Moundville (Other Keyword)
1-5 (5 Records)
Platform mound building is a key indicator of sociopolitical complexity in the southeastern United States. In this presentation, the human energy employed in earthen monumental construction at the Moundville polity in west-central Alabama is quantified as a means of exploring the organizational variability of the control of surplus labor and material resources in an emerging complex society. To reconstruct the scale of sociopolitical differentiation invested in mound building, the energy...
The Organizational Implications of Architecture at Moundville and Cahokia (2017)
What practices generated the largest and most complex Mississippian centers? We examine this issue through an analysis of Mississippian public and ritual architecture from Moundville in west-central Alabama and Cahokia in southwestern Illinois. Politico-religious buildings and associated practices or powers constituted the historical development of both places. Cahokians created a wider variety and more complicated distribution of such buildings than did Moundvillians. We argue that the Cahokian...
Osteoarthritis and Implications for Economic Lifestyle Change in Two Prehistoric Skeletal Populations (2017)
Numerous studies have been conducted regarding the influence of activity-related stress on postcranial elements such as the upper and lower limbs, but few studies have considered the vertebral column in relation to inter-populational variation. This study examined the vertebral columns of two prehistoric skeletal populations. The Indian Knoll site (n=98), representing a population of hunter-gatherers, is located in Ohio County, Kentucky along the Green River and is dated between 2558 and 4160...
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...
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...