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5 Social and Spatial Dimensions of Moundville Mortuary Practices Gregory D. Wilson, Vincas P. Steponaitis, and Keith P. Jacobi Moundville has an impressive mortuary data set with a long history of related investigations. Previous mortuary studies, however, have not focused on individual burial clusters as socially and spatially relevant units of analysis. Here we address this issue by documenting and interpreting the size, arrangement , and composition of selected Mississippian cemeteries at Moundville. These cemeteries were uncovered during the 1939 and 1940 excavations of the Moundville Roadway. Our analysis reveals that these cemeteries exhibit considerable internal variation in terms of age, sex, and mortuary treatment. Based on their composition, small size, strategic location, and duration, we argue that small corporate kin groups used these cemeteries to assert social and spatial claims within the Moundville polity. Archaeological investigations have revealed that Mississippian mortuary practices were not uniform across the southeastern and midwestern United States (Brown 2006b; Conrad 1993; Emerson, Hargrave, and Hedman 2003; Goldstein 1980; Fisher-Carroll and Mainfort 2000; Peebles 1974; Sullivan and Rodning 2001). It has been clearly demonstrated that the intricacies of mortuary ritual varied along the dimensions of social status, gender, age, and regional tradition. This variability has often been used to draw conclusions about the social identity of the deceased (e.g., Binford 1971; Goldstein 1980; Peebles and Kus 1977; Saxe 1970). Scholars have only recently begun to investigate Mississippian mortuaries as important sites for the living as well as the dead. Central to this perspective is the point that mortuary ritualism commonly embodies socially relevant statements and negotiations that mourners and other surviving community members make about the current and future state of affairs (e.g., Kuijt 2000; Metcalf and Huntington 1991; Parker Pearson 1999). Accordingly, the archaeological signatures of mortuary practices not only reflect the status of the deceased but were also shaped by the social aspirations of the living (see Brown 1995; Marcoux, this volume). Social and Spatial Dimensions of Moundville Mortuary Practices 75 By their very nature, sites of Mississippian mortuary ritual were situated at an important nexus between the living and the dead, between this world and the next, and between the past, present, and future. Indeed, the social meaning embodied by Mississippian cemeteries often appears to have been negotiated relative to the occupational history of the landscapes in which they were situated (Boudreaux 2007a; Rodning 2005; Wilson 2008). Mississippian groups who built mortuaries within the spatial boundaries of towns and villages did so in reference to mounds, plazas, domestic structures, and other places actual or remembered. Mississippian landscapes deeply sedimented with a history of past occupations would have contained many important sites of memory, the social relevance of which could have been appropriated, modified, or contested through the performance of and association with mortuary ceremonialism (Joyce 2003; Meskell 2004; Nora 1989). It is with these concepts in mind that we turn our discussion to the social and spatial dimensions of Moundville mortuary practice. Moundville Community Organization The Moundville site, located in the Black Warrior River valley of west-central Alabama, was the political and ceremonial capital of one of the largest and most complex Mississippian polities in the southeastern United States (Figure 5.1). Moundville’s highly organized community plan has long been the subject of archaeological attention and analysis (Knight 1998; Peebles 1971, 1978, 1983). The Moundville site encompasses 75 hectares and consists of 32 mounds, mostly grouped in pairs around a rectangular plaza (Knight and Steponaitis 1998: 3). The largest mounds are located on the northern edge of the plaza and become increasingly smaller going either clockwise or counterclockwise around the plaza to the south. Knight (1998) has interpreted this community plan as a sociogram, “an architectural depiction of a social order based on ranked clans.” According to this model the Moundville community was segmented into a variety of different clan precincts, the ranked position of which was represented in the size and arrangement of paired earthen mounds around the central plaza. The largest earthen mounds on the northern portion of the plaza were associated with the highest-ranking clans, while smaller mounds to the south were associated with lower-ranking clans. Wilson’s (2005, 2008) recent analysis of the 1939 and 1940 Moundville Roadway excavations has revealed that the Mississippian inhabitants of the Black Warrior River valley built and rebuilt the Moundville sociogram in a number of different ways and on a number of different scales over the course of approximately three centuries. In addition to demarcating clan...

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