War, Power, and History in the Mississippian Period Central Illinois Valley

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper considers the impact of warfare-induced settlement nucleation on the sociopolitical organization of the thirteenth-century Central Illinois River Valley. Concurrent with the beginning of a period of intense warfare, Mississippian groups in the region abandoned their small, dispersed farmsteads and aggregated into the region’s first nucleated villages. Cross-cultural analyses of aggregated settlements have shown that groups are often ranked by their order of arrival into the community. This case study is novel in that newcomers to these nucleated settlements were quickly incorporated with little evidence of inequality between social groups. Indeed, the archaeological evidence we discuss in this paper suggests that the founders of the CIRV’s first nucleated villages substantially expanded upon previously established Mississippian traditions of group decision-making by constructing much larger council houses. These new ceremonial spaces emphasized group solidarity rather than chiefly authority and allowed for the inclusion of more social groups in decision-making.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Warfare and the Origins of Political Control   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36342.0