Linking Communities in Time and Space: Mound Building Practices in the Lower Mississippi Valley and Beyond

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Beginning around 5500 BCE and continuing through today, groups throughout the American South created their communities in part through mound building. Recent large-scale reviews of data from excavations at pre-contact earthen mound sites have allowed for a number of repeated practices of construction, use, modification, and abandonment to be identified and their meanings to be considered. The Mississippi Mound Trail Project (and the follow-up excavations it spawned) has provided a particularly rich dataset for the Lower Mississippi Valley. In this paper, I bring together the reports of investigations from these recent excavations in the Lower Valley with a broad review of the literature on other mound-building societies in the American South to enumerate common forms of foundation and termination deposits, as well as widespread techniques of construction and use. Looking both through time and across space, I then explore how these variable practices created and maintained different types of relationships between the human subjects that undertook them, as well as between the human actors and the structured deposits and landscapes that were being created.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51429