This book is the first detailed investigation of the important archaeological site of Parchman Place in the Yazoo Basin, a defining area for understanding the Mississippian culture that spanned much of what is now the United States... more
This book is the first detailed investigation of the important archaeological site of Parchman Place in the Yazoo Basin, a defining area for understanding the Mississippian culture that spanned much of what is now the United States Southeast and Midwest before the mid-sixteenth century. Refining the widely accepted theory that this society was strongly hierarchical, Erin Nelson provides data that suggest communities navigated tensions between authority and autonomy in their placemaking and in their daily lives.
Drawing on archaeological evidence from foodways, monumental and domestic architecture, and the organization of communal space at the site, Nelson argues that Mississippian people negotiated contradictory ideas about what it meant to belong to a community. For example, although they clearly had powerful leaders, communities built mounds and other structures in ways that re-created their views of the cosmos, expressing values of wholeness and balance. Nelson’s findings shed light on the inner workings of Mississippian communities and other hierarchical societies of the period.
Drawing on archaeological evidence from foodways, monumental and domestic architecture, and the organization of communal space at the site, Nelson argues that Mississippian people negotiated contradictory ideas about what it meant to belong to a community. For example, although they clearly had powerful leaders, communities built mounds and other structures in ways that re-created their views of the cosmos, expressing values of wholeness and balance. Nelson’s findings shed light on the inner workings of Mississippian communities and other hierarchical societies of the period.
Research Interests:
Communal eating events or feasts were important activities associated with the founding and maintenance of Mississippian communities in the southeastern United States. More often than not, however, archaeological deposits of food refuse... more
Communal eating events or feasts were important activities associated with the founding and maintenance of Mississippian communities in the southeastern United States. More often than not, however, archaeological deposits of food refuse are interpreted along a spectrum, with household-level consumption at one end and community-wide feasting at the other. Here, we draw attention to the important ways that domestic food practices contributed to social events and processes at the community level. We examine ceramic, botanical, and faunal assemblages from two fourteenth century contexts at Parchman Place (22CO511), a late Mississippi period site in the northern Yazoo Basin. For the earlier deposit, everyday ceramics and plant foods combined with high-utility deer portions and exotic birds suggest pot-luck style feasting meant to bring people together in the context of establishing a community in place. We interpret the later deposit, with its pure ash matrix, focus on serving wares, and purposeful disposal of edible maize and animal remains, as the result of activities related to maize harvest ceremonialism. Both practices suggest that household contributions in general and disposal of domestic food refuse in particular are critical yet underappreciated venues for creating and maintaining community ties in the Mississippian Southeast.
Research Interests:
Because it immediately precedes the Mississippi period, Coles Creek (A.D. 700–1200) culture is often viewed through the lens of Mississippian social organization. In particular, early platform mound-and-plaza complexes have long been... more
Because it immediately precedes the Mississippi period, Coles Creek (A.D. 700–1200) culture is often viewed through the lens of Mississippian social organization. In particular, early platform mound-and-plaza complexes have long been understood as elite compounds due to their physical similarities with later sites. However, evidence regarding the construction and use of the monumental landscape at the Feltus site (22JE500) in Jefferson County, MS, suggests that platform mound construction was but one aspect of a broader ritual sequence aimed at gathering the dispersed Coles Creek community. In addition to mound building, this sequence included the setting and removal of freestanding posts, ritual feasting, and burial of the dead and focused on explicit deposition of meaningful objects and substances. Archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic analyses of the objects and substances included in the ritual deposits at Feltus suggest that they helped forge relationships between an extended kin network, including non-human fictive kin and non-living human kin. In this context, we find a metaphor of gathering to be useful in understanding the archaeological remains of a ritual sequence focused on bringing together social, cosmological, and temporal domains. This provides a distinctly different take on the meaning and use of platform mounds based on a review of Native beliefs and practices that looks beyond the traditionally relied upon sources.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
ABSTRACT Communal eating events or feasts were important activities associated with the founding and maintenance of Mississippian communities in the southeastern United States. More often than not, however, archaeological deposits of food... more
ABSTRACT Communal eating events or feasts were important activities associated with the founding and maintenance of Mississippian communities in the southeastern United States. More often than not, however, archaeological deposits of food refuse are interpreted along a spectrum, with household-level consumption at one end and community-wide feasting at the other. Here, we draw attention to the important ways that domestic food practices contributed to social events and processes at the community level. We examine ceramic, botanical, and faunal assemblages from two fourteenth-century contexts at Parchman Place (22CO511), a Late Mississippi period site in the northern Yazoo Basin. For the earlier deposit, everyday ceramics and plant foods combined with high-utility deer portions and exotic birds suggest potluck-style feasting meant to bring people together in the context of establishing a community in place. We interpret the later deposit, with its pure ash matrix, focus on serving wares, and purposeful disposal of edible maize and animal remains, as the result of activities related to maize harvest ceremonialism. Both practices suggest that household contributions in general and disposal of domestic food refuse in particular are critical yet underappreciated venues for creating and maintaining community ties in the Mississippian Southeast.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Domestic structures at Parchman Place are characterized by rectangular magnetic anomalies of high value, surrounded by haloes of low magnetic value. Site-wide magnetic gradiometer survey reveals discrete clusters of these anomalies,... more
Domestic structures at Parchman Place are characterized by rectangular magnetic anomalies of high value, surrounded by haloes of low magnetic value. Site-wide magnetic gradiometer survey reveals discrete clusters of these anomalies, indicating the presence of at least three residential groups or neighbourhoods. However, the empty spaces on the map, the magnetically clean areas bounded by architecture, are also important for structuring daily interactions among individuals and groups. This paper explores the spaces between geophysical anomalies – the intimate landscapes of courtyards, plazas and paths that are common yet rarely investigated spatial components of Mississippi Period (ad 1000–1541) sites in the southeastern USA. Magnetic gradiometer data from Parchman illustrate how attributes of empty spaces – size, shape, orientation, visibility and proximity to other features – promoted different types of social interaction in the past. These data, supplemented by traditional archaeological data, indicate that early in the site's history, the focus of community members was inward – at the neighbourhood level toward courtyards and the lineages associated with them, and at the site level toward the central plaza and other social groups living at the site. Later, at least some community members became oriented away from the rest of the community and toward monumental architecture instead. As a result of this reorientation, many people were excluded from participating in mound-top activities. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Research Interests:
Materiality studies have traditionally focused on objects, often to the exclusion of the built environments in which those objects circulate. In the southeastern United States and elsewhere, some of the most dynamic material remains of... more
Materiality studies have traditionally focused on objects, often to the exclusion of the built environments in which those objects circulate. In the southeastern United States and elsewhere, some of the most dynamic material remains of past societies exist at the scale of landscape. Monumental constructions such as mounds were inscribed with culturally and historically situated meaning and were variously deployed for political and social purposes. While using mounds to talk about the construction of political and social relationships is nothing new, interpretations regarding the nature of those relationships have been fairly limited. Traditional thinking promotes the idea that mounds were locations constructed for and manipulated by elite members of society. While there is compelling ethnohistoric evidence to support such interpretations, we suggest that this relationship between mounds and elites is only one among many potential scenarios. Further, we propose that the tendency to relate the two may be a consequence of the distorting effects of time perspectivism. Interestingly, the material qualities of the mounds themselves—specifically their durability and conspicuous presence on the landscape—may be partially responsible for this conflation. We wish to reevaluate the social contexts in which mounds as material objects were created and used. If elites were not the sole actors involved in creating these material landscapes, who else was involved and what motivated their participation? Case studies from the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Caddoan region are used to illustrate the situated nature of mounds as locations of communal identity construction, political contestation, and commemoration.
Research Interests:
Post ritual is an important part of Late Woodland ceremonial practice. At Feltus, Coles Creek people repeatedly planted, pulled, and refilled a series of free-standing posts. In addition to the posts themselves, specially procured ash... more
Post ritual is an important part of Late Woodland ceremonial practice. At Feltus, Coles Creek people repeatedly planted, pulled, and refilled a series of free-standing posts. In addition to the posts themselves, specially procured ash and clay sediments with ceramic pipe, bear bone, and other material inclusions were essential components of the depositional process. In this paper, we explore the possible meanings of these archaeological features. Does meaning derive from the power of the individual, included objects? From the act of depositing them together? Or perhaps, from their earlier role/s in a broader ritual sequence?