Social Relationships and Connections from the Mississippi Valley to the Great Lakes during the Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interactions across the North American Midcontinent" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

“Mississippianization” has been used by archaeologists to explain the appearance of shell-temper and certain decorative ceramic motifs found in the northern Prairie Peninsula during and after the eleventh century. These ceramic attributes are supposed symbols of an expanding Cahokian worldview, sent north by a diffusionist wave of Cahokian ideas. Alternatively, migration and/or missionization from the south fueled conversion to a Cahokia-centric lifeway. But such unidirectional models remove agency from non-Cahokian peoples, and data indicate that cultural change occurred discontinuously and divergently across the Prairie Peninsula circa AD 1000–1400. Some traits thought to exemplify Cahokian ideas appear to have occurred concurrently in the American Bottom and the Great Lakes. Outside of the Mississippi trench, Cahokia-related artifacts are rare finds north of the Central Illinois valley. The singular Middle Mississippian occupation of the north, Aztalan was isolated, short-lived, and violently terminated, belying the notion of a unidirectional wave of influence across cultural boundaries. The shift in Great Lakes region material culture circa AD 1050–1100 is likely tied to a pan-regional shift in ideology entrained to subsistence and settlement shifts that resulted in regionally diverse expressions due to local histories, environments, and social networks.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Interactions across the North American Midcontinent

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32376