Reconsidering Mississippian Households and Communities

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.