dead (2018)
Migration of human populations is an ancient and persistent part of the history of humankind. In the past, as in the present, migration continues to be a solution to human problems that carries with it some degree of increased risk and challenges for group and individual security and identity. Vulnerability resulting from migration choices, and practices to mitigate risks of that vulnerability, vary between historically situated populations and within groups by age, gender, and other elements of...
Mississippian and Oneota Entanglements: Iconography and Ritual in the Lower Mississippi Valley (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Dancing through Iconographic Corpora: A Symposium in Honor of F. Kent Reilly III" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mississippian and Oneota entanglements were often violent, typically resulting in intercommunity conflict, loss of life, and population displacement. However, Mississippians in the northern Lower Mississippi Valley may have comprised a sufficiently large territorial bloc to have successfully thwarted Oneota...
Mississippian Communities and Households from a Bird’s-Eye View (2016)
In the twenty years since the publication of Mississippian Communities and Households, improvements in GIS and database software have enabled archaeologists to analyze and compare the material remains of past communities and households at spatial scales that were once infeasible. In this paper I use a database of over 1200 Native American structures from 65 sites across the Southeast to compare changes in the architecture of Mississippian houses and settlements at a broader temporal and spatial...
Mississippian Communities in the Northern Yazoo Basin: Bridging the Protohistoric Divide (2017)
Late Mississippi period (AD 1350-1541) archaeological sites in the northern Yazoo Basin typically consist of one or more earthen platform mounds adjacent to a large plaza surrounded by multiple residential areas. Sites are closely spaced throughout the region and evidence for smaller non-mound settlements is lacking. These observations suggest a distinctive Mississippian settlement pattern for the northern Yazoo, but they only partially address questions about past communities and the people who...
The Mississippian Community at Town Creek (2016)
Archaeological uses of the term “community” incorporate elements of the physical environment, which often include a particular place on the landscape, and elements of the built environment, such as the structures and spaces that people created there. In addition to being a place, the concept of “community” also entails the social, economic, and political relationships that existed among the individuals and groups that lived there. This paper presents an overview of the Mississippian community at...
Mississippian Conflict and the Role of the Fission-Fusion Process: An Example from East Tennessee (2015)
Increasing intensity and frequency of conflict over time is a noted characteristic of the Mississippian Period in the southeastern United States. To examine the question of why violence increases, researchers have examined many cultural institutions and environmental mechanisms that can defuse tensions as well as those that exacerbate chances for warfare. A key theoretical construct is the use of bufferzones that help to lower tensions by creating separation between competing groups. However...
The Mississippian Fin de Siècle in the Middle Cumberland Region of Tennessee (2018)
Bayesian chronological modeling is used to investigate the chronology for a large-scale human depopulation event during the Mississippi period (A.D. 1000–1700) known as the Vacant Quarter phenomenon. The Middle Cumberland Region (MCR) of Tennessee is within the Vacant Quarter area and six villages from the final phase of Mississippian activity in the MCR have been subjected to radiocarbon dating. Complete radiocarbon datasets from these sites are presented within an interpretative Bayesian...
Mississippian Modes of Exchange: Documenting Shifting Networks and Distribution at Ancient Cahokia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study investigates changes in distribution at the ancient Mississippian site of Cahokia using social network analysis. Over the course of its history, Cahokia transformed from a small village to a large macroregional center. This transformation was accompanied by a marked increase in institutional complexity, specialization, rank/class differences,...
Mississippian Warfare and Social Houses (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within a hundred years of Cahokia’s Big Bang around AD 1050, warfare becomes evident in the construction of defensive structures, especially massive, bastioned palisades. The first of these palisades at Cahokia dates to ca. AD 1135 and stands as the earliest Mississippian fortified community. This signaling of intensive and organized...
Mississippianization in Late Pisgah Communities in the Appalachian Summit of North Carolina (2017)
Three Mississippian villages from the Pisgah period (AD 1200 – 1600) in western North Carolina are reviewed and discussed – the Cane River Site (31Yc91), the Warren Wilson Site (31Bn29), and the mound and village at the Garden Creek Site (31Hw1). The elements of each community’s built environment, household architecture and domestic practices are evaluated and considered along with new radiocarbon dates from each site. These three Pisgah communities are situated in an unusual mountain...
The Mississippianization of Women in the Black Warrior Valley of Alabama, A.D. 1120–1250 (2018)
By A.D. 1120 in the Black Warrior Valley of west-central Alabama, a Mississippian identity, predicated on the dissemination and subsequent adoption of maize, had firmly begun to take root at what would become the ritual-ceremonial center of Moundville. Traditionally, researchers have modelled the origins of Moundville within a political-economic lens: the growing aspirations of elites, who are implied to be male, are supported and fueled by stores of and feasts of maize, which is treated...
The Mitchell Site: An Upgrade (2017)
In the Spring of 2015, SCI Engineering, Inc. was contracted to conduct archaeological investigations ahead of the expansion of the Cedar Creek Lumberyard situated in the northeast portion of the Mitchell site (11MS30) in Madison County, Illinois. These investigations resulted in the delineation of multiple wall trench structures of varying size and shape. Most of what is known of this important Mississippian mound center comes from James W. Porter’s dissertation on his 1960s salvage excavations...
Modeling Fort Ancient: Legacy Data and Pathways to Improving Chronology in Late Precolonial Kentucky (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramic- and lithic-based phase-level chronologies, built on assumptions of gradual change over time, have traditionally comprised the foundation of archaeological reconstructions. Recent reevaluations of long-standing regional chronologies, often based on pre-AMS radiocarbon dates and the presence or absence of...