Rethinking Mississippian Migration and Frontier Settlement in Southwest Virginia, USA

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Fifteen years of excavations at the Carter Robinson mound site in southwestern Virginia, USA, have documented a case of immigration, settlement, and transformation at the extreme edge of the Mississippian world. Recovered cultural material suggests residents were nonlocal Mississippians who established intensive craft production economies supporting the trade of fibers and drilled objects. Hybridity in material culture attributes suggests the occurrence of intermarriage between Mississippians and locals. New excavations at the nearby Ely Mound in 2019 have identified an earlier occupation than expected, suggesting that the establishment of Mississippian groups in this region was multifaceted and involved reciprocal social and economic relationships. This paper will present these new data and suggest alternate understandings of expansion and settlement of Mississippian groups along their cultural frontier.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36228.0