Mississippian Mortuary Practices and the Quest for Interpretation

From Cahokia to Larson to Moundville : death, world renewal, and the sacred in the Mississippian social world of the late prehistoric Eastern Woodlands

“…NOTES 1. I have already noted that I am not alone in this view since a number of archaeologists are now recognizing that the "secondary burial" phenomenon is widespread in the North American mortuary record and, furthermore, that it cannot be treated adequately within the funerary or representationist framework, suggesting that they have serious concerns with that framework (Brown 1996(Brown , 2003(Brown , 2010Goldstein 2000Goldstein , 2010Pauketat 2010;Sullivan and Mainfort 2010). …”

“…I am certainly not alone in considering it necessary for North American archaeologists to rethink the way we conceptualize and analyze the material manifestation of the mortuary spheres of prehistoric Native North American communities. I have already noted that several archaeologists have taken issue with the funerary or representationist perspective (Brown 2003(Brown , 2010Goldstein 2000Goldstein , 2010Sullivan and Mainfort 2010). These archaeologists have astutely noted that the rich complex of "secondary" burials demands a different approach.…”

“…Hence, the mortuary chaîne opératoire is both a cultural strategy (i.e., structure of procedural steps to achieve the defining goals of the mortuary sphere) and a complex conventional behavioral process firmly grounded in the ethos and world beliefs of the community. As I noted above, several archaeologists, including Lynne Goldstein (2000Goldstein ( , 2010, Timothy Pauketat (2010), James Brown (2003Brown ( , 2006Brown ( , 2010, and Lynne Sullivan and Robert Mainfort Jr. (2010), have recently initiated reassessing the way North American archaeologists have characterized the nature of the rich evidence of secondary burials. 2 I see this as a positive advance in mortuary studies since, of course, it is consistent with my above view, and the Mourning/World Renewal Mortuary model is specifically constructed to address and account for this patterning.…”

“…The model claims that, for traditional historical Native North American communities, the range of types of mortuary actions that constituted the mortuary sphere surpassed in number and complexity the range of types of ritual actions that characterizes the mortuary sphere of modern Euro-American communities, a sphere I suggested as being limited largely to funerary and ancillary rites (e.g., mourning rites and memorial rites). Since the prevailing tendency in North American archaeology has been to address the mortuary sphere of prehistoric Native North American communities in these funerary terms-at least until very recently (e.g., see Sullivan and Mainfort 2010 ) or a second-order or even possibly a third-order cult sodality heterarchy. I will proceed in terms of the hermeneutic spiral method by first summarizing and critiquing the view that pretty well prevails in the current Moundville/Mississippian literature-namely, that the mortuary component of Moundville manifests a cemetery CBL, thereby empirically grounding the conclusion that Moundville was the seat of a monistic chiefdom polity-type community.…”

Subsistence and Settlement Correlates of Treponemal Disease: Temporal Patterns in Pre-Columbian East Tennessee

“…The social organisation was initially characterised as a two‐tiered chiefdom with an elite social stratum evidenced by differential interment within the flat‐topped mounds and accompanied particularly by exotic grave goods (Chapman, ; Hatch, ; Peebles & Kus, ; Scott, ). However, recent re‐evaluation of some Dallas phase sites suggests that some sort of heterarchical (perhaps role‐based) rather than a hierarchical organisation is displayed (Sullivan, , ). The social organisation of Dallas culture is relevant to treponemal disease visibility because a statistically significant difference between the village interred and the mound interred has been observed (Smith et al ., ).…”