King: The Social Archaeology of a Late Mississippian Town in Northwestern Georgia (review)

In the preface to this large volume, David J. Hally, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Georgia, sets out his ambitious purpose:

My goal in writing this book was to reconstruct as fully as possible the nature of the King site and to place that community in its larger regional and historical context

(pp. xix and xx).

How well does Hally succeed in achieving his aims? As an outsider with a nodding familiarity of the painstaking processes involved in an archaeological dig, I would say very well indeed. Hally’s project began in the early 1970s and after an on-again, off-again history, it has been pursued in earnest for the past ten years. This book is a magnum opus: the culmination of all those reports, theses, dissertations and field season notes masterfully woven together by the scholar who oversaw the project from the beginning. It is accessible in a way that the original source materials might not be. I counted seven reports in the book’s extensive bibliography written by Hally himself that previously had only appeared in the “gray literature” (e.g., those produced for project sponsors that are often difficult for an interested scholar to obtain).

Is the investment of time and expense unearthing a relatively small (2.05 hectacres), marginally important and short-lived center in a grouping of settlements that was later abandoned by the Mississippians worth the effort? Despite the problems caused by nature (erosion) and more important by humans (looting, plowing for crop production), I think the answer is yes, it was worth it. The volume contains an excellent inventory of structures, plazas, palisades, burial pits and grave goods found at this late Mississippian site in northwest Georgia. And, for those scholars who wish to pursue the data further, there is also a CD included in a back cover sleeve that contains all of the information presented in the book in a digitized format compatible for analysis and reinterpretation if deemed necessary.

Hally’s book represents the most comprehensive on-going project trying to reconstruct the social history of late Mississippian culture in the eastern United States. The King site is located on the property of Mr. Harold W. King and Mr. James T. Jordan on the Coosa River near Rome, Georgia. The study detailed in this book in an excellent example of integration and synthesis of many aspects of material culture including the spatial configuration of the town determined from post hole placement and mortuary analysis that includes the examination of human osteological data. Grave goods and burial practices were examined to infer the form of social hierarchy and gender relations present during the King site’s relatively short occupancy. Given the rate of decomposition of white and Loblolly pine logs in the Georgia clay, posts could last no more than six years and there is no evidence of any structure being rebuilt at the same site more than four times, hence the estimate of a 40–50 years settlement history before King was abandoned altogether.

Where the settlers came from is also a mystery. What is known is that there was no population in the Coosa River area before the group of settlements was created and the area was abandoned by the Mississippians in the latter part of the 16^th century. Hally’s narrative moves seamlessly back and forth from the archaeological record at King to ethnographic evidence from European reports of the Mississippian descendents in the region, mainly the Cherokee and the Creek. This opens Hally to the criticism of committing a possible historical fallacy—arguing backwards from a known but later historical record and inferring (or arguing by analogy) that the Mississippian culture was organized in the same way as the cultures that followed it. That assertion...