Migration and Climate Change: The Spread of Mississippian Culture

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.