Purification Ritual and the Creation of Place in the Mississippian Southeast

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Silenced Rituals in Indigenous North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

While the indigenous societies of the Eastern Woodlands shared ways of life, they also differed in many important ways so that we cannot view them as a single culture. Even where material cultures and iconography appear to have been shared across great distances and over significant periods of time, the meanings and practices connected to those representations and items undoubtedly varied. Here I look at a particular assemblage (the beaker-bottle complex of the Chattahoochee-Apalachicola Valley and adjacent areas) and ethnohistorical accounts of Apalachee rituals connected to their ballgame to interpret an assemblage from Mound 6 at the Lake Jackson site and to argue that the peoples of this area were distinct from Mississippian peoples in other parts of the Eastern Woodlands in terms of their ritual practices. I argue that the people who lived at Lake Jackson employed the material culture of the beaker-bottle complex to created purified (sanctified) space for the construction of mounded architecture. I go on to suggest that this space and the mound that capped it likely served as a locus for rituals connected to the Apalachee ballgame (rituals that may also have involved the beaker-bottle complex).

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Silenced Rituals in Indigenous North American Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24697