Mortuary Spaces as Social Power: Ceramic Exchange and Burial Practice at Safford Mound (8PI3)

Summary

Mortuary spaces often served as gathering points for disparate communities in the pre-Columbian past. The deep temporal associations of many burial mounds across the southeastern United States linked living societies to the ancestral landscape, thus creating a sense of social memory that penetrated both quotidian and ritualized social practice. Safford Mound (8PI3), a burial mound located near modern Tarpon Springs, Florida, embodies some of these characteristics. In this study, we qualitatively describe thin sections, and also present a gross paste characterization and technological analysis of ceramic vessels from the Safford assemblage. Although the excavations were poorly recorded, the sheer size and completeness of this assemblage provides us types of information usually unattainable through standard recovery methods. We use these data to investigate the ways in which vessel exchange and provenance at Safford represents both change and continuity in mortuary practice during the Woodland (1000 BC-AD 1000) and Mississippian Periods (AD 1000-1500). The results of these analyses ultimately suggest that Safford Mound maintained its social power during a period of immense sociopolitical realignment and reorganization. We view this pattern as indicative of the embeddedness of mortuary ritual within social life in the Gulf Coastal Plain.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22241