The idea that a substantial portion of the North American midcontinent centered on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers confluence was largely depopulated around A.D. 1450–1550—Stephen Williams's “Vacant Quarter” hypothesis—has been generally accepted by archaeologists. There has been, however, some disagreement over the timing and extent of the abandonment. Our long-term research along the Ohio River in southern Illinois's interior hill country has yielded a substantial corpus of late Mississippian period radiocarbon dates, indicating that depopulation of the lower Ohio Valley occurred at the early end of Williams's estimate. Furthermore, the abandonment was a widespread phenomenon that involved Mississippian groups living in remote settings, as well as along major drainages. Although causes for the Vacant Quarter are still debated, evidence from other regions indicates that regional abandonment by agricultural groups was not a unique event in the Eastern Woodlands.
During the Mississippian period (A.D. 1000-1500) the southeastern United States witnessed a broadscale fluorescence of polities characterized by impressive earthwork construction, rich mortuary offerings, and intensified agriculture. Research on the nature of complexity in these so-called chiefdoms has been an enduring issue in North American archaeology, even as this research has undergone several paradigmatic shifts. This study focuses on the primary dimensions of the archaeological record used to describe and explain variation in Mississippian complexitypolity scale, settlement and landscape, the organization of labor, mortuary ritual and ideology, and tribute and feasting. Changing perspectives toward the organization of complexity and power have become increasingly pronounced in each of these categories. 65 the 1970s onward in part because it was a theoretically compelling view and in part because several of those archaeologists-as well as a subsequent generation of influential archaeologists from Michigan-work in the Mississippian Southeast. Today when archaeologists refer to Mississippian complexity, they usually refer to the political aspects of these chiefdoms. Yet this is a tacit understanding, and, with few exceptions (e.g., Emerson & Pauketat 2002, Saitta 1994, Schroeder 2003), there has been little explicit discussion in Mississippian circles about the precise meaning of complexity. Variation in complexity is commonly described by subcategories of chiefdoms based on the relative degree of inferred political and economic power. To that end, the most commonly applied terms are "simple," "complex," and "paramount" chiefdoms. It would overstate the case, nevertheless, to argue that considerations of Mississippian complexity are merely exercises in pigeonholing. Lurking behind these categories there is a deeper, implicit interest in the exercise of power and authority. "Complexity" serves as a gloss for these types of relations. Hence, discussions about complexity now tend to be phrased in terms of the political economy, and political economy is commonly tied to the issue of power. Using political economy as a point of departure, one can discern two trends in research on Mississippian complexity. First, the notion of political economy has expanded from a materialist basis to one that incorporates considerations of ideology, or what some refer to as political culture (Pauketat 1997, Rees 2002). Second, vertical conceptions of power focused on elites have broadened to consider both horizontal characteristics of the political economy (or heterarchy, following Crumley 1987) and the actions of commoners in terms of agency and resistance. These trends can be attributed to the realization that power is not solely a structural feature of chiefdoms that can be expressed as incremental forms of domination. Power also has an experiential quality; it is something that is acted out, reproduced, contested, and transformed in the daily interactions of actors. It is not easy to parse advocates cleanly into one approach t...
Frequent population movement and political re-organization spurred a pattern of repeated abandonment at the Mississippian mound center of Etowah in the southeastern United States. These processes also characterized the larger surrounding region in north Georgia and southeast Tennessee. The Etowah abandonments provided inflection points where interest groups were able to distance themselves from previous conventions of structure and reformulate new forms of sociopolitical organization. Re-invented traditions were embedded in changing definitions of genealogical and mythical time, and mediated through the built environment and iconography.
Many attempts to understand the cultural impact of the forces of modernism, capitalism, and globalization have come to highlight contemporary cultural diversity at the expense of reifying a homogenized past of traditional, static societies. The “savage slot” still provides a convenient myth for characterizing small‐scale communities before the advent of modernism—communities that experienced dramatic change only as they were pulled into the world system. Archaeological evidence from the southeastern United States challenges this stereotype, as Native American groups routinely migrated and continually redefined notions of “place” and “locality”—processes often treated as distinctly (post)modern. Such case studies emphasize the importance of working toward a deep historical anthropology that will continue to undermine stereotypes about the Other in the past as well as the present.
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