Mississippian Mortuary Practices: Beyond Hierarchy and the Representationist Perspective

1. Mississippian Mortuary Practices and the Quest for Interpretation

1 Mississippian Mortuary Practices and the Quest for Interpretation Lynne P. Sullivan and Robert C. Mainfort Jr. Mississippian Period (ca. A.D. 900–1500) native peoples in the southeastern and midwestern United States are known for towns that typically include platform mounds and plazas and for elaborate and well-crafted copper and shell ornaments, pottery vessels, and stonework. Some of these objects were socially valued goods that often were placed in ritual contexts, such as graves, within or near Mississippian towns. The funerary context of these artifacts has sparked considerable study and debate among archaeologists, raising questions about the place in society of the individuals interred with such items as well as the nature of the Mississippian societies in which these ancient people lived. The intellectual bridges that connect archaeologically observed mortuary practices with the social behaviors of past populations are of significant interest to archaeologists, and the study of Mississippian mortuary sites was instrumental in the development of archaeological mortuary theory. Notable examples include publications by Brown (1971, 1981a), Goldstein (1980, 1981), Peebles (1971), and Peebles and Kus (1977). These studies were among the first to break from the old school archaeological axiom that “one cannot dig up a social system.” While this old saw technically is true, pioneering researchers realized that Kroeber’s (1927) long-standing argument that mortuary behavior could not be connected with other aspects of society was flawed and that mortuary sites could indeed provide data sets relevant to the organization and operation of past social systems. Furthermore, these data could be used to develop ideas and models based on observations rather than on speculation or solely upon ethnographic analogy. The social dimensions of mortuary practices thus have become an important arena of study, and these studies have had a significant impact on how archaeologists envision and interpret the late prehistoric Mississippian societies of the eastern United States. 2 Lynne P. Sullivan and Robert C. Mainfort Jr. Figure 1.1. Locations of Archaeological Sites Discussed in this Volume. 1. Spiro; 2. Pecan Point; 3. Nodena; 4. Cahokia; 5. Aztalan; 6. Koger’s Island; 7. Moundville; 8. Etowah; 9. Ledford Island; 10. SunWatch; 11. Fains Island; 12. Holliston Mills; 13. Town Creek. Theoretical perspectives and principles for interpreting archaeological mortuary data continue to evolve, as do theoretical perspectives in the discipline as a whole. New perspectives are facilitating new ideas and insights into the operation and diversity of Mississippian ritual, symbolism, and social systems. The collection of essays in this volume showcases some of these new theoretical and analytical currents from a geographically diverse set of Mississippian contexts (Figure 1.1). As a context for these studies, we take the opportunity in this chapter to discuss previous studies of Mississippian mortuary practices as well as current trends and look at how new studies, including those in this volume, are changing perceptions and interpretations of the late prehistoric peoples subsumed under the rubric “Mississippian.” The Quest for Interpretation 3 Beyond Representation: The Pursuit of Theoretical Perspectives The interment of elaborate funerary objects with some Mississippian individuals naturally led scholars to ask questions about social inequities in Mississippian societies. The search for intimations of social hierarchy, typically tied to the cultural evolutionary schemes of Fried (1967) and Service (1962, 1975), was a major focus of many archaeological mortuary studies that appeared in the late 1960s, 70s, and 80s, many of which used data from Mississippian contexts (e.g., Brown 1981a; Decker 1969; Greber 1976; Goldstein 1980; King 1976; Mainfort 1985; Peebles 1971; Rothschild 1979; S. Shennan 1975; Shryock 1987; Stickel 1968; Sullivan 1986; Tainter 1975a, 1975b, 1977; Tainter and Cordy 1977). This approach stemmed from the theoretical foundations of the “new archaeology ,” namely the materialist evolutionary perspectives of Marvin Harris (e.g., 1968, 1979), Elman Service (1962, 1975), and Julian Steward (e.g., 1955). These views sought overarching principals, explanations, or “laws” of human social behavior and cultural variation that were to be discovered through empirical research using strict scientific methods. In a particularly influential study, Arthur Saxe (1970) employed these materialist principals and provisionally tested a number of hypotheses regarding various aspects of mortuary practices and their relationships to societal contexts and organization. The notion of representation is embedded in Saxe’s view that funerary rites in some way represent the deceased individual’s place in society. Drawing on role theory (Goodenough 1965), Saxe (1970: 4–6) viewed funerary rites as a final occasion when...