The Woodland Southeast

19. Culture-Historical Units and the Woodland Southeast: A Case Study from Southeastern Missouri

Chapter 19 Culture-Historical Units and the Woodland Southeast: A Case Study from Southeastern Missouri Michael J. O’Brien, R. Lee Lyman, and James W. Cogswell The archaeological record of southeastern Missouri has long been a focus of attention, and there now exists a considerable body of information on that record, especially the part that postdates circa 500 B.C.—the point at which pottery first appeared in the region. Numerous overviews have appeared over the past two decades that address that segment of prehistory in southeastern Missouri (e.g., C. Chapman 1980; Lafferty and Price 1996; R. Lewis 1996; D. Morse and P. Morse 1983; O’Brien and Dunnell [eds.] 1998; O’Brien and Wood 1998), all of which in turn are based on over five decades of survey and excavation in the myriad physiographic zones that comprise the northern end of the Mississippi Embayment (Fisk 1944) (Figure 19.1). Chronology has long been at the heart of these investigations, and no shortage of schemes exists to keep track of time (and space) in the region— a situation that parallels that for the greater Southeast. In several respects the Southeast has been witness to some of the most innovative archaeology ever undertaken in the United States (see reviews in Dunnell 1985; Lyman et al. 1997; O’Brien 2000; O’Brien and Dunnell 1998; O’Brien and Lyman 1998, 1999). It was in the Mississippi Valley, for example, that a concept central to culture history, the archaeological phase, was widely applied, and it was there that pottery typology reached its zenith (Phillips 1970; Phillips et al. 1951). Somewhere in the process, however, there developed a lack of differentiation between the analytical constructs used by archaeologists to keep track of time, space, and form and the empirical reality they were intended to describe. Nowhere is this more evident than in southeastern Missouri, where there has arisen an incredible array of archaeological units used to track form over space and through time. Some units perform their intended functions quite well, whereas others do not. Given this assessment, one might think that all that needs to be done to bring better order to the record is to discard 422 O’Brien, Lyman, and Cogswell the less useful units and either keep the others or modify them. This argument , however, ignores a key epistemological issue: Are the units appropriate for the purposes to which they are being put? This is the critical question we address here by focusing on the three kinds of units—periods, phases, and pottery types—that together comprise archaeological systematics as used in the Southeast. Our comments are directed specifically to units employed by archaeologists working in southeastern Missouri, but they are applicable generally to the greater Southeast. Although we are critical of many of the units, our discussion should not be read as criticism of the researchers who laid the original foundation for time-space systematics. In terms of when they were working and the intellectual climate of the time, what they produced was no different from that produced by many other culture historians. Our point is simply that few efforts have been made in succeeding years to examine the usefulness of the units, most of which exist in unaltered form. Figure 19.1 — Map of southeastern Missouri showing physiographic features and sites mentioned in the text Sikeston Ridge Matthews M a l d e n P l a i n Culture-Historical Units and the Woodland Southeast 423 Initial Initial Initial Initial Initial T T T T Time-Space Systematics: ime-Space Systematics: ime-Space Systematics: ime-Space Systematics: ime-Space Systematics: Phases and Per Phases and Per Phases and Per Phases and Per Phases and Periods iods iods iods iods Archaeological interest in southeastern Missouri was sporadic throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see O’Brien [1996] for discussion ), and it was not until 1941, when Winslow Walker and Robert Adams conducted large-scale excavations at the Matthews site in New Madrid County (W. Walker and Adams 1946) (Figure 19.1), that the region became a focal point of sustained activity. For assistance in analyzing the pottery from Matthews, the investigators turned to James B. Griffin, who at the time was involved with Philip Phillips and James A. Ford in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley Survey (Phillips et al. 1951). Within a few years Griffin, with the help of Albert C. Spaulding, would initiate...