Mississippian Mortuary Practices: Beyond Hierarchy and the Representationist Perspective

9. The Materialization of Status and Social Structure at Koger’s Island Cemetery, Alabama

9 The Materialization of Status and Social Structure at Koger’s Island Cemetery, Alabama Jon Bernard Marcoux The explanatory frameworks used to interpret the mortuary practices of Mississippian societies have undergone a significant amount of change within the last 35 years. Early mortuary studies of these societies relied heavily on the socio-evolutionary typologies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Fried 1967; Service 1962) and the related notion of a cross-culturally valid social type known as a “ranked” society (e.g., Binford 1971; Brown 1971; Goldstein 1980, 1981; Peebles 1971, 1974). The authors of these works developed their interpretations around this notion using the Binford-Saxe mortuary program, a theoretical construct that considered mortuary events to be expressions of the social persona of the deceased individual and his/her inherited place in the rigid and hierarchical social order of a ranked society. While the authors of more recent studies continue to use the Binford-Saxe program to derive information about Mississippian social structure, they have largely moved away from interpretations that are cast in the language of social evolution. These authors consider mortuary practices within the social contexts of particular native southeastern societies (e.g., Eastman 2001; Rodning 1996, 2001; Sullivan 2001). Consequently, their attempts to understand the social context of mortuary practices rely more upon ethnohistoric accounts of southeastern Indian societies than upon ethnographic analogies to Polynesian groups and other societies exhibiting a similar level of social complexity. This essay addresses the current shift in explanatory frameworks by offering an alternative interpretation of the mortuary practices materialized at the Koger’s Island site, a Mississippian cemetery located in the middle Tennessee River Valley of northern Alabama (Figures 9.1 and 9.2). I contrast my interpretation with that of Christopher Peebles (1971), who structured his analysis of the Koger’s Island cemetery around the Binford-Saxe mortuary program and the socioevolutionary concept of the ranked society. 146 Jon Bernard Marcoux Like Peebles, I test the relationship between social structure and mortuary practices by using a Binford-Saxe–type analysis that focuses on burial types, variability in the distribution of artifacts, and the spatial arrangement of graves within the Koger’s Island cemetery. However, instead of testing a socio-evolutionary model of social structure, as Peebles did, I use the burial data to test the applicability of ethnohistorically derived models of dual social structure such as those Knight (1990, 1997) and Hudson (1976) have posited. These models have become more popular in recent years and describe a somewhat different form of social structure than a ranked society. First, Knight and Hudson argue that hierarchical status in these models was achieved through an individual’s age and exploits instead of being strictly inherited. Furthermore , members of such societies reckoned relationships among members of dually organized societies differently than in ranked societies, where descent and status were so intertwined. These models predict archaeological materializations of social structure (e.g., spatial organization of cemeteries, settlement layout) that are not weighed so heavily toward differences in hierarchical status . Given the patterns I identify through individual-level and spatial analyses, I conclude that while the hierarchical status of individuals was materialized in Figure 9.1. Areal Map Showing the Location of the Koger’s Island Cemetery. Figure 9.2. Plan Map Depicting the Excavated Burials and Features at the Koger’s Island Cemetery. Adapted from Webb and DeJarnette 1942: Figure 70. 148 Jon Bernard Marcoux some of the mortuary events, it appears to have been based on achievement rather than inheritance. Furthermore, I argue that status was not the sole organizing principle of the cemetery. Instead, I hold that the spatial distribution of interments and funerary objects indicates that the mortuary practices of the local community were more likely structured by a form of dual social structure in that these practices marked either the membership of the deceased in one of two corporate kin groups or their status as an “outsider.” Mississippian Mortuary Analysis and Socio-Evolutionary Typologies Together with Arthur Saxe (1970), Lewis Binford (1971) developed the body of middle-range theory known as the Binford-Saxe mortuary program. The foundation of their program rested upon the belief that mortuary practices were dictated by two symbolic referents to the deceased individual: the social persona of the deceased and the size of the group that had “duty-status” relationships with the deceased. Both researchers noted that the identity constructed for the...