Mississippian (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Hammerstedt. Amanda Regnier. Sheila Savage.

Artifact color has both chronological and symbolic significance at Spiroan burial sites in the Arkansas River drainage of eastern Oklahoma. In this paper, we examine litter burials from the Great Mortuary and the Brown mound at Spiro. Ethnohistoric descriptions are used to suggest color symbolism in Spiroan ritual displays. These data are compared with color usage in earlier burials at Spiro and mounds elsewhere in the drainage. We wish to determine whether the Great Mortuary was the culmination...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Krus. Charles Cobb. Brad Lieb. Edmond Boudreaux III.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mississippian presence in the Upper Tombigbee River (UTR) drainage is represented by dispersed communities and single-mound centers with modest-sized occupations. The artifact sequence for the UTR closely mirrors that of the neighboring Moundville polity and the UTR traditionally has been viewed as having occupations that extended throughout the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Nowak.

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. Dr. Kent F. Reilly and many of the scholars associated with the Mississippian Iconography Workshop have used ethnography and folklore to support interpretations about ritual and cosmology. This talk discusses how ancient landscapes can, in turn, inform folklore, ritual communication, and iconography....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vincas Steponaitis.

In the 1720s the Natchez nation, as described in contemporary French accounts, consisted of at least six towns: Grand, Farine, Pomme, Tioux, Grigra, and Jenzenaque. Building on the work of Andrew Albrecht, Ian Brown, and James Barnett, and taking into account eighteenth-century manuscript maps that have recently come to light, I re-examine the evidence for the nature of these towns and where they were located on the modern landscape. Apparent inconsistencies between narrative accounts and maps...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Barzilai. Jayne-Leigh Thomas.

This is an abstract from the "Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mississippian peoples (circa eleventh–fourteenth centuries CE) in the midwestern and southeastern United States have long been proven to be and defined by their maize agricultural practices. Due to the nutritional deficiencies of subsisting solely on maize as a crop when unprocessed, researchers have linked all maize...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles McGimsey.

This is an abstract from the "What’s Canoe? Recent Research on Dugouts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Louisiana has 31 dugout and plank canoes spanning the last 2,000 years recorded in the archaeological site files. The collection reflects a diversity of shapes and sizes in both Indigenous and Euroamerican assemblages, suggesting that beyond the required linear shape, individual preference and intended function significantly influenced form. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Mathu. Katie Chiou.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project looks at plant remains from an archaeological site, Moundville (1Tu500), in the Black Warrior River Valley of west central Alabama. Over centuries of occupation (AD 1020-1650), the people of the Black Warrior River Valley experienced profound changes in population size and social organization. Signatures of past peoples co-mediating...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dennis Blanton.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Religious traditions follow historical trajectories. Within the archaeological record, processes of cosmological reorientation may be signaled by patterned change in attendant ritual paraphernalia. This kind of evolutionary process may be tracked in the American Southeast among certain late prehistoric, Mississippian societies, specifically in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Briggs.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Edwards. Robert Jeske.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Wiewel.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alleen Betzenhauser.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Massey. Christina Friberg. Quinn Lewis. Edward Herrmann.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Baltus.

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,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Meeks. Jacob Lulewicz. Shawn Patch. Kevin Smith. Lynne Sullivan.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Blitz.

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,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Bengtson. Jeffrey Painter. Frank Raslich. Nikki Silva. Andrew Upton.

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,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Comstock. Robert Cook.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Cook. Aaron Comstock.

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,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sissel Schroeder. A. J. White. Lora Stevens. Samuel Munoz. Varenka Lorenzi.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jodie OGorman.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sherman Johns. Jay Stephens. Virginie Renson. Keith Ashley.

This is an abstract from the "Geological and Technological Contributions to the Interpretation of Radiogenic Isotope Data" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Long-distance movement of copper across North America is often noted by archaeologists but little studied, with its provenance typically assumed to be the Great Lakes region. Such claims need to be tested, and recent studies have approached this problem using laser-ablation instrumentation to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phillip Newman.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While it has been established that the Natives of the Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere employed a number of magical plants toward entheogenic ends (Barrier 2020; Rafferty 2021; Simon and Parker 2018), e.g., Nicotiana spp., Datura spp., Ipomoea spp., etc., the general consensus has been that the use of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, in the forms...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Dye.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Steere.

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...