Mississippian (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandon Ritchison.

Communities are social fulcrums, situated within multiple scales of interactivity. Understanding the discursive relationship between regions and households through the lens of the community can allow for a better understanding of social transformations. In the decades preceding 1400 C.E., chiefdoms in the Savannah River Valley collapsed and the region became depopulated. Settlement evidence suggests large scale population movements from the valley to the Georgia Coast, with significant social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandon Ritchison. Maureen Meyers. Zoe Doubles.

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. Fifteen years of excavations at the Carter Robinson mound site in southwestern Virginia, USA, have documented a case of immigration, settlement, and transformation at the extreme edge of the Mississippian world. Recovered cultural material suggests residents were nonlocal Mississippians...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel LaDu.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As both a universal cultural influence and important catalyst for change, diffusion matters. I advocate for the restoration of the Interaction Sphere as a rigorous theoretical means of rehabilitating the concept of diffusion. We begin with the history of this construct in order to place its architects and tenets in their proper developmental context. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Hall.

This is an abstract from the ""Re-excavating" Legacy Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Army Corp of Engineers Mobile District funded excavations in Mississippi to salvage a number of Native American sites along the Tombigbee River from the construction of the Tennessee-Tombigbee River lock and dam complex. Three of these sites, Tibbee Creek (22Lo600), Kellogg (22Cl527), and Yarborough (22Cl814) are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michaelyn Harle. Lynne Sullivan.

This is an abstract from the "Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Topographical constraints played a role in shaping the social trajectory of the Southern Appalachian region. The Ridge and Valley physiographic province of East Tennessee includes the Tennessee River and is characterized by linear ridges and parallel valleys, with the Blue Ridge Mountains to the east and the Appalachian Plateau...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Zych.

Games have the ability to change the course of relationships between people, whether through direct engagement as participants or spectators. This paper explores the peripatetic nature of the pre-contact Chunkey game and its role in the initial and sustained spread of Middle Mississippian lifeways from the greater Cahokia region near modern day St. Louis, beginning around A.D. 1050. While Middle Mississippian culture quickly spread throughout the midcontinent at this time, the Chunkey game...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jan Simek. Alan Cressler.

Walter Klippel has always focused his research on animal remains from archaeological sites, especially from Southeast North America. In honor of his retirement, we review how animals are depicted in Precontact rock art sites from the region he knew so well. A wide variety of creatures—mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and even insects—were illustrated by ancient southeastern artists. Animal imagery appears in both open air and cave art, although the kinds of animals vary between these two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Rees.

This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early historical accounts suggest that drums played an important role in the ceremonial life of the prehistoric southeastern United States. However, because they were made in whole or in part of ephemeral materials, drums are virtually invisible in the archaeological record. Interestingly, historical records,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Cook. Grace Conrad. Joseph Chambers.

This is an abstract from the "Digitizing Archaeological Practice: Education and Outreach in the Archaeogaming Subdiscipline" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While archaeologists are quite good at communicating to each other through various professional outlets, we have not been particularly good at conveying our core findings and lessons for wider audiences. This seems particularly true in the Midwest United States. While there are likely many...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maureen Meyers.

Frontier areas differ from non-frontier areas in multiple ways; one is by a more intense degree of interaction with other cultures. To successfully settle a frontier area, frontier groups must not just interact but also socially integrate with other groups. Craft production is one way social integration occurs. At the Middle Mississippian-period Carter Robinson site, there is evidence for the production of shell beads. This paper presents this evidence, which includes all stages of shell bead...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maureen Meyers.

This is an abstract from the "Textile Tools and Technologies as Evidence for the Fiber Arts in Precolumbian Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Textiles served as symbols of status and ideological belief systems in Southeastern Mississippian chiefdoms. They also were markers of identity. Remains of fabric are not often found in the Southeast, due to poor preservation in the region. Those that have been analyzed reveal that a range of colors...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Smith. Elliot Blair.

This is an abstract from the "People and Space: Defining Communities and Neighborhoods with Social Network Analysis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Moundville is one of the largest Mississippian sites in North America consisting of at least 29 earthen mounds positioned around an open plaza. Numerous researchers have remarked on the regularized spatial layout of the site, arguing that the formal arrangement of the mounds and plaza reflect social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Edwards. Robert Jeske.

This is an abstract from the "Interactions across the North American Midcontinent" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. “Mississippianization” has been used by archaeologists to explain the appearance of shell-temper and certain decorative ceramic motifs found in the northern Prairie Peninsula during and after the eleventh century. These ceramic attributes are supposed symbols of an expanding Cahokian worldview, sent north by a diffusionist wave of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Lulewicz.

This paper investigates how processes of societal transformation, including the emergence of sociopolitical hierarchies and socioeconomic inequalities, are shaped by the scale and structure of social networks. Across Southern Appalachia, during more than seven centuries of population growth and sociopolitical change, two distinct regional political traditions emerged in what are today northern Georgia and eastern Tennessee. Employing data on social signaling practices as materialized in ceramic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Kelly.

Lynne Goldstein’s contribution to our understanding of Mississippian societies in the Midwest is still an ongoing endeavor. Her research with its roots in the greater Cahokia area and within a few years at Aztalan has an important impact on my own efforts. Her dissertation research into the Mississippian cemeteries, Schild and Moss, was methodologically rigorous and provided insights into the manner in which non-elite cemeteries some 100 km north of Cahokia were spatially and socially...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Staffan Peterson. Dru McGill. Elizabeth Watts Malouchos.

The vast majority of Mississippian research in southwestern Indiana has focused on Angel Mounds, specifically the extensive excavations of the Eastern Village and analysis of decorated ceramics. Recently, a site wide magnetometry survey and large scale analysis of Mississippian Plain Pottery from the Angel site were completed by the first and second author of this paper. Additionally, recent magnetometry and excavations at the Stephan-Steinkamp site, the second largest Angel phase site in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Sanders. Phyllisa Eisentraut.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the recognition that violence, warfare, and trophy display within the North American Southeast was endemic during the Mississippian Cultural Period, an in-depth analysis of the equipment used by warring groups is now necessary. By examining the “Conquering Warrior” and associated human effigy pipes from the Great Mortuary at Spiro Mounds and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meagan Dennison.

This is an abstract from the "Zooarchaeology and Technology: Case Studies and Applications" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Southeastern United States, the relationship between indigenous peoples and their domestic dogs is known to be long and complicated. Dog burials and dog skeletal remains are ubiquitous from archaeological sites in the region from as early as 7,000 years ago through the Historic Period. A previous paleopathology study of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dru McGill.

At the Mississippian site of Angel Mounds (12Vg1), people crafted both plain, utilitarian-appearing vessels, and a variety of highly decorated wares, including Negative Painted plates that are frequently associated with the site. Previous researchers have suggested that Negative Painted vessels were made by ceramic or ritual specialists, who were perhaps sponsored by a chief or other elite individual. These decorated vessels are indeed rare at Angel Mounds, but no evidence has been found to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Flood. Jeremy Wilson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The late pre-Columbian period in the central Illinois River valley (CIRV) is demarcated by the development of large, oftentimes fortified Mississippian towns, farming hamlets, extensive trade networks, and shifting political alliances between AD 1050 and 1400. The fission and fusion of local polities ceased with abrupt abandonment of the CIRV by AD 1450 as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Harke.

Although the Florida Keys’ archaeological record famously made possible the seriation of south Florida pre-Columbian ceramic styles in 1949, this 356 km2 archipelago has been largely ignored by academic archaeologists ever since. Today, Keys archaeological sites and historical properties are plagued by tourism-related development, a multi-faceted issue that is exacerbated by the compounding effects of weekly tidal erosion and seasonal tropical storms. Consequently, an untold number of sites have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dorian Burnette. David Dye. Arleen Hill.

Stephen Williams proposed the idea of a Vacant Quarter based on the abandonment of numerous Mississippian polities throughout much of the Midsouth and Midwest. The unprecedented, large-scale depopulation of an approximately 130,000 square kilometer area has been linked with population movements as well as interpolity conflict. By taking a dendroclimatological approach we evaluate the role of climate change in this process, while also being cognizant of social processes. We postulate a staggered...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Zimmermann.

This is an abstract from the "Art Style as a Communicative Tool in Archaeological Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I have argued that Cahokia might best be understood as the capital of a Native American theater state, which drew people to it and spread its influence not through armies but by attracting followers through theatrical rituals (Zimmermann Holt 2009). In current research I argue that storytelling was primary among those rituals....

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Feltz.

3D photogrammetry is the process of creating a manipulable 3D model using only photos from a high-resolution camera that are then processed through computer software to extract 3D data and create a wireframe and mesh. This process can be accurate enough to measure a hairline fracture along the surface of prehistoric pottery with .1mm accuracy. Analyze the benefits of such methods, a study was conducted using Oneota ceramic artifacts of the La Crosse, Wisconsin locality that have been curated at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leslie Drane. Joel Lennon.

Lunsford-Pulcher (11-S-40) is a Mississippian mound center located in the American Bottom, near modern day Dupo, Illinois. To date there has been limited excavation and analysis conducted at this important ceremonial village. For this study, 181 rim sherds from a surface collection by Timothy R. Pauketat and Bobby Pauketat were analyzed and then compared to other nearby Mississippian sites (the Washausen, Peiper, and Morrison sites), with a focus on the differences in temper usage. This paper...