Re-Inventing Mississippian Tradition at Etowah, Georgia

Abstract

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.

Moving Earth and Building Monuments at the Carson Mounds Site, Coahoma County, Mississippi

“…Marked by an increase in mound building, a shift to rectangular house patterns, and the intensification of maize agriculture, small and large Mississippian mound centers dot the entirety of the Mississippi Delta landscape. Interestingly, very few of these sites (with the exception of Walls phase sites near modern-day Memphis) have yielded artifacts associated with the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, a distinctive symbolic religious system composed of iconography developed in the American Bottom, thought to be the Mississippian homeland [19,25,26,64,105]. Scholarship on large Mississippian sites throughout the midcontinental and southeastern United States is extensive (e.g., [19,61,63,106,107]), yet the large multi-mound centers of the Yazoo Basin have remained largely ignored (excepting [12,15]).…”

“…Carson is one of the largest of the numerous late prehistoric multi-mound sites in the Mississippi Delta, but like many other mound sites in the Lower Mississippi Valley, it has not been investigated to the same extent that other Mississippian mound centers like Cahokia [61], Moundville [17,62,63], and Etowah [64][65][66][67] Figures 4 and 5); if so, the site begs a consideration of community (sensu [70]) and site formation processes (sensu [71]). The sheer size of the site also makes it problematic to excavate-as a solution, it was anticipated that modern and efficient forms of investigation, such as remotely sensed data, geophysical survey, soil coring, and mechanical trench excavations, could be used to gather data efficiently, and were therefore used as part of this research.…”

The Inalienable Rite: Smoking Ritual During the Mississippian Stage in the South Appalachian Mississippi Region

“…I discussed this history in Chapters 3 and 4, but a review of defining religious and symbolic attributes will be useful again here. King (2004), Cobb and King (2005), and others (Brown 1997(Brown , 2004Pauketat 2007) The figures also almost certainly reveal ongoing concern with issues of fertility.…”

“…It has become increasingly clear that Mississippian chiefly societies, of this region and beyond, experienced shifts over a multi-century interval (Anderson 1996b;Cobb 2003;Cobb and King 2005;Pauketat Period Dates (AD) Lake Jackson (Scarry 1996) Chattahoochee (Blitz & Lorenz 2006) Etowah (King 2003) Upper Tenn (Sullivan 2009a) Savannah (Anderson 1994) Oconee (Williams & Shapiro 1996) Ocmulgee (Hally 1994) Coast (Crook 1986) 950 chronology 2007). Some such changes were unique to sub-regions, but others were driven by fartherreaching factors.…”

“…Beyond these basics, we know that chiefly societies functioned in a wide range of modes, as Cobb and King (2005) have proposed, and this section lays out expectations of ritual patterns representative of three forms of chiefly organization (see Figure 4.1). arguably, allocations of labor for major public works projects, and because they likely experienced increasing levels of diversity among group members.…”