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1 The Southeastern Ceremonial Complex From Cult to Complex Adam King It is now 23 years since the Cottonlandia Conference brought together a collection of notable scholars to review current perspectives on that most venerable of concepts in the southeastern United States, the Southern Cult (Galloway, ed. 1989). The concept, which has its roots in the intensely productive decade of the 1930s, has a history that is both as long as and fundamentally tied to yet another venerable concept in southeastern archaeology: Mississippian. In 1984, as it is today, it was clear that our understanding of the objects, themes, and artistic styles associated with the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC) has changed a great deal, and it is equally clear that this complex is much more complex than once thought. Since the publishing of The Southeastern Ceremonial Complex: Artifacts and Analysis, new primary data have come to light that bear directly on the complex, and new theoretical approaches have continued to ask us to view it in new ways. Also in that time, Jeffrey P. Brain and Philip Phillips (1996) published a major work on engraved shell gorget styles, which has reignited many debates about the dating and nature of the SECC and reinvigorated studies of the complex. Given the circumstances, the contributors to this volume saw that the time was right to bring together and present these new data and perspectives on the SECC. The purpose here is not to present a single, unified conception of the SECC but rather to present new data and new ideas on the temporal and social contexts of the objects, artistic styles, and symbolic themes included in the complex. In fact, it will become clear that there is no single, unified perspective on the meaning , function, or content of the SECC precisely because the SECC was not a single, monolithic ceremonial complex, artistic tradition, or belief system. Despite this, for simplicity’s sake I will continue to refer to this complex as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex or SECC. The purpose of this chapter is to create a context for the contributions that follow by briefly reviewing the development of our conceptions of the SECC 2 King and the research that it has engendered. I organize this review around a series of publications that I consider to be watershed contributions in the history of the SECC. The reader is referred to Brown (2001a), Brown and Kelly (2000), Galloway (1989), and Williams (1968) for other fine reviews of the development of the SECC. From the Warrior Cult to the Southern Cult (1931 to 1968) The first watershed publication on the SECC came in 1945 with the publication of “A Prehistoric Ceremonial Complex in the Southeastern United States” by Antonio Waring and Preston Holder (see Waring and Holder 1945). While this article is recognized by most as an important early work on the topic, it more than anything represents a systematic explication of ideas that were current in the 1930s. This is not to say that there is nothing original in the article, but it is important to recognize that it is a concrete statement that grew out of a larger debate occurring at the time (see Williams 1968). The earliest published discussion of some kind of cult or complex in the late prehistoric Southeast came from Spinden (1931), who suggested the presence of a “warrior cult” that was introduced from Mexico. Later in the 1930s while completing his dissertation at Harvard, Phillips (1940) concluded, as Williams (1968:6) notes, “quite independently,” that the exotic materials known from places like Etowah, Moundville, and Spiro could be explained as part of an “eagle warrior complex” that spread rapidly by a small number of people from Mexico. At roughly the same time, a “southeastern version” of a hypothesis to explain those same data was formulated. In 1937, Waring hosted an informal meeting in Savannah in which he and Holder, with James A. Ford and Gordon R. Willey in attendance, formalized their ideas about a Southern Cult that swept across the Southeast like the Ghost Dance would do in the West centuries later (see Williams 1968:6). Although their paper was not published until after the war, it was in large part finished and available to Ford and Willey when they published their influential synthesis on eastern archaeology (see Ford and Willey 1941). In that paper, Ford and Willey noted a “curious cult,” which they called the Southern Cult and which was in large measure the...

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