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11 Mound Construction and Community Changes within the Mississippian Town at Town Creek Edmond A. Boudreaux III The Mississippian Period was a time of significant political and social change within the native communities of the southeastern United States (Griffin 1985: 63; Smith 1986b: 56–63; Steponaitis 1986: 388–391). Political changes within Mississippian societies included increases in power and authority for community leaders and the establishment of multiple-community political entities known as chiefdoms (Hally 1996; Scarry 1996; Steponaitis 1986: 383). Relatively large settlements were established that were occupied for generations in some cases (Holley 1999). These large communities were formally arranged towns that contained clearly demarcated public and domestic spaces (Hally 1994: 233; Holley 1999: 28; Lewis et al. 1998). Significant architectural changes occurred within these towns during their occupation, and the most obvious change in many cases was the construction of one or more platform mounds on which public buildings were placed. It has been proposed that the placement of public buildings and residences on mound summits was a physical manifestation of concomitant social and political changes (Emerson 1997: 250; Lewis and Stout 1998: 231), namely the centralization of political authority that occurred during the process of establishing chiefdoms (Anderson 1994: 119–120, 1999: 220; DePratter 1983: 207–208; Rudolph 1984: 40). In particular , within the regional variant of Mississippian culture known as South Appalachian Mississippian (Ferguson 1971), platform mounds at a number of sites were preceded by a distinctive type of earth-embanked public building called an earthlodge (Crouch 1974; Fairbanks 1946; Larson 1994: 108–110; Rudolph 1984). Based on their architectural attributes and their analogy with the council houses of historic Indians (see Hudson 1976: 218–226), earthlodges in the Southeast have been interpreted as places where a council of community leaders came together to make decisions based on consensus (Anderson 1994: 120, 1999: 220; DePratter 1983: 207–208; Wesson 1998: 109). In contrast to the more inclusive function proposed for premound earthlodges, it has been ar- 196 Edmond A. Boudreaux III gued that access to the buildings on top of Mississippian platform mounds was limited to the community’s social and political elite (Anderson 1994: 119; Blitz 1993: 92; Brown 1997: 479; Holley 1999: 30; Lewis et al. 1998: 17; Steponaitis 1986: 390; but see Blitz 1993: 184). While archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence from across the Southeast suggests that Mississippian mound summits supported buildings that served a variety of functions (Blitz 1999: 583; Knight 2004: 318–319; Lindauer and Blitz 1997), they primarily served as the locus of political power in many communities (Hally 1996, 1999). If mounds were the seats and symbols of political power within Mississippian societies and if ground-level earthlodges were more accessible than structures on the summits of mounds, then access to leaders and leadership may have decreased over time. Thus, the sequence of change for public architecture during the Mississippian Period may reflect a centralization of political power (Anderson 1994: 119–120, 1999: 220; DePratter 1983: 207–208; Rudolph 1984: 40). This especially would have been the case in communities where a leader was able to place a residence on top of an earthen mound, an act that has been interpreted as an expression of political power that made a clear statement that the person living on top of the mound was now associated with a powerful, traditional, community-oriented symbol and with the locus of political authority (Brown 1997: 475; Knight 1989a: 287, 1998: 60; Milanich et al. 1997: 118; Steponaitis 1986: 386). While the idea that changes in public architecture within a Mississippian community reflect changes in relationships among individuals and groups certainly seems plausible, our ability to test this proposition against the archaeological record has been hindered by the limited nature of excavations in many cases. Although changes in public architecture have been documented at numerous Mississippian sites, investigations of contemporaneous nonmound contexts generally have been of a relatively limited scale that has not allowed the documentation of large portions of Mississippian communities. This essay focuses on the Town Creek site in North Carolina, where extensive excavations produced a large amount of data from public and domestic contexts that predate and postdate mound construction. I use mortuary and architectural data from the entire site to assess the proposition that changes in public architecture , namely the replacement of a ground-level earthlodge with buildings placed on a platform mound summit, reflect social and political changes within the community. I also use these data to evaluate the proposition...

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