Reconsidering Mississippian Communities and Households

Edited by Elizabeth Watts Malouchos and Alleen Betzenhauser; Foreword by Gregory D. Wilson

SERIES: Archaeology of the American South: New Directions and Perspectives

University of Alabama Press

Explores the archaeology of Mississippian communities and households using new data and advances in method and theory

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. Reconsidering Mississippian Communitiesand Households revisits and builds on what has been learned in the years since the Rogers and Smith volume, advancing 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.

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. 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.

Reconsidering Mississippian Communities and Households successfully updates its namesake, Rogers and Smith’s 1995 Mississippian Communities and Households. It will certainly find a wide readership among those interested in social archaeology by bringing together established scholars and up-and-comers in a democratizing publication.’
—Ramie A. Gougeon, coeditor of Archaeological Perspectives on the Southern Appalachians: A Multiscalar Approach

‘I found Reconsidering Mississippian Communities and Households to be thoughtfully written, well organized, and engaging. Most of the hard data have been summarized, making the chapters relatively short and leaving room for discussion of theoretical orientations and processual arguments.’
—David W. Benn, Journal of the Iowa Archaeological Society.

‘Contributors to this volume successfully demonstrate the relational nature and intersecting social dimensions of households and the communities of which they were part. Chapter authors utilize multiscalar datasets with a particular focus on pottery practices and settlement organization alongside broader regional histories as clues of community making and everyday life.’
–American Antiquity

Elizabeth Watts Malouchos is a research archaeologist at the Illinois State Archaeological Survey’s American Bottom Field Station, part of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Alleen Betzenhauser is coordinator of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey’s American Bottom Field Station, part of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword by Gregory D. Wilson

Acknowledgments

Introduction by Elizabeth Watts Malouchos and Alleen Betzenhauser

Part I. Articulating Communities and Households

Chapter 1. Reconsidering Mississippian Communities and Households in Context by Elizabeth Watts Malouchos

Chapter 2. Making Mounds, Making Mississippian Communities in Southern Illinois by Tamira K. Brennan

Chapter 3. The Battle Mound Community: Interaction along the Red River and throughout the Caddo Homeland by Duncan P. McKinnon

Chapter 4. Negotiating Community at Parchman Place, a Mississippian Town in the Northern Yazoo Basin by Erin S. Nelson

Chapter 5. Mississippian Communities and Households from a Bird’s-Eye View by Benjamin A. Steere

Part II. Coalescing and Conflicting Communities

Chapter 6. Variability within a Mississippian Community: Houses, Cemeteries, and Corporate Groups at the Town Creek Site in the North Carolina Piedmont by Edmond A. Boudreaux III, Paige A. Ford, and Heidi A. de Gregory

Chapter 7. Mississippian Communities of Conflict by Meghan E. Buchanan and Melissa R. Baltus

Part III. Community and Cosmos

Chapter 8. Households, Communities, and the Early History of Etowah by Adam King

Chapter 9. Unpacking Storage: Implications for Community-Making during Cahokia’s Mississippian Transition by Elizabeth Watts Malouchos and Alleen Betzenhauser

Chapter 10. The Social Lives and Symbolism of Cherokee Houses and Townhouses by Christopher B. Rodning and Amber R. Thorpe

Part IV. Movement, Memory, and Histories

Chapter 11. Moving to Where the River Meets the Sea: Origins of the Mill Cove Complex by Keith Ashley

Chapter 12. Resilience in Late Moundville’s Economy by Jera R. Davis

Chapter 13. Multiscalar Community Histories in the Lower Chattahoochee River Valley: Migration and Aggregation at Singer-Moye by Stefan Brannan and Jennifer Birch

Commentary. The Archaeology of Mississippian Communities and Households: Looking Back, Looking Forward by Jason Yaeger

References Cited

List of Contributors

Index

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