Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology

4. Colored Monuments and Sensory Theater among the Mississippians

69 4. Colored Monuments and Sensory Theater among the Mississippians Corin C. O. Pursell Abstract: Recent research has demonstrated that colorful sediments were frequently used to surface Mississippian earthworks. This paper interprets one such colorful monumental space, Shiloh Mounds in southwestern Tennessee. Engagement with the sensuous past of Shiloh changes our understanding of the site, inverting assumptions about the power dynamics in the construction of two of the main mounds. Shiloh was constructed using red and white sediments, which were deposited in discrete areas of the site and distinctly cap the two mounds in question. Many southeastern Native Americans characteristically split both their ideological and social realities into the dichotomous categories of Red or White, which were key symbols for a suite of related concepts—including clan, directional, and animal symbolism—tied to various personal or social attributes. This paper shows that broad ethnographic generalizations about power do violence to the locally contextual, historically contingent metaphors of Shiloh, in which monumental Red and White, in quotidian and ritual experience, were used to accomplish surprising social goals. The manipulation of color and perspective create the powerful impact of a small white burial mound and modify that of a large red “chief’s” mound. Traditionally, most Mississippian monuments have been portrayed as being either brown or grass-covered, as we living archaeologists project backward from our present experience into the prehistoric past. The typical experience today is that of a broad, grass- or tree-covered swath of open plaza and low mounds. Despite that, we are aware that the lived experience of the mound towns of southern Tennessee would have included the smell of roasting deer and Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology, edited by Jo Day. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper No. 40. © 2013 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois Univer­ sity. All rights reserved. ISBN 978-0-8093-3287-8. 70 C. C. O. Pursell corn, the sound of an early dialect of Chickasaw, and the feel of a surrounding crowd and houses. Similarly, we now realize that many Mississippian mounds were quite brightly colored, darkly colored, or sharply contrasting (Anderson and Cornelison 2002; Pursell 2004; Sherwood and Kidder 2011). Mounds were the central sacred architecture of the Mississippian peoples, a physical feature that literally served as either a backdrop or platform for the majority of the important political and religious events of a person’s life (Knight 1981, 1986). With that in mind, it is difficult to think that this color play was not done with purpose. This paper will particularly focus on the visual and meaning-laden experience of place created by the construction and use of two major earthworks using colored earths in the thirteenth century c.e. at an important Mississippian political center along the Tennessee River (Figure 4-1). Shiloh has been under erosional threat for decades and has been the subject of intense archaeological scrutiny since 1998. Recent reexamination of old work has been combined with new excavations to create a more complete whole (Anderson and Cornelison 2002; Sherwood and Kidder 2011; Welch 2006). An important result of this research was the discovery of the complex use of colored sediments in large primary Mound A, particularly distinct red sediment caps. Excavations in the 1930s showed that Mound C, a smaller burial mound, also had colored sediments—in this instance, layers of white (Figure 4-2). These colored sediments have been interpreted previously in terms of ethnographic analogy to Charles Hudson’s description of the Red and White structural dichotomy in historic Native American groups of the southeastern United States (Anderson and Cornelison 2002; Hudson 1976:234–239; Welch 2006:408–409). Red and White were shown to act as extended metaphors for kin divisions and for War and Peace respectively, with a variety of associated symbolic concepts. As stated by Hudson, European observers had an incomplete understanding of how this system operated and may have reported misleading information about practices related to dual organization in the Southeast (1976:234). Only a limited grasp of the historic practices tied to this color dichotomy and the related suite of concepts is available. Another study inspired by the Shiloh work has recently addressed the subject from a geoarchaeological perspective with some useful reflections on social importance (Sherwood and Kidder 2011), and a study on color meaning in the Mississippian ceramics known as head pots presents a possible relationship of color meaning to time or temporality (Cobb and Drake 2008). The actual ways...