The Archaeology of Town Creek

4. Moortuary Analysis

4 Mortuary Analysis Town Creek’s rich mortuary record (Davis et al.1996; Driscoll 2001) is a critical dataset for an exploration of the relationship between changes in Mississippian public architecture and changes in the nature of leadership. The interpretations presented in this chapter are based on the assumption that individuals who occupied leadership roles within the Mississippian community at Town Creek are recognizable within the site’s mortuary record.Community leaders should be identifiable based on distinctions in where they were buried, how they were buried,and the objects that were interred with them.The community history established in Chapter 3 will be used as a diachronic framework to explore changes in who community leaders were and how roles associated with community leadership were expressed before and after mound construction at Town Creek. A great deal of variability exists at Town Creek in the ways individuals were treated at death.The dimensions on which this variability is expressed include the position of the body within the grave (flexed or extended), evidence for postmortem processing of the body (secondary bundle burial), the location of the burial (in public or domestic contexts), and the kinds and quantities of associated artifacts. The mortuary analysis presented here is based on the assumption that the spaces in which individuals were buried, the position in which they were placed, and the items that were interred with them reflect the statuses the individuals held in life and the social roles they played within their community (see Binford 1971:13–15; Saxe 1970, 1971). The ethnohistoric record of the Southeast supports the idea that an individual ’s social status had a great deal of influence on his treatment at death (Brown 1971:104–105). Ethnohistoric and ethnographic observations indicate that native Southeastern Indian communities contained individuals who fulfilled numerous social and political roles. These included various grades or types of warriors, priests, and community leaders (Hudson 1990:61–67; Lefler 1967:210; Scarry 1992; Swanton 1979:641–665; Waselkov and Braund Mortuary Analysis / 67 1995:118;Worth 1998:92).Based on cross-cultural studies (Binford 1971) and the documentary record from the Southeast in particular, social and political factors may explain much of the variation in the mortuary record at Town Creek. While the mortuary rituals of some societies actually obfuscate distinctions that existed in life, the consideration in this research of nonmortuary contexts from across the site should allow the recognition of any stark disjuncture between the daily expression of social and political differences and their manifestation in death (see Hodder 1982:152–153). In this chapter, mortuary data are used to explore leadership roles and how they may have changed through time at Town Creek. Leadership is a status that is marked within many small-scale societies worldwide through the differential treatment of individuals at death (Feinman and Neitzel 1984:57; Flannery 1999; Marcus and Flannery 1996; Whalen and Minnis 2000:172). Artifact distributions can be useful in this regard. If objects signified a particular status held in life, then burials of community leaders—as individuals who hold the most diverse number of roles in small-scale and middle-range societies—should contain a greater diversity (i.e., high richness) of associated objects (Howell 1995:129, 1996:63; Kintigh 2000:104). Therefore, one of the ways in which Town Creek burials are compared is the number of artifact types (NAT) included as grave goods (see Bennett 1984:36; Howell 1995:129, 1996:63; Kintigh 2000:104). Also, the presence of artifacts that are distinctive within the context of a particular community (e.g., copper plates and axes, stone celts, the remains of litters, conch shells) have been recognized as symbols of particular leadership statuses in some Mississippian cases (Blitz 1993a:104; Brown 1971:101; Peebles and Kus 1977:439; Scarry 1992:179).Another way to recognize leaders is that they may be set apart physically from others, for example, being buried in special places within the community such as public spaces (DePratter 1983:189; Sullivan 1995:117). Also, the remains of leaders may have been processed in distinctive ways. The ideas of special burial location and extra processing were combined in the practice among Mississippian groups of venerating past chiefs through the storage of their cleaned and bundled skeletal remains in mound-top temples (Brown 1997:475). In addition, leaders may have been set apart by the arrangement of their bodies within the graves (e.g., orientation, seated vs...