Location, Location, Location: Multi-scalar Investigations into the Unexpected Timing and Length of Occupation of a Late Woodland and Early Mississippian site in the Lower Mississippi Valley

Summary

Site 22HO626 is a multicomponent site located along an abandoned meander loop of the Yazoo River, Holmes County, Mississippi. Due to the presence of surface collected exotic lithic materials and a close proximity to the Poverty Point center of Jaketown, 22HO626 was expected to represent a Late Archaic settlement within the lower Mississippi Valley. However, work by the University of Tennessee’s Archaeological Research Laboratory and Tennessee Valley Archaeological Research indicates a more recent period of occupation for this riverside location, beginning during the Late Woodland period and continuing only into the Early Mississippian. This multidisciplinary study, which incorporates site-level artifact, feature, and stratigraphic analyses with a landscape-scale remote sensing investigation, provides an explanation for the unexpectedly late period of occupation and for its relatively short duration. This case study illustrates the importance of multi-scalar approaches in examinations of cultural resources and settlement strategies within dynamic environments such as those found within the complex fluvial landscape of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage