Mississippian (Other Keyword)
226-250 (318 Records)
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 Reexamination of Hurricane Hill Macrobotanicals (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early Caddo ethnobotany is understudied compared to later periods due to a variety of factors, including preservation and sample size issues. The Hurricane Hill Site (41HP106) is an Early Caddo site with carbonized plant materials previously examined by Gary Crites and Eileen Goldborer. This study analyzed a subsample of Hurricane Hill macrobotanicals...
Reflections on DGR and RBR: David G. Anderson and the Richard B. Russell Reservoir Project (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE Big Data and Bigger Questions: Papers in Honor of David G. Anderson" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. David Anderson’s archaeological career took root in the fields of cultural resource management and his research on the Richard B. Russell (RBR) Reservoir was integral to his intellectual development. Through three seasons of fieldwork and subsequent analysis and reporting, he directed archaeological excavations at...
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...
Reintroducing Spiro Mounds (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Spiro Mounds, located in eastern Oklahoma, is known almost solely for the spectacular collection of well-preserved ritual objects unearthed when looters tunneled into the Craig Mound in the 1930s. The dramatic story of the looting and subsequent dynamiting of the Craig Mound has led many archaeologist to believe the site has no remaining intact...
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...
Responding to Regional Collapse: A Late Mississippian Community on the Georgia Coast (2016)
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...
Rethinking Mississippian Migration and Frontier Settlement in Southwest Virginia, USA (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. 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...
Revisiting Interaction Sphere Theory (2023)
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...
Rewriting Narratives by Challenging Old Ideas: The Potential in Applying Recent Innovations in Archaeology to Legacy Collections. (2019)
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...
Ridges, Valleys, Mountains, and Plateaus: The Topographic Context of Late Mississippian Diversity in East Tennessee (2019)
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...
Rock and Roles: The Chunkey Experience in the Mississippian World (2015)
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...
Sacred Animal Images in Precontact Southeastern Rock Art (2018)
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...
Searching for the Missing Drum: The Evidence for the Presence and Ceremonial Importance of Ceramic Vessel Drums in the Prehistoric Southeastern United States (2021)
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,...