Community and Ritual Within the Mississippian Center at Town Creek

Abstract

This article evaluates aspects of an occupational history that was developed for the Town Creek site, a small Mississippian center in the North Carolina Piedmont that was occupied sometime between A.D. 1150–1400. Town Creek’s occupational history suggests that its Mississippian community consisted of multiple, discrete household groups, and that these groups were important throughout the center’s existence. Analyses of architectural, mortuary, and ceramic data indicate that Town Creek began as a town with a substantial domestic population, but it evolved into more of a vacant center later in time. This decline in domestic population coincided with significant evidence for site-wide ritual activity that included the construetion of a platform mound and the use of cemeteries in former house locations. Parallels between the small center at Town Creek and some of the largest Mississippian centers, especially the persistence of household-group spaces and an emphasis on ritual activities later in time, suggest that interaction among discrete social groups within a ritual context was a salient part of being Mississippian.

Landscapes of forgetting and structural silence in the American Southeast

“…But this new development was not necessarily so new. Several hundred years earlier, it was common for many mound centers to serve as ceremonial vacant centers: depopulated but regularly revisited for ritual purposes by a hinterland population (e.g., Boudreaux 2013;Kassabaum 2019;Rafferty 1995). Vacant ceremonial towns of the 1800s, with some alterations, recalled one tradition from the Mississippian past (Cobb 2019, 178-79).…”

Shifting Communities: Demographic Profiles of Early Village Population Growth and Decline in the Central American Bottom

“…The last few decades of Mississippian archaeology in the eastern United States has provided a clearer picture of the population dynamics associated with the growth and decline of these complex polities (Blitz 2010:12;Cobb 2003). Whereas earlier accounts produced an image of relatively long-lived and stable social systems, researchers have demonstrated much more flux in the occupational histories of Mississippian sites and entire regions (Anderson 1994b;Beck 2003;Blitz 1999;Blitz and Lorenz 2006;Boudreaux 2013;Cobb and King 2005;Hally 1996; Knight 2010; Knight and Steponaitis 1998;Milner 1990). In many places, no longer is it assumed that the largest sites (often containing one or more earthen mounds and plazas) were continuously occupied throughout an entire, local Mississippian sequence, and it is known that centers of regional power, influence, and population often shifted between neighboring sites.…”

“…In the Mississippian world, researchers have shown that mound settlements were composed of complexly organized social entities, including corporate kin groups, factions, and sodalities (Barrier 2011; Blitz 1999;Boudreaux 2013;Cobb and King 2005;Kelly 2006a;Knight 2010;Pauketat et al 2002). The movement of groups across landscapes and their coalescence at new settlements (or their subsequent abandonments) would have produced critical moments when community identities and cultural practices were in flux (Cobb 2005; see also Alt 2006;Cobb and Butler 2006;Cobb and King 2005;Pauketat 2003).…”

Mortuary Patterns In West-Central Tennessee: Contextualizing Historic Field Data From Nine Mississippian Period Sites

“…2007Seeman 1979, Wilson 2010, Zakrzewski 2011. This symbolic meaning cannot shift without the belief system behind the symbolism also changing (Boudreaux III 2013, Carr 1995, Shanks and Tilley 1982, Shimada et al 2004 and that could be evident in the mortuary context due to changes in the behavior surrounding the treatment of the death. That is not to say that the meaning behind this symbolism is obvious to the archaeologist but that there was a specific set of meanings behind the process of interment and handling of the body and that these processes do not change without some outside cultural or ideological force influencing them (Beck 1995, Bourdieu 1979, Glick 1995, Pauketat and Alt 2003, Pauketat and Emerson 1991.…”

“…Baires et al 2017, Emerson andHargrave 2000, Emerson and Hedman 2016, Lopinot 1997, Slater et al 2014). For the purposes of the current research, Cahokia is a geopolitical resource for all the different styles of interment that migrants have introduced to that settlement (Bense 2016, Boudreaux III 2013, Brown 1985, Charles 1995, Clay 1984, Emerson et al 2001, Goldstein 1980, Kelly 2014, Melbye 1963, Milner 1984, Milner and Schroeder 1992, Sullivan and Mainfort 2010Slater et al 2014).…”