Gregory D. Wilson

Explores the archaeology of Mississippian communities and households using new data and advances in method and theory First published in 1995, Mississippian Communities and Households, edited by J. Daniel Rogers and Bruce D. Smith, was a foundational text that advanced southeastern archaeology in significant ways and brought household-level archaeology to the forefront of the field. The impressive breadth of case studies presented allowed archaeologists to grapple with the complexities of Mississippian social organization across the region. Reconsidering Mississippian Communitiesand Households revisits and builds on what has been learned in the years since the Rogers and Smith volume. Edited by Elizabeth Watts Malouchos and Alleen Betzenhauser, this new volume advances the field further with the diverse perspectives of current social theory and methods and big data as applied to communities in Native America from the AD 900s to 1700s and from northeast Florida to southwest Arkansas. The book is divided into four parts with overarching themes: articulating communities and households; coalescing and conflicting communities; community and cosmos; and movement, memory, and histories. Watts Malouchos and Betzenhauser bring together scholars researching diverse Mississippian Southeast and Midwest sites to investigate aspects of community and household construction, maintenance, and dissolution. By tacking back and forth between daily domestic practices and wider communal landscapes, contributors engage with communities and households as locations of daily social, political, economic, and religious negotiations. Thirteen original case studies prove that community can be enacted and expressed in various ways, including in feasting, pottery styles, war and conflict, and mortuary treatments.

Using fresh evidence and nontraditional ideas, the contributing authors of Mississippian Beginnings reconsider the origins of the Mississippian culture of the North American Midwest and Southeast (A.D. 1000-1600). Challenging the decades-old opinion that this culture evolved similarly across isolated Woodland populations, they discuss signs of migrations, pilgrimages, violent conflicts, and other far-flung entanglements that now appear to have shaped the early Mississippian past.Presenting recent fieldwork, archival studies, and new investigations of legacy collections, the essays in this volume interpret results through contemporary perspectives that emphasize agency and historical contingency. They track the various ways disparate cultures across a sizeable swath of the continent came to share similar architecture, pottery, subsistence strategies, sociopolitical organization, iconography, and religion. Together, they provide the most comprehensive examination of early Mississippian culture in nearly thirty years.

This title defines household composition and social relationships at Moundville. Complex Mississippian polities were neither developed nor sustained in a vacuum. A broad range of small-scale social groups played a variety of roles in the emergence of regionally organized political hierarchies that governed large-scale ceremonial centers. Recent research has revealed the extent to which interactions among corporately organized clans led to the development, success, and collapse of Moundville. These insights into Moundville's social complexity are based primarily on the study of monumental architecture and mortuary ceremonialism. Less is known about how everyday domestic practices produced and were produced by broader networks of power and inequality in the region.Wilson's research addresses this gap in our understanding by analyzing and interpreting large-scale architectural and ceramic data sets from domestic contexts. This study has revealed that the early Mississippian Moundville community consisted of numerous spatially discrete multi-household groups, similar to ethnohistorically described kin groups from the southeastern United States. Hosting feasts, funerals, and other ceremonial events were important strategies by which elite groups created social debts and legitimized their positions of authority. Non-elite groups, on the other hand, maintained considerable economic and ritual autonomy through diversified production activities, risk sharing, and household ceremonialism. Organizational changes in Moundville's residential occupation highlight the different ways kin groups defined and redefined their corporate status and identities over the long term.