Reconsidering Mississippian Households and Communities
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Mississippian Communities and Households (Rogers and Smith 1995). The landmark volume can be credited with making "household" a popularly employed concept in Mississippian archaeology. Indeed, the ubiquity of the household is matched by the diverse ways that this concept has been employed. However, contributors in the volume did not explicitly address communities and instead operationalized them as archaeological sites and settlements composed of aggregations of houses, pits, and people. In the two decades since the volume’s publication, researchers have approached communities and households from many different methodological and theoretical directions. In this symposium, we challenge participants from the various temporal and geographic subdivisions of the Mississippian Southeast and Midwest to engage with Mississippian communities and households as situated within entangled networks of peoples, places, practices, and things. This can include linking "classic" household archaeology approaches to broader theoretical issues, as well as moving beyond traditional spatial and coresidential definitions of community. Further, we encourage contributors to consider the social construction of Mississippian communities and households via the varied and often complex processes of multiscalar group identity formation and maintenance.
Other Keywords
Mississippian •
Households •
communities •
Architecture •
Community •
Mississippian Period •
Cahokia •
Theory •
Protohistoric •
Cherokee
Geographic Keywords
North America - Southeast •
North America - Midwest
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-10 of 10)
- Documents (10)
-
Creating a Cahokian Community: Rethinking Mississippian Storage Practices (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
The procurement, processing, preparation and most importantly here, the storage of food, are inextricably tied to the everyday lived experiences of peoples of the past and cannot be disentangled from larger social, economic, and political processes. Storage pits and structures feature prominently in prior studies of Mississippian households but they are mostly regarded as utilitarian and economic spaces rather than integral to communities. Similarly, previous interpretations of Mississippian...
-
A Flow of People: Household and Community at the Cane Notch Site, a Protohistoric Cherokee Town on the Nolichucky, Upper East Tennessee (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Radiometric dates from the protohistoric Cane Notch Site on the Nolichucky River in upper East Tennessee indicate contemporaneous ceramic assemblages characterized by multiple traditions. Our work produced wares referable to the Qualla and Overhill series, wares directly associated with 18th century Cherokee villages elsewhere. Burke wares, from the eastern side of the Appalachians, also occur in large numbers. These “different” wares at Cane Notch share common attributes, however, that also...
-
From Households to Communities and Back Again: Bridging Analytical Scales in Search of Conflict, Coalescence, and Communitas (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Archaeological examinations of households and communities have increased dramatically over the past decade. These studies explore the ways people define themselves while simultaneously shaping the social interactions, physical spaces, and material objects that comprise their daily existence. Despite the considerable insights generated by such studies, it is often difficult to bridge analytical scales when research is primarily focused at either the household or community level, with little to...
-
Households, Communities, and the History of Etowah (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Etowah was the home of Mississippian period communities for 550 years. During that time, three distinct communities were created: an initial founding followed by two reoccupations after periods of abandonment. Because abandonment creates points in the life of a community where local traditions can be questioned and modified, they can lead to novel ways of casting identity, social relations, and history. With each new community created at Etowah, households and the larger built environment were...
-
Making Mounds, Making Communities in the Mississippian Period Midwest (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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...
-
Mississippian Communities and Households from a Bird’s-Eye View (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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...
-
The Mississippian Community at Town Creek (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Archaeological uses of the term “community” incorporate elements of the physical environment, which often include a particular place on the landscape, and elements of the built environment, such as the structures and spaces that people created there. In addition to being a place, the concept of “community” also entails the social, economic, and political relationships that existed among the individuals and groups that lived there. This paper presents an overview of the Mississippian community at...
-
Multiscalar Community Histories: A Tale of Migration, Aggregation, and Integration in the Lower Chattahoochee River Valley (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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...
-
Responding to Regional Collapse: A Late Mississippian Community on the Georgia Coast (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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...
-
Spatial, Architectural, and Economic Dimensions of Neighborhoods: A Comparison of Three Large Mississippian Sites in Indiana (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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...