Mississippian and Oneota Entanglements: Iconography and Ritual in the Lower Mississippi Valley

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Dancing through Iconographic Corpora: A Symposium in Honor of F. Kent Reilly III" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Mississippian and Oneota entanglements were often violent, typically resulting in intercommunity conflict, loss of life, and population displacement. However, Mississippians in the northern Lower Mississippi Valley may have comprised a sufficiently large territorial bloc to have successfully thwarted Oneota aggression. In this paper I suggest Mississippian-Oneota interactions during the Late Mississippian period were sedimented in rituals resembling early contact period Calumet ceremonies. Oneota motifs on ceramic bottles and the presence of Siouan disk-style pipes offer compelling evidence for ritual protocols that engendered mutually beneficial interactions between neighboring Mississippian and Oneota polities, perhaps resulting in sustained contact.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Dancing through Iconographic Corpora: A Symposium in Honor of F. Kent Reilly III

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32432