Understanding Manifestations of Public Ritual in Late Mississippian Pottery: A Comparison of Millstone Bluff and Dillow’s Ridge Ceramic Assemblages

Summary

This research entails the thorough analysis and comparison of two ceramic assemblages to understand whether and how ritual manifests in pottery of the Late Mississippian Southeast. The study focuses on ritual phenomena exhibited at two Late Mississippian Period (ca. late 1200s A.D. to A.D. 1500) settlements in southern Illinois, the Millstone Bluff site in Pope County (11Pp3) and the Dillow’s Ridge site in Union County (11U635). Millstone Bluff has been interpreted as a site of public ritual and unusual symbolic importance evidenced by its general location and topography, spatial organization, and distinctive rock art. Though Dillow’s Ridge was the locale for an inordinate level of chert tool production, in other ways the site is understood to be typical of Mississippian villages for this region and time. The sites serve, respectively, as proxies for high and low levels of public ritual phenomena. As a case study of the Late Mississippian cultures of the Ohio River Valley, this comparison of the Millstone Bluff and Dillow’s Ridge sites provides an opportunity to evaluate the efficacy of current ceramic analysis methods for identifying ritual and understanding the social motivators that underlie ritualized activity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22459