In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV) Plaquemine is one of several late prehistoric , multiregional cultural variants that archaeologists have generally regarded as distinct from, but interacting with, contemporary Mississippians. Coeval non-Mississippian archaeological cultures include Caddoan in the Trans-Mississippi South (TMS), plus Fort Ancient, Oneota, and Plains Village in other areas. These cultures are generally rather vaguely de¤ned and are classi¤ed mainly on the basis of ceramics. Identi¤cations are often problematic in regions close to Mississippian or other cultural variants. This is certainly true for the situations summarized here. De¤nitions, Concepts, and Problems Interestingly, the impetus for this volume came from denizens of the Louisiana bottomlands, as did the original Plaquemine concept. As Rees and Livingood note in Chapter 1, Plaquemine was ¤rst published (as “Placquemine”!) in two charts derived from James A. Ford’s Louisiana work (Ford and Willey 1941:Figures 2 and 5), but it was not really described until the 1950s (Ford 1951:85–89, 100ff, 125, 127–129; Quimby 1951, 1957; cf. Gregory 1969; Neitzel 1965). By contrast, major publications of the Harvard-based Lower Mississippi Survey (LMS) downplayed the Plaquemine concept. Ford and his cohorts operated in a sort of parallel universe, distinct from their LMS colleagues and successors, who distanced themselves from Ford on various issues. Instead, Phillips (1970) wrote only of Coles Creek and Mississippi as culture periods, overextending both spatially. He referred variously to “Plaquemine culture” but avoided the P-word in his minimal discussion of his southeast Arkansas Bellaire phase (Phillips 1970:944; see below). In a similarly brief Fitzhugh phase section (Phillips 1970:945), he referred to relationships with “the Plaquemine phase,” also mentioned elsewhere (Phillips 1970:50, 560), but 9 The Outer Limits of Plaquemine Culture A View from the Northerly Borderlands Marvin D. Jeter in the end did not actually name such a phase. Phillips (1970:946–947) also suggested that Plaquemine was an outgrowth of Ford’s earlier (1936) Caddoan complex, but actually it was Ford’s homegrown interpolation between his Coles Creek and Natchez periods, displacing the “Caddoan” concept that he had erroneously intruded into those regions (Jeter et al. 1989:205). In the Lake George report, the drama was recast in terms of interactions between Coles Creek and Mississippian cultures, which again got headings and period names, while Plaquemine did not (Williams and Brain 1983:391, 405, 408). In the big-picture discussion (Williams and Brain 1983:408ff ), Plaquemine was only mentioned in passing in a section entitled “Ecumene (a.d. 1200–1400).” A discussion of the Winterville, Routh, and Anna phases did not mention their Plaquemine cultural af¤liation (Williams and Brain 1983:413–414). Instead, following Brain’s (1969) lead, it concentrated on “Cahokian and continuing (but unspeci¤ed) [sic] Mississippian in®uence” on Coles Creek culture. Plaquemine was mentioned only in the next few paragraphs , once with “culture” in quotes, after which it was “de¤ned as Mississippianized Coles Creek” (Williams and Brain 1983:414). This report also whittled away at the time span and artifacts allotted to Plaquemine, by subtracting a key phase. Whereas Brain’s (1969:Table 20) Winterville-based dissertation and Phillips’s (1970:558–560, 945, Figure 450) tome had included Crippen Point as an early phase of Plaquemine culture, dating from a.d. 1000 to 1200, Williams and Brain (1983:373) suggested an extension of the Coles Creek period to include Crippen Point, with its basic Addis 1 set of 10 ceramic varieties as a terminal expression of Coles Creek culture, dating about a.d. 1100–1200. The ¤rst phase of Plaquemine culture became the Winterville phase, starting around a.d. 1200, featuring the Greenville set of grog/shell-tempered types, plus the Yazoo 2 set of shell-tempered types (Williams and Brain 1983:Figures 9.4, 10.16, 11.4, and 12.1). So at least in the Lower Yazoo Basin, the Fordian concept of Plaquemine culture was gutted, even deprived of its basic Addis ware (Quimby 1951:107– 109), which had already been subsumed under the northerly type Baytown Plain as var. Addis by Phillips (1970:50–51). Instead, Plaquemine was characterized as having primarily northerly in®uenced wares with shell tempering! However, Addis ware still appears primarily associated with the Plaquemine tradition farther south, on into historic Natchezan culture (Brown 1985a:Table 2). De¤nitions and criteria for Addis ware have varied signi¤cantly (Jeter et al. 1989:206; Ryan 2004:91–93). Recently, they have emphasized heterogeneous tempering agents, mainly...

Share