Migration and Climate Change: The Spread of Mississippian Culture
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Migration and Climate Change: The Spread of Mississippian Culture," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
Many advances have been made in recent years regarding Mississippian migrations, with increasing efforts placed on integrating environmental, biological, and cultural data sets. However, these different aspects of inquiry have not often been integrated within a specific region and even less so to search for regularities and historical particularities between regions. Our goal here is to pull together these efforts by having contributors present the most updated chronologies in their respective regions set against updated climatic data. Within this shared context, authors explore the chronology of changes that came about in material culture (specifically the occurrence of plain and decorated pottery styles) the incidence of wall trench houses, dietary variation, the role of ritual in integrating diverse populations, and when possible biological insights as inferred through isotopic and biological data sets. It is hoped that this symposium further identifies common ground as well as unique characteristics associated with the spread of Mississippian lifeways and the utility of using multiple lines of evidence in addressing the problem.
Other Keywords
Mississippian •
Migration •
Environment and Climate •
Drought •
Bioarchaeology/Skeletal Analysis •
Geoarchaeology •
History Of Archaeology •
Dating Techniques •
Stable Isotopes •
Ceramic Analysis
Geographic Keywords
United States of America (Country) •
Kentucky (State / Territory) •
North America (Continent) •
USA (Country) •
Missouri (State / Territory) •
Illinois (State / Territory) •
Wisconsin (State / Territory) •
Indiana (State / Territory) •
Michigan (State / Territory) •
Nebraska (State / Territory)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-10 of 10)
- Documents (10)
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Climate Change, Population Migration, and Ritual Continuity in the Lower Mississippi Valley (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. Tree-ring reconstructions of cool- and warm-season moisture reveal several multi-decadal droughts that impacted the northern Lower Mississippi Valley between AD 1250 and 1450. These chronic droughts contributed to the regional abandonments and population migrations southward out of the Cairo Lowland and adjacent areas...
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Drought, Diet, Demography, and Diaspora during the Mississippian Period: A View from the Central Illinois River Valley (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. For decades archaeologists have conjectured about the impacts of climate change on the distribution of Mississippian and related pre-Columbian populations in midcontinental North America. Until recently, climatological reconstructions were coarse grained and lacked the temporal and spatial resolution to link in any...
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Environment, Climate, and Mississippian Origins in the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Mississippi River Delta (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. The Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV) and Mississippi River Delta (MRD) are dramatically impacted by long-term and seasonal fluctuations in water levels, storm cycles, and flooding. In both regions, unpredictable storm events, upstream changes in water flow, and increased water salinity (as well as a host of other factors)...
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Late Precolumbian Subsistence Change, Socio-political Transformation, and Ethnogenesis in the Upper Illinois River Valley (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. Post-AD 1000 was a time of tremendous change in the Upper Illinois River valley. The Terminal Late Woodland groups in the region were bordered on the south by emergent Mississippian petty chiefdoms of the Central Illinois River valley, on the north by Oneota and Mississippian societies, and on the east by Fort Ancient...
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Middle Cumberland to Dallas: Constructing Peace in the Valley (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. Based on artifact styles, regional archaeologists in the 1940s first proposed movement of Mississippian people from the Middle Cumberland Region to the Great Valley of East Tennessee. Lacking absolute dating techniques, these researchers had limited understanding of the timing or contemporaneity of the archaeological...
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Migration and Climate Change in Mississippian Archaeology: An Introduction and Brief History (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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 introduces the symposium "Migration and Climate Change: The Spread of Mississippian Culture ca. A.D. 1050-1400." I provide a brief history of migration and climate change research in the archaeology of Mississippian societies. These earlier research efforts -- the theoretical contexts in which they occurred,...
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Migration and Ethnic Hybridity: Examining the Middle Ohio Valley Mississippian Periphery (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. Recent research on the Fort Ancient culture of the Middle Ohio Valley has considerably improved our understanding of the motivation for and subsequent role of Mississippian migrations along a Mississippian periphery. A plethora of new radiocarbon dates on multiple media, strontium and biodistance analyses of human bone,...
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Migration, Population Change, and Climate at Cahokia (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. In this paper we explore sociopolitical, economic, and climatological aspects of the population history of Cahokia and compare these with the timing of the appearance of Cahokia materials at hinterland sites to better understand some of the factors that may have contributed to the migration of people out of the American...
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Pushing and Pulling the Mississippian Moment Into the Western Great Lakes (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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...
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Temporal Patterns in Diet and Population Movement within Greater Cahokia (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. At its peak, Greater Cahokia had a population of over 30,000 people, and engaged in social, political, and religious interactions that covered the midcontinent. The factors that influenced the rise and dissolution of Greater Cahokia between ca A.D. 1000 and 1300 remain a focus of inquiry. Archaeobotanical and isotopic...