The Vacant Quarter Revisited: Late Mississippian Abandonment of the Lower Ohio Valley

Abstract

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.

Regional Settlement Pattern Studies

“…Fuller regional coverage and geoarchaeological studies can identify those places where sites may be hidden by alluviation. Real abandonments are well attested in Europe (Thrane 2003), the Mediterranean (Blanton 2000;Haggis 1996), the American Southwest (Huckleberry and Billman 1998;Nelson 1999), the eastern U.S. (Anderson 1996;Cobb and Butler 2002), highland Mesoamerica (Kowalewski et al 2008), and the Maya area .…”

Natural and human-induced prehistoric and historical soil erosion and landscape development in Southwestern Tennessee, USA

“…Small hamlets and hunting camps are evident along the bluffs and throughout the rivers and stream valleys that cut through the loess deposits. For reasons yet unknown, much of the broad interior uplands were abandoned in the fourteenth century, perhaps due to massive droughts (Burnett and Murry, 1993;FisherCarroll, 2001;Cobb and Butler, 2006;Meeks and Anderson, 2013) which are evident from the nearby Great Plains (Miao et al, 2007) and throughout the western United States (Woodhouse et al, 2010). Although Wickliffe was abandoned in the middle of the fourteenth century, the Chucalissa village continued as a populous, regional community into the late fifteenth and perhaps early sixteenth centuries.…”

Life among the tides : recent archaeology on the Georgia Bight : proceedings of the Sixth Caldwell Conference, St. Catherines Island, Georgia, May 20-22, 2011.

“…Tracking the shifting nature of archaeological material distribution through time and across space continues to be used by archaeologists to investigate a wide variety of past ideological, economic, and social phenomena including: relationships between people and natural resources (Daniel, 1996;Jones et al, 2003), logistical organization and residential strategies (Savelle, 2001), the creation and maintenance of social territories (Dortch, 2002;Kowalewski, 2003;Peterson and Drennan, 2005), changing power relations (Hally, 1996(Hally, , 1999(Hally, , 2006Williams and Shapiro, 1996), and demographic shifts (Feinman et al, 1985;Milner and Oliver, 1999;Scarre, 2001;Cobb and Butler, 2002;Kowalewski, 2003;Kintigh, Glowacki, and Huntley, 2004;Osborne, 2004).…”

“…Attempting to reconstruct past demographic trends is a perennial goal within archaeology (Hassan, 1978;Milner and Oliver, 1999;Cobb and Butler, 2002;Kowalewski, 2003;Bandy, 2004;Kintigh, Glowacki, and Huntley, 2004;Osborne, 2004). Quantity of temporally sensitive objects, such as ceramics, is a common approach, which is not without its dangers.…”