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INTRODUCTION Bottle Creek, located in the Mobile Delta, and Moundville, located in the Black Warrior Valley of Alabama, are the two largest Mississippian sites in Alabama (Figure 6.1). As discussed by Fuller (Chapter 2), ceramics recovered from the two sites suggest interaction and exchange between the polities, although neither community seems to have been under the direct control of the other. Excavations in midden deposits on the mounds at both sites have yielded plant remains. This chapter summarizes what we know about the production and use of plant foods at the two sites and explores the use of plants in mound-related activities. Bottle Creek and Moundville are arguably the most impressive Mississippian mound centers in the lower Southeast. The sheer scale of monumental architecture at these two sites speaks to us of the commanding authority of the paramount chiefs who ruled them. Undoubtedly many factors contributed to the dominant role these centers achieved in regional politics, but we can be certain that the power of the elite was based in part on productive agricultural economies capable of generating substantial surpluses. For several reasons Bottle Creek and Moundville make a logical pairing for examining late prehistoric subsistence practices in the lower Southeast. Although the sites are located on the same drainage system, they are in vastly different environmental settings. Moundville was built on a high terrace overlooking the Black Warrior River, while Bottle Creek was built on Mound Island, surrounded by the swamps and rivers of the MobileTensaw Delta. The occupation histories of the two sites overlap, but they show different developmental trajectories (Figure 6.2). A basic commonality is that both sites are believed to have been paramount centers of polities that dominated the surrounding countryside. In this chapter I present the results of analyses of plant remains recovered from mounds at Bottle Creek and Moundville, and I place the results 6 / The Use of Plants in Mound-Related Activities at Bottle Creek and Moundville C. Margaret Scarry 6.1. Location of the Moundville site on the Black Warrior River, relative to the Bottle Creek site in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. Use of Plants in Mound-Related Activities / 115 in the context of previous studies from the two polities. For Moundville, this entails ¤tting them into the larger picture I have developed over the last twenty or so years. For Bottle Creek, we are dealing with baseline studies that build on those done by Kristen Gremillion (1993) and myself (Chapter 5). In addition to characterizing the plant assemblages, I will examine evidence for provisioning of plant foods from outlying sites to the centers and provide a glimpse of ceremonial uses of plants in moundrelated activities. The plant remains from both sites were recovered using®otation and for most samples I examined both the light and heavy fractions . I used standard procedures to sort and quantify the remains, and the procedures were consistent for all samples, including those from earlier analyses (see Chapter 5). In order to have sample populations large enough to make quantitative comparisons, I combined materials spanning several phases. Although this is far from ideal, it is unavoidable until we have additional collections from mound contexts. MOUNDVILLE I do not intend to put Bottle Creek in Moundville’s shadow (Chapter 2), but it makes sense to discuss the plant data from Moundville ¤rst. By do6 .2. A comparison of late prehistoric chronologies at Moundville and Bottle Creek. 116 / C. Margaret Scarry ing so we can use the better documented foodways from Moundville as reference points for examining those from Bottle Creek. Over the last few years we have substantially revised our interpretations of the development of Moundville as a political center (Figure 6.3). The Mississippian presence at Moundville begins about a.d. 1050 with a dense cluster of farmsteads and two mounds. The inhabitants began a massive construction project around a.d. 1150 and, by a.d. 1300, the mound-andplaza complex, as we know it today, was in place (Knight and Steponaitis 1998). The monumental architecture was clearly built according to a plan. A palisade enclosed the ceremonial precinct, which exhibits bilateral symmetry on its east-west axis, pairing of mounds around the plaza, and a status-related division of space along its north-south axis. Knight (1998) has argued that this town plan was a sociogram designed to mark the social order among ranked clans. During this period of intense activity, the resident population at Moundville reached its peak and the regional polity...

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