Fourteen experts examine the current state of Central Valley prehistoric research and provide an important touchstone for future archaeological study of the region
The Mississippi Valley region has long played a critical role in the development of American archaeology and continues to be widely known for the major research of the early 1950s. To bring the archaeological record up to date, fourteen Central Valley experts address diverse topics including the distribution of artifacts across the landscape, internal configurations of large fortified settlements, human-bone chemistry, and ceramic technology.
The authors demonstrate that much is to be learned from the rich and varied archaeological record of the region and that the methods and techniques used to study the record have changed dramatically over the past half century. Operating at the cutting edge of current research strategies, these archaeologists provide a fresh look at old problems in central Mississippi Valley research.
Fourteen experts examine the current state of Central Valley prehistoric research and provide an important touchstone for future archaeological study of the region
The Mississippi Valley region has long played a critical role in the development of American archaeology and continues to be widely known for the major research of the early 1950s. To bring the archaeological record up to date, fourteen Central Valley experts address diverse topics including the distribution of artifacts across the landscape, internal configurations of large fortified settlements, human-bone chemistry, and ceramic technology.
The authors demonstrate that much is to be learned from the rich and varied archaeological record of the region and that the methods and techniques used to study the record have changed dramatically over the past half century. Operating at the cutting edge of current research strategies, these archaeologists provide a fresh look at old problems in central Mississippi Valley research.
Changing Perspectives on the Archaeology of the Central Mississippi Valley
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Changing Perspectives on the Archaeology of the Central Mississippi Valley
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Overview
Fourteen experts examine the current state of Central Valley prehistoric research and provide an important touchstone for future archaeological study of the region
The Mississippi Valley region has long played a critical role in the development of American archaeology and continues to be widely known for the major research of the early 1950s. To bring the archaeological record up to date, fourteen Central Valley experts address diverse topics including the distribution of artifacts across the landscape, internal configurations of large fortified settlements, human-bone chemistry, and ceramic technology.
The authors demonstrate that much is to be learned from the rich and varied archaeological record of the region and that the methods and techniques used to study the record have changed dramatically over the past half century. Operating at the cutting edge of current research strategies, these archaeologists provide a fresh look at old problems in central Mississippi Valley research.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817384173 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 404 |
| Lexile: | 1420L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 25 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Michael J. O'Brien is Professor of Anthropology and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Robert C. Dunnell is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Brief Introduction to the Archaeology of the Central Mississippi River Valley
Michael J. O'Brien and Robert C. Dunnell
The chapters in this volume summarize a series of recent investigations of the archaeological record of the central Mississippi River valley, which, following Morse and Morse (1983; see also Williams 1956), we take to be that portion of the greater Mississippi Alluvial Valley (Fisk 1944) lying between the Arkansas River and its deposits on the south and Thebes, Illinois, on the north (Figure 1-1). This is not a wholly arbitrary area, even though the southern boundary of the central valley is less marked than the northern, eastern, and western boundaries (see below). North of Thebes, the Mississippi flows in a narrow valley only a few kilometers wide and deeply incised into Paleozoic bedrock. South of Thebes, the river occupies a major structural depression — the Mississippi Embayment — that is filled largely with poorly consolidated or unconsolidated sediments of Cretaceous and later age. There, the valley often is 200 kilometers wide; its eastern and western boundaries are Paleozoic bedrock, deeply buried by loess in the east.
One would be hard pressed to find another region of the United States, unless it is the Southwest, that has witnessed such a long-standing interest on the part of prehistorians. Given the high visibility of segments of its archaeological record — especially mounds — why wouldn't the region attract the attention of those interested in the past? Alban Jasper Conant, an amateur prehistorian writing in the Transactions of the Academy of Science of St. Louis in 1878, prosaically characterized the southeastern Missouri portion of the valley as an archaeologist's paradise:
There is, doubtless, now no richer field for archaeological research in this great basin of the Mississippi Valley than is to be found in [southeastern] Missouri. The wonderful extent and variety of the ancient works and monuments therein, the relics they disclose, the huge burial mounds filled with the bones of the dead, disposed in orderly array, as though by loving hands, along with vessels of pottery of graceful forms and varied patterns, often, too, skillfully ornamented, — all bear witness to a settled and permanent condition of society and government and obedience to law, and to certain convictions of a future life. (Conant 1878:353)
Once people with an interest in antiquities began poking in and around the mounds, they were immediately rewarded for their efforts. By the end of the nineteenth century, thousands of magnificent ceramic bowls, bottles, and jars that had lain hidden in the large prehistoric cemeteries along the Mississippi and St. Francis rivers and neighboring streams such as Little River and Pemiscot Bayou had been mined, many of them ending up in museums in the East. In a very real sense, it is a wonder that anything was left of the archaeological record of the central Mississippi Valley by the beginning of the twentieth century. Perhaps it is testament to the incredible wealth of the record that even today, after more than a century of indiscriminate digging coupled with new farming technologies, especially those related to land leveling, there are still large segments of the record that are in reasonable condition.
The chapters in this volume demonstrate that not only is there still a considerable amount to be learned about the archaeological record of the central Mississippi Valley but also that the methods and techniques that are being used to study the record have changed dramatically over the past half century. If one peruses the literature on the archaeology of the region, it appears that the culture-history paradigm that long guided Americanist archaeology everywhere (Lyman et al. 1997) is still quite at home. Culture history has a revered place in Americanist archaeology (see Lyman et al. 1997 for an extensive review), one important aspect of which is the chronological ordering of archaeological materials. Many of the issues that were central to Americanist archaeology during the period 1940 to 1970 were brought to the table as a direct result of fieldwork conducted in the central Mississippi Valley (O'Brien and Lyman n.d.). Archaeologists working in the region, like most of their counterparts working in areas to the south and east, did not take part in the processual debates of the 1960s and 1970s (Dunnell 1990). Although many factors played a role in this conservatism, one stands out: the Mississippi Valley had been an important and early donor to the culture-history paradigm; thus, archaeologists working in the region either had played a direct role in creating the paradigm or were students of those who had. Many students of the original creators continued to work in the valley after receiving their degrees, and they continued in the same vein as their predecessors, adding new data to the growing pile rather than reinterpreting old facts.
Most archaeologists working in the central Mississippi Valley are comfortable with the culture-history framework provided them — a framework first worked out by Philip Phillips in collaboration with James Ford and James Griffin (Phillips et al. 1951) (see below) and later modified through Phillips's collaboration with Gordon Willey (Phillips and Willey 1953; Willey and Phillips 1955, 1958). Likewise, they are comfortable with the pottery types first described by Phillips, Ford, and Griffin (1951) and later modified by Phillips (1958, 1970). If the pottery types described by Phillips, Ford, and Griffin (1951) can be used to bring chronological order to archaeological phenomena, and if the phases proposed by Phillips (1970) have a usefulness in keeping track of things both chronologically and spatially, then why should they not continue to be used? No one has ever said that units such as phases and pottery types have no use. What a few archaeologists have said (e.g., Fox 1992; O'Brien 1994a, 1995; O'Brien and Fox 1994a, 1994b; O'Brien and Lyman n.d.) is that modern usage of the units in some cases far exceeds what the creators of the units had in mind. Continued use of the units with little or no reflection as to their original intended purposes has, in our minds, had a rather palling effect on the archaeology of the central Mississippi Valley. For the most part, the chapters included here bypass extended discussion of types and phases in favor of other aspects of archaeological analysis. Some of the chapters document that archaeological attention is beginning to move beyond time-and-space systematics; others question many of the longheld assumptions about time and space and look toward refining our understanding of those two dimensions.
We find it difficult to evaluate work being done today without an awareness of how that work mirrors or differs from what was done previously. Our purpose in this chapter is threefold: (1) to summarize the who, what, when, and where of various research efforts; (2) to mention some of the major issues with which investigators wrestled; and (3) to show how some of the work reported in the various chapters included here has readdressed those issues. We make no attempt to chronicle all the myriad pieces of research that have been carried out between Thebes, Illinois, and the mouth of the Arkansas River: for extended discussions see Dye and Cox (1990), Morse and Morse (1983), and McNutt (1996). Our choice of what to include is highly selective, but we believe it accurately reflects the history of archaeological research in the region.
Because the unique character of the Mississippi Alluvial Valley intrudes into this history, we preface the historical account with a brief description of the physical environment. Analysis of the landscape has long been of importance to archaeologists working in the central Mississippi Valley, and several contributors to this volume continue this tradition and examine selected features of the landscape and the differential use of those features by prehistoric humans. We focus here on only one component of the physical environment, namely, fluvial regimes. These not only structured prehistoric use of the region but also have had profound effects on the archaeological record itself.
Physical Setting
The modern Mississippi River hugs the eastern margin of the valley from Thebes southward, moving out of sight of the loess bluffs only south of Memphis (Figure 1-1). A major feature of the central valley — one that sets it apart in striking fashion from the lower valley — is Crowley's Ridge — a loess-capped Tertiary monadnock with a north-south trend that divides the alluvial valley into two segments. The portion between the ridge and the Mississippi River comprises a series of lowlands (e.g., the Cairo Lowland and the Little River Lowland) collectively referred to as the Eastern Lowlands; similarly, the portion between Crowley's Ridge and the Ozark Highlands comprises several lowlands (e.g., Morehouse Lowland) that collectively are known as the Western Lowlands (Figure 1-1). The Eastern Lowlands cover the greater percentage of the St. Francis River basin — an extensive drainage area that extends from the northern terminus of the Mississippi Alluvial Valley south to Helena, Arkansas. Except for a small area in the extreme northern Western Lowlands that is drained by the St. Francis, drainage west of Crowley's Ridge is controlled by numerous tributaries of the White River (Figure 1-1).
The kinds and ages of the various sediments in the central valley (Figure 1-2) are products of where the ancestral Mississippi and Ohio rivers happened to be at various times during the Pleistocene and early Holocene — of channel positions that in large part were controlled by the enormous volumes of water those rivers carried into the embayment during interstadials. Harold Fisk, in his monumental Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River (1944), attempted to provide a history of the valley by mapping and dating all physiographic features from just north of Cairo, Illinois, south to the Gulf of Mexico. Although Fisk produced a series of excellent maps of the valley, some of his channel reconstructions were speculative, and his chronological positioning of the channels, in terms of both absolute and relative time, was based on faulty assumptions (Autin et al. 1991; Saucier 1981). More-recent mapping of portions of the valley (e.g., Saucier 1994; Saucier and Snead 1989) (Figure 1-2) has modified Fisk's sequence of events and greatly altered the timing he suggested for those events.
Fluvial Regimes
Understanding the geomorphological history of the Mississippi Alluvial Valley is predicated on recognizing the presence of two different fluvial regimes, the braided stream and the meander-belt stream, which left dissimilar evidence of their history across the landscape. That evidence, in the form of sediments and landforms, is important from an archaeological standpoint, since knowledge of how the landscape changed through time provides clues not only as to where prehistoric materials might be found but also as to where they might not be found. For example, recent analysis of prehistoric-site locations in Pemiscot County, Missouri, documented that few archaeological remains dating to the pre-Christian era have been found in the eastern half of the county, not because the area was uninhabited during that period but because the processes associated with an active floodplain have either removed or buried them (O'Brien 1994b). Archaic (pre–ca. 600 B.C.) and Early Woodland (600–250 B.C.) remains that are found occur on topographic highs that have escaped removal by channel erosion or burial from overbank deposits. This pattern characterizes the situation in much of the central Mississippi Valley.
THE BRAIDED-STREAM REGIME
Extensive evidence of braided-stream courses, which are complex features composed of master channels and an interlocking series of gathering channels and dispersal channels, is found in the Western Lowlands (Royall et al. 1991; Saucier 1974; Smith and Saucier 1971) as the result of the ancestral Mississippi River and in the Little River Lowland as the result of both the ancestral Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Braided surfaces, or valley trains (Figure 1-2), comprise outwash sediments derived from midcontinental glaciers that formed throughout the Pleistocene (Autin et al. 1991; Saucier 1974; Teller 1987, 1990). The oldest exposed valley-train surface in the Western Lowlands is located east of the extreme southwestern edge of Crowley's Ridge and probably dates in excess of 120,000 years (Autin et al. 1991; Rutledge et al. 1985) (Figure 1-2). Older braided-stream deposits in the Eastern Lowlands are (1) a narrow strip along the base of the northern half of Crowley's Ridge and (2) Sikeston Ridge, a discontinuous projection southward from just east of the Bell City–Oran Gap in Crowley's Ridge to New Madrid, Missouri (Figure 1-1).
A radiocarbon chronology of sediments from corings in Powers Fort Swale near the base of the Ozark Escarpment in Butler County, Missouri (Figure 1-1), establishes the dating of the permanent shift of the Mississippi River to the east of Crowley's Ridge (Royall et al. 1991). In the swale, "the last deposition of fine sand layers by 11,500 yr [ago] marks the termination of glacial meltwater flow through the Western Lowlands, after which full meltwater flow was funneled east of Crowley's Ridge" (Royall et al. 1991:167–68).
At least two northeast-southwest-trending braided surfaces connected with the displaced Mississippi River are exposed in the Morehouse and Little River lowlands. The more western of the two, the Malden Plain, extends in an arc shape from the base of Crowley's Ridge at Dexter, Missouri, to near Levesque, Arkansas, a distance of approximately 175 kilometers (Figure 1–1). Primary drainage of the surface today is provided by the St. Francis River. The eastern braided surface extends from the northern wall of the alluvial valley, through the Bell City–Oran Gap, to Marked Tree, Arkansas, a distance of approximately 170 kilometers (Figure 1–1). When the Mississippi River shifted its course east of Crowley's Ridge and began to drain the Little River Lowland, it created its own outwash fan and braided drainage pattern, in the process reworking earlier sediments and eradicating previous northeast-southwest-trending Ohio River channels. After the Mississippi again changed course and moved into the channel occupied by the Ohio River (see below), underfit streams such as the Little River developed to drain the abandoned braided-stream surface in a southerly pattern. But as Saucier (1964:6 [unpaginated]) noted, "The establishment of the [Mississippi] river in its present meander belt did not mean the end of Mississippi River sedimentation in the [area east of Crowley's Ridge], however. For long periods of time, the Little River system served as an outlet for [Mississippi River] floodwaters that entered the upper end. ... Its well-developed natural levees and other meander belt features attest to its role in carrying sediment-laden floodwaters of the Mississippi River."
East of Crowley's Ridge, the braided-stream deposits have been partially eroded by the meandering of the modern Mississippi (see below). In the northern part of the valley, surface sediments of the Malden Plain (Figure 1-1) comprise braided-stream deposits that are somewhat younger (less than ca. 13,300 years ago) than those of the Western Lowlands and thus lack any substantial loess (Guccione and Rutledge 1990; Guccione et al. 1988). The large braided-stream channels, which contain older sediments, are well known locally for their terminal Pleistocene fauna (e.g., mastodon [Mammut americanum] and llama [Palaeolama mirifica]) (Figure 1-3); the uppermost part of the fill in one such channel, Buffalo Slough in Dunklin County, Missouri, yielded an uncorrected radiocarbon age of 10,890 × ±130 years ago (D. F. Morse, pers. comm., 1990). Inasmuch as the surface of the braided-stream deposits has a steeper gradient than the surface of those created by the meandering Mississippi, the erosional escarpment that forms the boundary between the two is more marked in the north (ca. 5 meters high) and gradually disappears in northeastern Arkansas.
Because the Malden Plain blocked access to the St. Francis for Mississippi floodwaters, a vast backswamp developed in the Little River Lowlands (Figure 1-1) so that while this area is shallowly underlain by braided-stream deposits, the surface deposits are much younger (less than 6000 years old). Surface deposits consist of uniform, fine-grained "gumbos," broken only by the natural levees of the usually incompetent drainage (e.g., Little River and Pemiscot Bayou) (Figure 1-4). In northern Arkansas, this featureless terrain is replaced by ridge-and-swale topography characteristic of recent meander belts (Figure 1-5). Thus, in the northern half of the region, the Western Lowlands and Crowley's Ridge provide surfaces that were exposed in the Late Pleistocene, whereas the Malden Plain provides a slightly later surface. The ages of meander-belt surfaces are highly variable, but except for local monadnocks, they are considerably younger, of mid-Holocene age.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Figures,
Tables,
Preface and Acknowledgments,
1. A Brief Introduction to the Archaeology of the Central Mississippi River Valley Michael J. O'Brien and Robert C. Dunnell,
2. An Examination of Mississippian-Period Phases in Southeastern Missouri Gregory L. Fox,
3. Pottery, Radiocarbon Dates, and Mississippian-Period Chronology Building in Western Kentucky Paul P. Kreisa,
4. An Overview of Walls Engraved Pottery in the Central Mississippi Valley David H. Dye,
5. Graves Lake: A Late Mississippian-Period Village in Lauderdale County, Tennessee Robert C. Mainfort, Jr., and Michael C. Moore,
6. Landscape Change and Settlement Location in the Cairo Lowland of Southeastern Missouri Robert H. Lafferty III,
7. Nonsite Survey in the Cairo Lowland of Southeastern Missouri Patrice A. Teltser,
8. Powers Fort: A Middle Mississippian-Period Fortified Community in the Western Lowlands of Missouri Timothy K. Perttula,
9. The Langdon Site, Dunklin County, Missouri Robert C. Dunnell,
10. Moon: A Fortified Mississippian-Period Village in Poinsett County, Arkansas David W. Benn,
11. Variability in Crowley's Ridge Gravel Patrick T. McCutcheon and Robert C. Dunnell,
12. Blade Technology and Nonlocal Cherts: Hopewell(?) Traits at the Twenhafel Site, Southern Illinois Carol A. Morrow,
13. Prehistoric Diet in the Central Mississippi River Valley Diana M. Greenlee,
Notes,
References,
Contributors,
Index,