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1 Mississippian Public Architecture, Leadership, and the Town Creek Community Numerous Mississippian societies developed across the southeastern United States beginning around a.d. 1000 (Smith 1986; Steponaitis 1986). The Mississippian rubric, which covers over 800 years and virtually all of southeastern North America, encompasses a great deal of variation regarding material culture,physiography,settlement patterns,and political organization (Griffin 1967,1985a:190; Smith 1978).Generally,Mississippian societies have been associated with relatively large populations, the increased importance of maize as a dietary staple, the construction of permanent towns and ceremonial centers ,extensive trade networks,the appearance and elaboration of village-level positions of authority,and the placement of public buildings on earthen platform mounds (Griffin 1985a:63;Smith 1986:56–63;Steponaitis 1986:388–391). The appearance of Mississippian platform mounds has been taken as an indication that the communities who built them possessed certain social and political attributes that communities without mounds lacked.At the regional scale, sites with mounds generally are seen as social and political centers that integrated contemporaneous nonmound sites into settlement systems. At the community level, mounds are often seen as marking both increased vertical social differentiation and the centralization of political power (Anderson 1994:80; Hally 1999; Lewis and Stout 1998:231–232; Lindauer and Blitz 1997; Milner and Schroeder 1999:96; Muller 1997:275–276; Steponaitis 1978, 1986:389–392). Platform mounds have been a part of Southeastern Native American communities since at least 100 b.c. (Jeffries 1994; Knight 1990; Lindauer and Blitz 1997:172).They were associated with a number of different activities and were built by societies that were economically, politically, and socially organized in very different ways (Blitz 1993a:7; Lindauer and Blitz 1997). One significant development occurred around a.d. 400, when leaders in some communities began to place their houses on top of earthen mounds—an act that has been interpreted as an attempt to legitimize personal authority by a commu- 2 / Chapter 1. nity leader through the appropriation of a powerful, traditional, communityoriented symbol (Milanich et al. 1997:118; Steponaitis 1986:386). These early acts were followed in subsequent centuries by three major changes in political leadership that are thought to reflect the institutionalization and centralization of political power within Mississippian chiefly authority. First, while leadership positions in Woodland societies probably were attained through achievement (Steponaitis 1986:383), theoretically being open to individuals from any family, Mississippian leaders increasingly were drawn from highranking families in the community (Blitz 1993a:12; Knight 1990:17). Second, unlike Woodland societies in which it seems that charismatic individuals built and maintained a group of followers, Mississippian societies had offices of leadership that existed independently of any one individual (Hally 1996; Scarry 1996:4; Steponaitis 1986:983).Third,while earlier societies are thought to have made political decisions through councils in which a number of community leaders reached consensus, community-level decisions in Mississippian societies seem to have been made by a much smaller subset of community members; that is,political power became centralized (Pauketat 1994:168; Scarry 1996:11; Steponaitis 1986:388; Wesson 1998:114; but see Blitz 1993a:7 and Muller 1997:83). It has been proposed that changes in leadership that occurred during the Mississippian period—namely, the centralization of political power—are re- flected in concomitant changes in public architecture (Emerson 1997:250; Lewis and Stout 1998:231). 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 building called an earthlodge—a structure with earth-embanked walls and an entrance indicated by short, parallel wall trenches (Crouch 1974; Rudolph 1984). The best-known example is the building found beneath Mound D at Ocmulgee in Georgia (Fairbanks 1946; Larson 1994:108–110).It is a circular structure with a central hearth and a bench with individual seats along its wall. Based on analogy with the council houses of historic Indians (see Hudson 1976:218– 226) and perhaps using the Ocmulgee structure as a prototype, 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 argued that access to the buildings on top of Mississippian platform mounds was limited to a much smaller subset of...

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