Signs of Power: The Rise of Cultural Complexity in the Southeast - Rilegato

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0817313915 ISBN 13: 9780817313913

Casa editrice: Univ of Alabama Pr, 2004

Riassunto

Traces the sources of power and large-scale organization of prehistoric peoples among Archaic societies.

By focusing on the first instances of mound building, pottery making, fancy polished stone and bone, as well as specialized chipped stone, artifacts, and their widespread exchange, this book explores the sources of power and organization among Archaic societies. It investigates the origins of these technologies and their effects on long-term (evolutionary) and short-term (historical) change.

The characteristics of first origins in social complexity belong to 5,000- to 6,000-year-old Archaic groups who inhabited the southeastern United States. In Signs of Power, regional specialists identify the conditions, causes, and consequences that define organization and social complexity in societies. Often termed "big mound power," these considerations include the role of demography, kinship, and ecology in sociocultural change; the meaning of geometry and design in sacred groupings; the degree of advancement in stone tool technologies; and differentials in shell ring sizes that reflect social inequality.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull'autore

Jon L. Gibson is Professor (Retired) of Anthropology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and author of The Ancient Mounds of Poverty Point.  


Philip J. Carr is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Alabama and editor of The Organization of North American Prehistoric Chipped Stone Tool Technologies.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

Signs of Power

The Rise of Cultural Complexity in the Southeast

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Copyright © 2004 The University of Alabama Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1391-3

Contents

Figures...................................................................................................................................................................................................................viiTables....................................................................................................................................................................................................................xiPreface and Acknowledgments...............................................................................................................................................................................................xiii1. Big Mounds, Big Rings, Big Power Jon L. Gibson and Philip J. Carr.....................................................................................................................................................12. Late Archaic Fisher-Foragers in the Apalachicola-Lower Chattahoochee Valley, Northwest Florida-South Georgia/Alabama Nancy Marie White................................................................................103. Measuring Shell Rings for Social Inequality Michael Russo.............................................................................................................................................................264. Regional-Scale Interaction Networks and the Emergence of Cultural Complexity along the Northern Margins of the Southeast Richard W. Jefferies.........................................................................715. The Green River in Comparison to the Lower Mississippi Valley during the Archaic: To Build Mounds or Not to Build Mounds? George M. Crothers..........................................................................866. Cultural Complexity in the Middle Archaic of Mississippi Samuel O. Brookes............................................................................................................................................977. The Burkett Site (23MI20): Implications for Cultural Complexity and Origins Prentice M. Thomas, Jr., L. Janice Campbell, and James R. Morehead........................................................................1148. Poverty Point Chipped-Stone Tool Raw Materials: Inferring Social and Economic Strategies Philip J. Carr and Lee H. Stewart............................................................................................1299. Are We Fixing to Make the Same Mistake Again? Joe Saunders............................................................................................................................................................14610. Surrounding the Sacred: Geometry and Design of Early Mound Groups as Meaning and Function John E. Clark..............................................................................................................16211. Crossing the Symbolic Rubicon in the Southeast Kenneth E. Sassaman and Michael J. Heckenberger.......................................................................................................................21412. Explaining Sociopolitical Complexity in the Foraging Adaptations of the Southeastern United States: The Roles of Demography, Kinship, and Ecology in Sociocultural Evolution Randolph J. Widmer.....................23413. The Power of Beneficent Obligation in First Mound-Building Societies Jon L. Gibson...................................................................................................................................25414. Archaic Mounds and the Archaeology of Southeastern Tribal Societies David G. Anderson................................................................................................................................27015. Old Mounds, Ancient Hunter-Gatherers, and Modern Archaeologists George R. Milner.....................................................................................................................................300References Cited..........................................................................................................................................................................................................317Contributors..............................................................................................................................................................................................................365Index.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................369

Chapter One

Big Mounds, Big Rings, Big Power Jon L. Gibson and Philip J. Carr

The ancient monuments ... consist ... of elevations and embankments of earth and stone, erected with great labor and manifest design. Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848)

Mounds have quickened the pulse of American antiquarians and archaeologists for generations. They still do. Who among you could stay calm after hacking a trail through a bottomland-hardwood jungle and suddenly realizing that the incline you're struggling to climb is no natural levee but a lost Indian mound? Or stand atop a mound on a starlit night with a handful of fellow archaeologists and keep from getting caught up in what the wind is whispering or help wondering whether the owl hooting deep in the woods is bird or shilombish? No use pretending, mounds are as magical today as ever. The contributors to this book are come before you to explain some of that magic.

ANCIENT MOUNDS AND THEIR BUILDERS

Mound builders always have been considered culturally more sophisticated and evolutionarily more advanced than groups who did not build mounds. But were they really? What about builders of the very first Archaic mounds? Were they more socially and politically adept than their hunter-gatherer forefathers and neighbors or just different? Archaeologists labored long under sway of hunter-gatherers as short-lived brutes spending every waking moment filling their bellies (Hobbes 1968 [1651]) or as lay ecologists basking in the leisure afforded by an almost serendipitous affluence (Sahlins 1968a, 1972). Ethnographically known hunter-gatherers did not engage in public construction, and only in rare prehistoric instances, such as Poverty Point in the Lower Mississippi Valley and shell rings on the southern Atlantic coast, were Archaic hunter-gatherers accorded mound-building motives and skills. Still, such primal cases were considered atypical, ahistorical-as cases lying outside mainstream cultural developments and forming exceptions to widely accepted generalizations of Archaic lifeways in the southeastern United States. Archaeologists were taken with the generalized foraging model of egalitarian hunter-gatherers going about their business in an efficient, no-nonsense way-so much so, in fact, that they skipped over the fact that the model was based on historically marginalized foragers, not on pristine foragers living in bountiful environments.

The issue of social complexity drives authors' searches here just as it did two centuries ago when antiquarians were trying to explain the enigma of the mounds and their builders. But there is a difference. Our searches are guided by history, not presumptions about complexity as a monolithic sociopolitical condition or cultural developmental stage. To a person, authors herein subscribe to complexity as "that which is composed of many interrelated parts" (Price and Brown 1985:7), as opposed to simplicity, which we construe as sociality having fewer parts. Conceptually, "hunter-gatherer" covers a potentially vast range of variability between traditional views of simple, egalitarian hunter-gatherers and advanced, ranked chiefdoms. Hunter-gatherer complexity has come under fire for making "simple" hunter-gatherers less social, apolitical, and unorganized, perceptions that have dominated traditional views of Archaic foragers. But the discovery of Archaic mounds prompts us to characterize their builders as complex, a wonderfully vague description that highlights that variability while sending us searching for its sources.

Interest in mounds has deepened since it was discovered how old some Louisiana and Florida mounds really are. Today, people do not roll their eyes at claims of 6,000-year-old mounds, but this was not the case a few short years ago. For a half-century, Poverty Point earthworks claimed title as the oldest in the continental United States (Ford and Webb 1956), and they dated to sometime between 1730 and 1350 cal B.C. Claims of even older Archaic mounds were dismissed out of hand for contravening conventional wisdom and, worse, for being seditious. Like the Missouri mule, the archaeological establishment had to be shown the truth and lots of it. Radiocarbon dating and elegance of argument were the capstones, but it was widespread realization that some Archaic fisher-hunter-gatherer groups manifested social formations and practices once accorded only to farming groups that softened skepticism about the early age of mounds. The quiet acceptance of Archaic origin brings us to the point where we can now ask after the sources of power and sociality behind primordial mound building, an impossibility a few years ago. Yet, as is often the case when data run ahead of theorizing, tough questions abound and open new avenues of research regarding relationships and interactions between regions where Archaic mounds were built and those where they were not. But the primary concern is time-honored-just how socially complex Archaic mound builders really were.

While neither complete in coverage nor unified by similar datasets or approaches, the body of research presented in the following pages represents our attempts to get a handle on Southeast Archaic lifeways, some embodying public construction and elaborate stone and bone artifacts and some lacking them (Figure 1.1). We recognize that general characterizations on the scale of regions and periods are as likely to be wrong for specific places and times as they are correct. Syntheses that portray Archaic hunter-gatherers as mobile, egalitarian populations roaming over a sparsely populated land do not always fit the data, as this book bears witness.

ARCHAIC SOCIALITY: TECHNOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURE

The rise of chiefdoms and hereditary social inequality has claimed center stage in contemporary research into Native American cultural complexity. It has not been that long since archaeologists assumed stilled mobility and horticultural economy were essential for chiefdom organization. Mounds and craft specialists were part of the mix as well. We have since learned that structural linkages between these variables are neither simple nor, more important, causal (e.g., Arnold, ed. 1996; Feinman 1995). John Clark and associates have, for example, proposed that some ancient Mesoamerican communities, such as Paso de la Amada, turned to farming sooner than others, because corn was used to make not tortillas but beer for competitive feasting (Clark and Blake 1994). To other researchers, hereditary inequality and foraging were structurally and organizationally incompatible, although the Calusa fisher folk of Florida's Gulf Coast and some salmon-fishing peoples of the northwestern Pacific Coast were long recognized as exceptions. But these were well-documented historic groups. What about Archaic foragers and collectors-the first groups on the North American mainland to deal with matters besides raising a family and finding supper and to leave earth and shell monuments and stone and bone masterpieces to show for it?

Archaic mound and ring building is only the flash point for a broader inquiry on Archaic organization and power. Contributors to this book examine other Archaic technologies and practices regarded as being out of sync with traditional perceptions of hunter-gatherer organization. Their unitary goal is to collect data and infer aspects of hunter-gatherer organization instead of relying on traditional models and perceptions.

Before Poverty Point, some Southeast groups wielded polished-stone and chipped-stone technologies that excelled in craftsmanship and beauty of line and finish. Atlatl weights, particularly bannerstones, were crown jewels of Middle Archaic sites on the Tennessee and Green Rivers during the third and fourth millennia B.C. (Moore 1916). A few unfinished and broken weights came from domestic contexts, but whole objects came from graves or deposits suggesting that their social importance outweighed practical importance in the end (Sassaman 1996). In familiar social groupings, the practical and the social were inseparable anyway, and weapons that could send prey and people to the spirit world with a single, swift motion surely carried great power. Robert Hall (1997) proposes symbolic links between ancient atlatls and historic tribal honor badges, courting flutes, and calumets-quite a social registry. But do bannerstones portend transegalitarian social formations? In Chapter 5, George Crothers does not think so.

Beautiful, highly polished, and often engraved bone pins also were fashioned by Middle Archaic peoples from the Tennessee River to Florida's Atlantic coast (Jefferies 1995, 1997), raising the prospect of craft specialization, another traditional indicator of social inequalities. Because pins were numerous and generally discarded with the trash, Richard Jefferies (1997:480) maintains that they were ordinary, everyday items. But, as he maintains in Chapter 4, being commonplace makes them perfect markers for the varied social identities being forged as Middle Archaic collectivities living just south of the Ohio River became less mobile-their movements restricted to ever-smaller territories. In Jefferies's view, reduced residential mobility cut down on access to resources, foods, and spouses and increased security risks and was counterbalanced by formation of intergroup alliances, which birthed movers and shakers and afforded a fertile social milieu for inequalities to take hold. By Jefferies's account, bone pins were not direct measures of social inequality within a collective but of the potential for inequality.

In Chapter 7, Prentice Thomas, Janice Campbell, and James Morehead tackle the twin problems of the age and cultural affiliation of the O'Bryan Ridge phase in Missouri's bootheel-fundamental archaeological homework required before setting out history and sociality. Their excavation at the Burkett site finds that its earliest occupation dated after first mounds in the Lower Mississippi Valley were built and before Poverty Point reached its peak but that its later occupations were logistically well situated to have been involved in the movement of Burlington chert down the Mississippi Valley to Poverty Point. Finding evidence for earthquake activity beneath a multistage mound leads Thomas, Campbell, and Morehead to suggest that Poverty Point-age (and later Woodland) peoples ritualized the spot, which culminated in the mound, perhaps in the manner posited by Crothers in Chapter 5.

Benton Archaic groups living in the hills south of the Tennessee River sometimes cached magnificent oversized bifacial foliates, ornate Turkey Tail bifaces, and atassa (polished-stone effigies) (Johnson and Brookes 1989), which Samuel Brookes in Chapter 6 contends were the work of embedded craft specialists. Brookes also suggests that specialists were responsible for the unusual polished-stone zoomorphs found in a wide band across the Southeast from western Louisiana to central Florida. Shaped in the round, usually from red jasper, these pocketknife-sized beads depict locusts, owls, turtles, frogs, and other four-leggeds (see Brookes, this volume; Connaway et al. 1977), creatures that figure prominently in the lore of historic Southeastern tribes. So far, zoomorphs have not been found in Benton caches or in areas where bone pins are common. With few exceptions, they do not occur in caches, first mounds, or burials. Unlike pins, they are rare and, being representations of those special animals that readily move between the vaults in the native cosmos-land, sky, and water (underground) -they are probably amulets or fetishes (Connaway et al. 1977; Webb 1971).

In Chapter 3, Michael Russo argues that some Atlantic and Gulf coastal shell rings were built by transegalitarian peoples, but Nancy White in Chapter 2 finds evidence of only simple shellfish-gathering collectivities along western Florida's Apalachicola River. The many shell heaps, she insists, are not intentionally constructed mounds but incidentally accumulated refuse left by mobile egalitarian foragers. To White, social inequalities, which disenfranchise individuals or population segments by restricting access to economic resources, are incompatible with the food bounty of the Apalachicola and the general lack of sedentism. Russo also tackles the public architecture/incidental refuse issue. He proposes that the bigger and more architecturally complex the shell ring, the more socially complex its builders. In keeping with social space theory, he argues that closed circles and BLDBLD-shapes reflect egalitarian formations, while U-shapes and closed circles with dwellings in centrally elevated positions reflect hierarchical social formations.

Philip Carr and Lee Stewart ponder the political-economic implications of the organization of Poverty Point's chipped-stone technology in Chapter 8. They model several different ways that rock might have reached Poverty Point and then search for matches for their expectations among the empirical data. They conclude that indirect acquisition, or exchange, best fits the situations and further propose that independent trade lines run by different lineages produced rock stockpiles that were then corporately shared.

In Chapter 9, Joe Saunders, drawing on his excavations at Louisiana's Watson Brake, Frenchman's Bend Mounds, and Plum Creek Archaic, evaluates evidence for cultivars, sedentism, storage, substantial housing, trade, feasting, burial, and specialized crafts-the usual archaeological correlates of social complexity (e.g., Hayden 1995)-and finds little empirical support for Middle Archaic transegalitarianism. However, he does find much that recommends Poverty Point transegalitarianism, especially in the monumentality of its earthworks. But Kenneth Sassaman and Michael Heckenberger in Chapter 11 contend that Archaic plaza villages evince internalized and institutionalized distinctions between residents of a community and the outside world, the authors' Rubicon for transegalitarianism. They also suggest that site-to-site consistency in siting and mound positioning indicates that mound building was planned and carried out on a regional scale, not independently by each local collectivity. Why? There is a regular pattern of size downscaling among Middle Archaic mound complexes in northeastern Louisiana, and the hierarchy intimates social and political complexity greater than that encountered in simple egalitarian formations.

Spatial arrangement, proportionality, and numerology of first mounds are also considered in Chapter 10 by John Clark, who finds evidence not only for a standard unit of measurement but also for geometrical layouts and spacing intervals among first-mound complexes from Louisiana to Mexico and Peru, which incorporate multiples of that standard. The numerology, as Clark demonstrates, is familiar: 13s, 20s, 52s, and, yes, the larger numbers too that make up the ritual counts of the Mesoamerican calendar. Finding the same measure and ritual counts across such vast distances may prove to be one of contemporary archaeology's most provocative revelations-it reopens age-old questions about a common "Archaic" cultural base (Spinden 1917) or rather some mighty-old tradition and the history behind it. We think it reasonable to conclude that those who built the works were not simple, ordinary foragers (see Sahlins 1968a).

ARCHAIC SOCIALITY: ORGANIZATION AND POWER

Did it really require transegalitarian societies to mount labor for public construction or industry for special crafts? Could simple egalitarian collectivities have managed? Or, as George Crothers asks in Chapter 5, was corporate society in the traditional sense necessary at all? Underpinning these organizational questions is the issue of power. Power-the capability of getting people to act a certain way or do certain things-permeates sociality in all its guises, but of prime importance for early monument building and fancy artifact crafting is determining how much power resides in varied organizations and can be leveraged by ordinary social means.

In Chapter 12, Randolph Widmer finds that the power behind sociopolitical complexity comes from the appearance of unilineal kin groups with their inherent corporateness and labor potential. For lineages to form, Widmer contends, four children in a group (on average) must survive to be adults in each of four successive generations. He links the required population growth to rises in sea level and shifts in river courses, which, in turn, result in greater food productivity, a boon to wetland fisher-hunter-gatherer baby-makers.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Univ of Alabama Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2004
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0817313915
• ISBN 13: 9780817313913
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 383
• Redattore: Gibson Jon L., Carr Philip J.
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile