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3 Chronological Implications of the Bellows-Shaped Apron James A. Brown Rarely has the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC) been treated as anything other than an undifferentiated entity with change through time having little place. Repeated attempts to create temporal distinctions have not gained widespread acceptance. As a consequence, the subject has failed to assume its rightful place as a historical subject. Without that historical dimension the SECC cannot be party to any interactive relationship with social, political, religious, or economic developments. It remains where Waring and Holder (1945) stuck it—as merely reactive (Brain and Phillips 1996:400–402). Consequently, we are deprived of any insight into ideological content underlying those developments. A major source of precious information thereby becomes lost to a more comprehensive perspective to developments outside of the confines of the SECC subject matter. The thesis of this chapter is that credible segmentation of the continuum of SECC motifs already exists if one is willing to look beyond the evidence provided by the grave lots of the “BigThree” contributors—Etowah, Moundville, and Spiro (Brown and Kelly 2000; Muller 1989). Instead of relying primarily upon the list of grave objects and their iconography from these sites as enshrined by Waring and Holder (1945), a more fruitful approach has been to define the SECC through theme, style, and iconography (Brown and Kelly 2000; Reilly 2004). The following contribution owes its genesis to Phil Phillips’s recognition that the scalp motif in the Craig style system undergoes a transformation from the “bellows-shaped” to the “carrot-shaped.”That is, the long-haired scalp with a rectangular frontlet was transformed into an oblong conventionalization centered on a circular frontlet. By generalizing this sequence to other style traditions, a style horizon can be recognized that runs across regions. This horizon emerged around a.d. 1300 with the sacred scalp taking on the form with the distinctive circular headdress frontlet. The shifts in political economy envisioned as activating this new imagery is a subject taken up for consideration elsewhere (Brown n.d.). Chronological Implications of the Bellows-Shaped Apron 39 Background Not long after Waring and Holder advanced their compressed-time position, others argued for some temporal unpacking. Waring (1968a) himself sought to provide a precursor in an attempt to tie the complex to Muskogean cult bringer myths he thought related to the beginning of the Mississippian period. His solution was to allocate specific types of artifacts to a formative period without tying them intrinsically to the classic SECC types (Waring 1968b). Madeline Kneberg (1959) was the first to advance a sequence of specific types of engraved shell gorgets. Her series, limited though it was to eastern Tennessee gorgets, was constructed from the stratigraphic sequence of grave lots found primarily at the Hixon site. Although strongly criticized by Brain and Phillips (1996), a reexamination of the sequence by Lynn Sullivan (2001) has confirmed Kneberg’s thesis, although it necessitated correcting stratigraphic assignment errors and tying 14 C-dated strata to the revised sequence. Muller (1989) returned to the task by employing his general sense of site contexts to advance an all-inclusive chronology. Brain and Phillips (1996) responded to Waring, Kneberg, and Muller by falling back on arguments based upon patterns of artifact co-associations, rather liberally conceived. They advocated a chronology of limited time depth that pulled the core of the SECC primarily into the fifteenth century. Strong reasons already exist suggesting that SECC content has a background extending deeply in time. Radiometrically dated objects, grave lots, mound stage layers, and rock art demonstrate 500 years of historically related image making (Brown and Kelly 2000; Brown and Rogers 1999; Diaz-Granados et al. 2001; King 2001a, 2003; Knight and Steponaitis 1998; Sullivan 2001; Williams and Goggin 1956). Chronologically controlled images and designs at Cahokia alone demonstrate a continuous use of diagnostic stylistic treatments over a period in excess of 200 years (Brown and Kelly 2000). This radiocarbon-dated record argues for a long duration for SECC themes and iconography—far beyond the confines of the grave lots record at the Big Three sites. Lastly, certain distinctive icons, such as the eye-in-hand, are present in pre-Mississippian contexts (Willey 1948), thereby begging the question of what transpired between the time these images first appeared and their reincarnation later. All told, numerous indications point to a content of long duration and one not confined to the grave goods at the Big Three sites. The problem...

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