Climate Change, Population Migration, and Ritual Continuity in the Lower Mississippi Valley

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Migration and Climate Change: The Spread of Mississippian Culture" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Tree-ring reconstructions of cool- and warm-season moisture reveal several multi-decadal droughts that impacted the northern Lower Mississippi Valley between AD 1250 and 1450. These chronic droughts contributed to the regional abandonments and population migrations southward out of the Cairo Lowland and adjacent areas into extreme southeastern Missouri, northeastern Arkansas, and western Tennessee. In addition, the climatic events appear to have been a major factor in the collapse of the political economy, resulting in subsequent downriver migrations of Mississippian polities. While transformations in political, religious, and social practices would have taken place, it is equally apparent that long-term continuities existed in ritual practice based on a large corpus of whole ceramic vessels from the region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Migration and Climate Change: The Spread of Mississippian Culture

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25310