Platform Mounds and Ethnographic Analogy Revisited: Defining the Functional Universe

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Why Platform Mounds? Part 2: Regional Comparisons and Tribal Histories" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological data from Southwest U.S. platform mound sites will likely not satisfactorily resolve the question of platform mound function and social organization. This is due to the ambiguities inherent in our data base and in our limited opportunities to excavate these features. Because of this, explanations given for prehistoric mound function vary tremendously, although almost all researchers agree that mounds were constructed by socially complex groups with defined leadership and subsistence surplus. Twenty-three years ago I used ethnographic and ethnohistoric records to characterize extant platform mound-using groups for my dissertation and then applied these findings to a prehistoric mound system in the eastern Tonto Basin of central Arizona. This paper continues this research using new information based on the assumption that human’s use platform mounds in a finite set of ways. The range of variation in ethnographic/ethnohistoric platform mound-using groups is investigated and the universe of known behavior defined. New observations are applied to prehistoric mound groups of the Southwest to better understand mound function and the social organization of mound-building groups.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Why Platform Mounds? Part 2: Regional Comparisons and Tribal Histories

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24363