Building, Burying, Tearing Down: The Role of Destruction in Mississippian Mound Building

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

With their consistent themes of mantle construction, summit use, burning, and burial, earthen monuments of the Mississippi period conveyed shared meanings between people across wide geographical areas. Exceptions to these broader patterns, however, convey meanings that are steeped in local histories and the communities that create those histories. Drawing on archaeological data from the American Bottom, the Black Bottoms, and the Yazoo Basin, we explore the roles of truncation and subsumation in mound building, acts which can arguably be seen as destructive rather than generative. We suggest certain mound-altering practices represent the negotiations that took place between neighbors, kin, and figures of authority, and consider whether they are best understood as acts of erasure and forgetting or as expressions of community values related to new beginnings.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24889