Early New World Monumentality

4. Monumentality in Eastern North America during the Mississippian Period

4 Monumentality in Eastern North America during the Mississippian Period David G. Anderson The Mississippian period in eastern North America is dated to between ca. 1000 and 400 cal. bp in most sequences, encompassing the last few centuries before sustained European contact across much of the region. Exactly what Mississippian is as a cultural entity has been the subject of as much debate as its beginning and end points, and indeed, the two subjects are intertwined. Over the past century, Mississippian societies have been defined based on the presence of attributes taken individually or collectively that have included such things as the presence of intensive maize agriculture, the widespread use of shell-tempered pottery, the appearance of wall-trench architecture, aspects of iconography and religion, or adaptations to specific environments such as riverine floodplains or oxbow lakes (e.g., Griffin 1967, 189; 1985, 63; Knight 1986; Pauketat 2007, 82–87; Smith 1986, 486, 488). Most scholars would agree that monumental construction —specifically the building of mounds, earthworks, and enclosures and their placement adjacent to or around plazas, with sturdy fortifications at larger centers—is a particularly characteristic feature of Mississippian culture . While not all Mississippian sites are characterized by the construction of monuments, or monumentality, and indeed it is rare or nonexistent in hamlets or smaller communities, it does appear to have been an integral part of life in larger communities. In this chapter what is meant by monumentality during the Mississippian period is explored, with a particular emphasis on its origins and on the ways the subject is currently being examined by local archaeologists. Monumentality in Eastern North America during the Mississippian Period · 79 Figure 4.1 Location of Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian sites mentioned in the text. Origins of Mississippian Culture and Monumentality Mound and plaza arrangements have great time depth in eastern North America. The existence of an architectural grammar, or an appropriate way to design communities, has long been assumed to exist within Mississippian culture. To one group of scholars, its “main architectural elements include plazas, platform mounds and other earthworks, entryways, various 80 · David G. Anderson means of segregating space and activities, defensive works, and natural terrain features” (Lewis, Stout, and Wesson 1998, 5). Indeed, some have argued that such a grammar was cosmologically grounded, ritually proscribed , and precisely determined and had great time depth in the region and perhaps across the Americas (Clark 2004; Lewis, Stout, and Wesson 1998; Sassaman 2010a, 2011, 203–206). Whether such consistency existed even during the Mississippian period, much less across the almost twelve millennia of human occupation across the region that came before it, has been debated, and while there is no consensus of opinion, some general themes are acknowledged (e.g., Anderson 2002, 268–269; Anderson 2004, 282–293; Milner 2004a; Pauketat 2007; Sassaman 2010a, 2011). In particular , dispersed populations appear to have periodically come together at specific and perhaps special (resource-rich, sacred) locations throughout much of prehistory, perhaps seasonally, annually, or less frequently, to engage in information exchange, ritual and ceremony, and the maintenance of populations through the regulation of kin and mating networks, activities that all served to promote group and cultural identity. Indeed, such patterns appear to date back to the earliest readily identifiable occupation of the region. At Paleoindian sites such as Bull Brook, Massachusetts; Debert, Nova Scotia; or Lindenmeier, Colorado, multiple artifact concentrations have been found that are thought to reflect the camping areas of individual bands and in some cases may have been contemporaneous. At Bull Brook it has been argued that multiple camps surrounded a central space that was used for public activity, including possible ceremony (e.g., Robinson and Ort 2011; Robinson et al. 2009). Thus, an arrangement of people and structures around a central space or plaza appears to date back to the earliest settlement of the region. Other forms of ritual behavior, such as the use of marked cemeteries, also characterize these earlier periods, as exemplified by burials at the late Paleoindian period Dalton culture Sloan site in Arkansas, located on a sand dune (Morse 1997), or the burials staked down in ponds in Florida, of which Windover is the best-known and -reported example (Doran 2002; Anderson 2009; Sassaman 2010a; Sassaman and Randall, this volume). Such mortuary behavior, like aggregation at special places, caused people to identify with portions of the landscape, a role that more visible architectural monuments would assume later in...