From Categories to Connections in the Archaeology of Eastern North America

Holland‐Lulewicz, Jacob

doi:10.1007/s10814-020-09154-w

Cited by 20 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 179 publications

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“…As noted by generations of anthropologists and archaeologists (e.g., Brain 1978; Feinman and Neitzel 2020; Holland-Lulewicz 2021; Mauss 2006; Wolf 1984), culture histories and similar heuristics are only useful insofar as they help explain real social processes. Following this logic, we find that the Poverty Point culture-historical unit fails to explain—and indeed obscures—prominent social processes observed in the archaeological records of Jaketown and Poverty Point, including the maintenance of long-term exchange relationships and differential, selective engagement with shared architectural traditions and foodways.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The View from Jaketown: Considering Variation in the Poverty Point Culture of the Lower Mississippi Valley

et al. 2022

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Recent research at Jaketown, a Late Archaic earthwork site in the Lower Mississippi Valley, suggests that the culture-historical framework used to interpret Jaketown and contemporary sites in the region obscures differences in practices across sites. As an alternative, we propose a framework focused on variation in material culture, architecture, and foodways between Jaketown and Poverty Point, the regional type site. Our analysis indicates that people used Poverty Point Objects and imported lithics at Jaketown by 4525–4100 cal BP—earlier than elsewhere in the region. By 3450–3350 cal BP, people intensively occupied Jaketown, harvesting a consistent suite of wild plants. Between 3445 and 3270 cal BP, prior to the apex of earthwork construction at Poverty Point, the community at Jaketown built at least two earthworks and multiple post structures before catastrophic flooding sometime after 3300 cal BP buried the Late Archaic landscape under alluvium. These new data lead us to conclude that the archaeological record of the Late Archaic Lower Mississippi Valley does not reflect a uniform regional culture. Rather, relationships between Jaketown and Poverty Point indicate a multipolar history in which communities selectively participated in larger social phenomena—such as exchange networks and architectural traditions—while maintaining diverse, localized practices.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The View from Jaketown: Considering Variation in the Poverty Point Culture of the Lower Mississippi Valley

et al. 2022

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“…In this way, archaeologically derived categories, with their attendant, often untested and tenuously supported assumptions about sociopolitical relationships, continue to structure discontinuous political histories, preferencing narratives of historical discontinuity and transformation over those that highlight and explore the more enduring patterns encoded in the archaeological and ethnohistoric records. Such categories serve as enduring barriers to theorizing effectively such issues as collective action, governance, or leadership that is relevant across the broader social sciences (Holland-Lulewicz 2021:2).…”

Section: Considering Council Houses and Native American Political Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

The Early Materialization of Democratic Institutions among the Ancestral Muskogean of the American Southeast

Thompson¹,

Holland‐Lulewicz²,

Butler³

et al. 2022

Am. Antiq.

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Democratic cooperation is a particularly complex type of arrangement that requires attendant institutions to ensure that the problems inherent in collective action do not subvert the public good. It is perhaps due to this complexity that historians, political scientists, and others generally associate the birth of democracy with the emergence of so-called states and center it geographically in the “West,” where it then diffused to the rest of the world. We argue that the archaeological record of the American Southeast provides a case to examine the emergence of democratic institutions and to highlight the distinctive ways in which such long-lived institutions were—and continue to be—expressed by Native Americans. Our research at the Cold Springs site in northern Georgia, USA, provides important insight into the earliest documented council houses in the American Southeast. We present new radiocarbon dating of these structures along with dates for the associated early platform mounds that place their use as early as cal AD 500. This new dating makes the institution of the Muskogean council, whose active participants have always included both men and women, at least 1,500 years old, and therefore one of the most enduring and inclusive democratic institutions in world history.

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“…These differences, described in detail below, are primarily defined by distinct mortuary practices, unique uses of copper, and the presence or absence of associated habitations and tool-working areas. The goal is to model age ranges for each of these site types, which have only to this point used the “eye ball” approach, masking important temporalities and chronological relationships between distinct social, cultural, and economic practices [ 47 ]. Once revised age ranges have been established, we can move beyond simple associations of the archaeological record with distinct “cultures” to better determine the historical relationships, as well as clarify when/if there were opportunities for interrelationships to have existed between the peoples who frequented these functionally distinct sites.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Refining the chronology of North America’s copper using traditions: A macroscalar approach via Bayesian modeling

2022

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North America’s ancient copper use, predicted to originate as early as 9000 cal BP, represents the earliest use of native copper for utilitarian tool production in the world. Although recent work has focused on establishing the first use of copper in the western Great Lakes region, little attention has been paid to determining the age ranges of subsequent copper using groups or to the identification of broader trends in copper use during the Archaic Period (10,000–3000 RCYBP). Here we address this issue by applying Bayesian modeling to a comprehensive suite of 76 radiocarbon dates directly associated with copper use. Our results identified two distinct peaks in copper usage, ca. 5500 cal BP and ca. 3300 cal BP. Age ranges for the three Archaic Period traditions and practices associated with copper use of the western Great Lakes are revised using modern calibration curves. Bayesian revisions of age ranges from sites where copper tools and/or production debris have been found provide insight into the historical relationships between, and cultural interactions among, these early copper using groups. This study provides an updated, refined chronology based on the most recent calibration curve (IntCal20) for the varied cultural contexts of copper use across the western Great Lakes.

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From Categories to Connections in the Archaeology of Eastern North America

Cited by 20 publications

References 179 publications

The View from Jaketown: Considering Variation in the Poverty Point Culture of the Lower Mississippi Valley

The View from Jaketown: Considering Variation in the Poverty Point Culture of the Lower Mississippi Valley

The Early Materialization of Democratic Institutions among the Ancestral Muskogean of the American Southeast

Refining the chronology of North America’s copper using traditions: A macroscalar approach via Bayesian modeling

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