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Notes Chapter 1. Introduction 1. Fortier and McElrath (2002, 174) make reference to McElrath’s coining the term “Little Bang” as “presaging the ‘Big Bang’ . . . denoting the appearance of Mississippian culture in this area.” This terminology is in keeping with their modeling the development of the social systems of the American Bottom in ruptural terms. I recognize the importance of the developments that they outline but wish to reserve for later developing the view that the material changes they note may be more adequately characterized as manifesting surface rather than deep structural changes constituting cultural and social ruptures. 2. Recently, Fowler (in Fowler et al. 1999, 59–60) has presented radiocarbon dates suggesting that monumental construction started at Cahokia in the later days of the Emergent Mississippian period. 3. This region is recognized as the outstanding and early expression of what is often referred to as the Southeastern Mississippian way of life. Because the primary focus of this book is the Mississippian period of the American Bottom, while I do touch on other examples of this way of life located primarily south and east of Cahokia, I will leave an in-depth study of the Southeast and its relations to the rest of the midcontinental region for another book. 4. Bhaskar (1978, chapter 3; 1979, 164–69) speaks of the hermeneutic spiral as the RRRE methodology. He takes this method as necessary when dealing with social systems because of their open nature (i.e., because of the impossibility of performing any realistic experimentation). The RRRE method is summed up in the following four phases: “(1) Resolution of a complex event into its components (causal analysis); (2) Redescription of component causes; (3) Retrodiction to possible (antecedent) causes of components via independently validated normic statements; and (4) Elimination of alternative possible causes of components” (Bhaskar 1979, 165, emphases in original). 5. In his attempt to deflate what he considers to be the more extreme claims about Cahokian-basedpowerandsize,Milner(1998,148)minimizeslaborrequirementsand population numbers: “It would have been a simple matter for a population of modest size to build the mounds. For example, it could have been accomplished by 470, 490, 310, and 68 laborers who worked 10 five-hour days each year during the Lohmann, Stirling, Moorehouse, and Sand Prairie phases, using durations of 100, 100, 50, and 125 years.” He reiterates these points in a later paper. For him, mound “building could easily have been accomplished during events of some social ritual significance, when large numbers of people might have been gathered together. It would not be surpris- ing if certain people regularly sponsored festivals that simultaneously augmented their reputations and provided an opportunity to construct earthen mounds, large wooden buildings, and the like” (Milner 2003, 140). Chapter 2. The Deontic Ecological Perspective 1. Given the premise that stable access to resources will promote cemeteries as a form of legitimization of proprietorial domain and exclusive territories (a mortuary position that is well entrenched in all the versions of the hierarchical monistic modular polity account), it is particularly intriguing that, until the emergence of the Mississippian period, there is essentially an absence of any indicators of mortuary ritual across the American Bottom. This puzzle or anomaly, generated by the assumption that exclusive territories prevailed, is fully addressed later and resolved under the heterarchical polyistic locale-centric account. 2. Of course, Ingold is correct to speak of poaching, understood in terms of exclusive territorial/proprietorial domain, as non-existent in this type of world. However, I note earlier and argue in more detail in later chapters that foragers also recognize the difference between appropriate and transgressive exploitation. 3. In a world of proprietorial domains, of course, tool styles are proprietorial warrants . Knowing and having the right to use the proper tools bearing the appropriate (i.e., recognized) styles endows the users with the same right to occupy the territory as those who share these styles and, therefore, the right to exploit the resources. Indeed, in an important sense, the tools are as much “certificates of birth rights” as they are hunting “licenses” (Byers 1994, 375–76; 1999b, 30–31; 2004, 68–79). 4. Bhaskar (1978, 113) expresses this view as a general ontological observation extremely well: “Living creatures qua causal agents determine the conditions under which physical laws apply; they cannot therefore already be manifest in the latter. Sentience determines the conditions of applicability of physical laws, but it is also subject to them.” 5. Irwin (1994, 62) characterizes the symbolic pragmatics...

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