Mississippian Period (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Stephenson.

Complicated stamped pottery vessels, and the carved wooden paddles used to stamp them, were produced in Southeastern North America beginning early in the first millennium AD and continued in some quarters well into the 19th century. Much of the research on paddle designs has focused on the highly decorative and diverse Woodland Period expressions, with little attention given to later, more repetitive paddle stamps. In this paper, I bring the methods of analysis used to study Woodland paddle...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carl Drexler.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Caddo homeland of Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas contains one of the major source areas for salt in North America. Coming to the surface as brines, this resource was an important part of local foodways, economies, and political relations for centuries, both for the Caddos and the American settlers who occupied the area beginning in the 19th...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Briggs.

The Mississippian standard jar is a specific kind of vessel form that, in tandem with maize agriculture and shell-tempering, was disseminated throughout the Eastern Woodlands during the late prehistory. As previous researchers have noted, the jar appears to be specifically adapted for slow, long-term boiling, especially when compared to earlier Woodland Period jars that are generally better suited for short-term cooking. Following the proposition that pots are tools, I characterize the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jane Eastman.

This paper considers the stratigraphic evidence for Connestee series and Pisgah series components in the Tuckaseegee Valley of Western North Carolina.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tamira Brennan.

Community is an expandable concept, at once representing social groups from scales as small as the household to those as broad as pathways of communication. This paper highlights the importance of examining archaeological data at these multiple spatial scales, but also at various scales of time, in order to more fully explore the social and historical processes that directed community development along their varied courses. Examples from several Mississippian period mound centers in the American...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tasha Benyshek. Paul Webb.

Recent large-scale excavations at the Ravensford and Iotla sites, and elsewhere in western North Carolina’s Cherokee "heartland", have documented Mississippian components that include architectural remains as well as artifact assemblages. But while Late Mississippian occupations have been found on many sites, Early and Middle Mississippian households and settlements have been difficult to isolate. Increased numbers of systematic surveys and excavations in recent years have uncovered evidence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stefan Brannan. Jennifer Birch.

Mississippian archaeology has benefited from historicized approaches which situate communities and their constituent parts within larger socio-political landscapes, rather than treating them as bounded or normative entities. In this paper, we explore historical and socio-political dynamics within the community centered upon Singer-Moye, a large (30+ ha) mound center located in the lower Chattahoochee River valley. Our analyses combine archaeological and geophysical data from mound and off-mound...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jay Johnson. John Connaway.

Drawing primarily on data from the Carson Mound Group located in the Mississippi River floodplain of northwestern Mississippi, this paper considers the timing, duration, and nature of the substantial evidence for what appears to have been direct contact between the polity that centered on Cahokia and the people who built the mounds at Carson. Distinctive northern traits include raw material, lithic technology, projectile point styles, ceramics, and architecture. These traits appear for a very...