Mississippian (Other Keyword)
176-200 (256 Records)
Archaeological and historical evidence suggests that pilgrimage centers were vital to the infrastructure, politics, and religions of cities and civilizations throughout the ancient world. The pre-Columbian city of Cahokia was no different. In this paper, I argue that the Emerald site, a major pilgrimage center east of Cahokia, was integral to the formation of a new political-religious order circa A.D. 1050. Ceramic, architectural, and botanical data show that large groups periodically gathered...
Pipe Assemblages of St. Catherines Island, GA (2018)
Excavations over the last four decades on St. Catherines Island, GA have recovered over 200 pipe fragments and a dozen nearly complete pipes. These pipes are both historic and native made which cover a wide range of sites through occupational periods on the island. In this paper, I will present the results of recent and previous analyses and consolidate this information to explore the island-wide distribution and temporal trends of pipes on St. Catherines Island. In addition I will examine...
Pisgah Archaeology in the Upper Reaches of the Tennessee Valley (2017)
Pisgah in upper East Tennessee appears to represent fluid, adaptable communities of practice in the upper reaches of the Tennessee Valley. It reflects various but limited elements of Mississippianization. Pisgah also appears to have crosscut ethnic boundaries. On the Holston, it was associated with the Dallas archaeological culture, while on the Nolichucky and Watauga, it was associated with Qualla (Cherokee) and also perhaps proto-Catawban wares. Pisgah in the region does not appear to have...
Preliminary Data for Developing a Fine-Scale Model of Socioecological Change on Ossabaw Island, Georgia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research project examines the history of human-environment interaction on Ossabaw Island, Georgia. Archaeological collections for Woodland (ca. 1000 BC–AD 1000) and Mississippian period (ca. AD 1000–1700) occupations of the island are combined with environmental data synthesized from the analysis of sediment cores taken from five freshwater ponds on...
Preliminary Results from Paleoethnobotanical Analysis of Pit Features at the Morton Village Site (11F2), Central Illinois (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the preliminary results of paleoethnobotanical analysis of flotation samples from 38 external pit features from the Morton Village Site (11F2), located in the Central Illinois River Valley (CIRV). Previous research at Morton Village provides strong evidence that the village was occupied contemporaneously by both Mississippian and Oneota...
Preliminary Results of 2022 Excavations at Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster will provide an overview of the 2022 excavations at Spiro by the University of Oklahoma field school, which involved work at two areas of the site. The poster will discuss the geophysics results that lead to excavating these areas, the preliminary results from the 2022 excavations, our preliminary interpretations that the two areas represent...
Prelude to the Protohistoric: Late Mississippian Settlement Dynamics in the Central and Upper Tombigbee River Drainage (2018)
This paper examines settlement patterns of the late pre-Contact era (1300-1500 C.E.) in the central and upper Tombigbee River, with a focus on the Blackland Prairie portion. Mississippian and Protohistoric settlement strategies and chronologies are overviewed with an eye toward understanding the coalescence of Contact-era polities and the abandonment of the Tombigbee floodplain. Climatological, sociopolitical, and demographic factors are evaluated. Decentralization as a bottom-up response to...
Principles of Open Government Archaeology: Lessons from the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) (2018)
American archaeology is conducted under cultural resources protection laws, but how does archaeology meet the challenge of openness? The past decade saw development of the "open government" digital information paradigm for public availability of information that underpins the functions of governance. Open government data provide a base for the interested public to offer expertise in aspects of necessary analyses, and to derive further public value from reuse of government data in novel ways. The...
Production Matters: Organic Residue and Iconographic Evidence for Late Precolumbian Datura Making in the Central Arkansas River 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. Recent absorbed residue studies have confirmed that ceramic and shell containers were used for consuming Datura in precolumbian times. Until now, no one has identified what tools precolumbian people used to produce a concentrated hallucinogenic concoction. In this study, we used mass spectrometry to...
A Provenance and Stylistic Study of Formative Caddo Vessels: Evidence for Specialized Ritual Craft Production and Long-Distance Exchange (2018)
Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis is used to determine whether Formative Caddo finewares (A.D. 850 -1150) were made locally in the Arkansas River Basin or produced by their Gulf Coastal Plain neighbors to the south. The preliminary INAA results, in concert with a stylistic study that indicates very few potters had the knowledge and skill to produce them, show that Formative Caddo finewares were made in the southern Caddo region and exported north to Arkansas River Basin mound centers for...
Purification Ritual and the Creation of Place in the Mississippian Southeast (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Silenced Rituals in Indigenous North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While the indigenous societies of the Eastern Woodlands shared ways of life, they also differed in many important ways so that we cannot view them as a single culture. Even where material cultures and iconography appear to have been shared across great distances and over significant periods of time, the meanings and practices...
Pushing and Pulling the Mississippian Moment Into the Western Great Lakes (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 provides a comparative review of the regional chronology, material culture indicators, and environmental data for three site-centered locales (Trempealeau/Fisher Mounds, Fred Edwards, and Aztalan) harboring Middle Mississippian components in southern Wisconsin and the Upper Mississippi River Valley. These data...
Ramey on the Frontier: A Pilot Study of Select Ramey Incised Technology from Cahokia’s Southern Neighbors (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Step by Step: Tracing World Potting Traditions through Ceramic Petrography" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cahokia’s influence on the archaeological cultures of the upper Central Mississippi River Valley (CMRV) has often been described as less prominent than processes taking place in the northern hinterlands. Although few examples are found at each site, Ramey Incised jars are found in many early and middle...
Rare Animals at a Mississippian Chiefly Compound: The Irene Mound Site (9CH1), Georgia, USA (2018)
The Irene site (ca. AD 1150 - 1450) was a small, prestigious community occupied by a chief and his lineage. It was located on the Savannah River, a few kilometers inland from the Atlantic Ocean. The presence of animals rare in the region and animals rare or absent in other coastal assemblages distinguishes the Irene collection from other tidewater collections. Many of these animals exhibit atypical, even dangerous, behavior. Rare animals, and other attributes, provide a standard for assessing...
A Re-Evaluation of Moundville's Collapse (2018)
The disruption of social traditions in ancient societies is often described as the collapse of complexity, but persisting or resilient practices are often ignored, limiting archaeological interpretations of social continuity and change. This paper addresses these historical processes during the terminal occupation of Moundville, a multiple mound Mississippian civic-ceremonial complex occupied from A.D. 1200-1550 and located in west-central Alabama. The collapse of ancient complex societies has...
Recent Excavations and Current Research at Spiro Mounds (2015)
Geophysical survey at Spiro provided evidence for dozens of contemporaneous structures near the well-known Craig mound. Over the last year, four of those structures were excavated by University of Oklahoma field crews. This paper will discuss the results of those excavations and discuss whether the evidence supports James A. Brown's recent interpretation of an early 15th century 'Event' at Spiro. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and...
Recent Investigations at 41AN162, a Middle Caddo Site in East Texas: Implications for Late Mississippian Settlement-Subsistence Behavior and Precision Dating (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent investigations at 41AN162, sponsored by the Texas Department of Transportation, exposed and documented several features associated with Caddo ceramics in an upland, non-aggrading landform. Historic-period plowing and extensive bioturbation has resulted in substantial reworking of site sediments and associated archaeological remains. However,...
Recognizing Variation in Pisgah Identity Across Space and Time (2018)
The late Mississippian Pisgah culture, dating from 1200- 1500 CE, is found across a wide geographic area including western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and southwestern Virginia. Pisgah sherds are often recognized by the presence of distinct rectilinear and later curvilinear stamped decoration with sand, grit, and/or mica temper. Excavations by Dickens (1976), Keel (1976), and Moore (1981; 2002) better defined changes over time in Pisgah ceramics while simultaneously showing the...
Reconsidering Mississippian Communal Food Consumption: A Case for Feasting at Moundville (2017)
Consuming food as a large group in a ritual context generates and reaffirms the social obligations of the participants and the sponsors of the ceremony. This paper evaluates models for feasting from the Mississippian center of Moundville, located in west-central Alabama. Feasting has not been documented in midden assemblages from the site because a wide range of ceramic vessel sizes and a diverse range of faunal species have been recovered. This indicated that the consumption of symbolic species...
Recording and Interpreting Mississippian Rock Imagery at Painted Bluff, Alabama (2017)
As part an overall effort by the Tennessee Valley Authority to conserve, manage, and present Middle Mississippian era pictographs and petroglyphs to a visiting public, Stratum Unlimited recorded 101 motifs from 47 panels at Painted Bluff, a steep south-facing limestone cliff overlooking the Tennessee River in northeastern Alabama. Results from the recording include an assessment of pictograph and petroglyph techniques, types and numbers of motifs, stratigraphic overlap and sequencing of...
Redefining Cahokia: City of the Cosmos (2017)
By the early 19th century the group of mounds we now recognize as Cahokia mounds was called the Cantine mound, with Monks Mound referred to as the "Great Cahokia" mound. Actual boundaries for the site were not established until the 1950s. For the inhabitants, the site was probably without bounds and our definition of Cahokia is to a large extent fulfills our society needs that relate to legal aspects of ownership and historical significance. The natural landscape is a palimpsest of features...
Redrawing the Arrows of Mississippianization to and from the Central Illinois River Valley (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The rise of Cahokia, the largest precolumbian Native American city north of Mexico, and the rapid spread of Mississippian culture across the midcontinental and southeastern United States after 1000 CE have long been a focus of archaeological inquiry. From early theories of cultural...
A Regional Comparison of Complicated Stamped Pottery Designs from Coastal Georgia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Late Mississippian ceramic assemblages from the Georgia coast contain abundant quantities of complicated stamped pottery. Motifs include concentric circles, figure nines, nested squares, and the filfot cross. Recent research tracking filfot cross design variation from assemblages on St. Catherines Island, GA was successful in identifying twelve unique...
A Regional Perspective on Mud Glyph Cave Art in Southeastern North America. (2015)
We provide an overview of a signature prehistoric cave art form in the Southeast of North America: "Mud Glyph" images traced and/or carved into plastic sediments inside the dark zones of caves. Today, we know of 21 such mud glyph caves in Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky and Virginia. Sometimes, mud glyphs form elaborate cave art compositions. While this art form has roots in the Archaic Period more than 3000 years ago, its greatest frequency occurs during the Mississippian Period after AD...
Religious Subjects and Gendered Transformations at the Native American City of Cahokia (2015)
Though processes of subjectification are continuously ongoing, there are moments when powers coalesce in particular persons, places, or objects and bring about pervasive transformations. We explore these moments through gendered divisions of key religious spaces, objects, and practices at the Native American city of Cahokia and other early Mississippian places. Through cosmological oppositions, these spaces, objects and practices both created balance and fomented politico-religious...