Recognizing Ritual in the Elaboration of Earthwork Construction at Jaketown

Summary

Elaborately constructed earthworks indicate monumental behavior requiring unique social processes to produce. This paper presents new subsurface data on the Late Archaic Poverty Point earthworks at the Jaketown site in the Mississippi Yazoo Basin. Unit excavations and soil coring demonstrate detailed and complicated internal architecture standing in contrast to earlier mounded landscapes in the eastern United States. Challenging traditional agrocentric models for socially complex societies, this research provides a new perspective on the emergence of ritual complexity in the Lower Mississippi Valley, and more broadly urges a reform of the civilization narrative in archaeology with the elaboration of landscapes built by hunter-gatherers.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Global Perspectives on the Archaeology of Ritually Mounded Landscapes

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15617