The Relationship between Mound Building and Agroforestry at Late Archaic Earthwork Sites

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Mound-building and food production are often treated as two distinct areas of study in the archaeology of the Indigenous southeastern United States. Accordingly, the results of decades of research remain siloed – monumentality, funerary practices, and social organization on one side; hunting, fishing, gathering, and cultivation on the other. In this paper, I argue that these major fields can be brought together through the lens of labor. I focus on the Late Archaic period (ca. 5000-3000 years BP) in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Based on paleoethnobotanical data from Poverty Point in Louisiana and Jaketown in Mississippi, I suggest that the coordinated harvesting of fruit and nut masts and controlled burns for land clearance entailed relationships and episodic, specialized social organization similar to that needed for earthwork construction. As such, labor was a force for social integration. Labor maintained the web of relations in the Lower Mississippi Valley that produced the earthworks at Poverty Point and Jaketown as well as the tended forests beyond them. Building mounds and producing food both meant working with others, human and non-human.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53490