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My ¤rst exposure to a Contact-period lithic assemblage came when I volunteered to analyze the stone tools from the Orchard site, an early-eighteenthcentury Chickasaw site in northeast Mississippi. The collection contained many surprises (Johnson 1997). I had expected that the access to European trade goods would have resulted in the complete replacement of stone tools with metal ones. Not only was there a large number of stone tools in the collection from the Orchard site, but the lithic industry of this site is one of the most elaborate and structured assemblages to be found in the Midsouth. Perhaps the most interesting of the stone tools are the thumbnail scrapers. The analyses of the Orchard site scrapers showed them to be uniform in size, shape, and technology. Strong evidence also suggests that the production demands of these tools forced the Chickasaws to exploit a new source of raw material , the Fort Payne tabular cherts which outcrop in the Tennessee River valley to the northeast. This material was of suf¤cient size to allow the production of the sort of ®ake blank that is critical in making a sharp but broad working-edge angle (Figure 4.1). The Chickasaw stone tool kit at the Orchard site also contains Dallas points which must have been arrowheads, broad bifacial knives, and awls. The question was, if the Chickasaw had access to the obviously superior European tools, why were they using arrows and stone scrapers? A close examination of the spatial and temporal distribution of similar early historic tools in the Southeast led to a likely explanation. The Chickasaws’ location at the western extreme of the British trade network and their isolation as the result of hostilities from the French trade out of Mobile meant that they had relatively less access to metal tools. In order to participate in the deer skin trade, they were forced to supplement their tool kit with stone tools. In fact, scrapers also become more common at the edges of the early historic European trade network 4 Chickasaw Lithic Technology: A Reassessment Jay K. Johnson in northern Alabama and central Tennessee (Johnson 1997). It seems likely that in these frontier locations, several days’ journey from the European ports of trade, other items assumed priority to the Indians. For example, glass beads, likely markers of status differentiation, are abundant on early-eighteenth-century Chickasaw sites in northeastern Mississippi. Fig. 4.1. Chickasaw lithic artifacts: a) British gun spall; b) French gun spall; c–d) Native gun spall; e–h) Dallas Triangular points; i–j) Edwards Stemmed, var. Sun®ower points; k–l) awls; m) bifacial knifed; n–q) thumbnail scrapers, dorsal and side views 52 jay k. johnson The distribution of scrapers within the area that was occupied by the Chickasaws throughout the eighteenth century also proved interesting. The Chickasaw divided themselves into moieties. The red clans occupied villages in an area designated by the French as the Large Prairie (Atkinson 1985; Galloway 1996). These war villages were located north of present-day Tupelo, Mississippi, along Beldon Ridge (Figure 4.2). The white clan villages were situated in an area known as the Small Prairie that is now covered by the subdivisions and malls of downtown Tupelo. They were led by the peace chief who resided in the village of Ackia. Thumbnail scrapers and other elements of the Chickasaw stone tool kit are much more common in Large Prairie assemblages than they are at Small Prairie sites. This pattern was interpreted to be the result of the documented trade relations that the Small Prairie villages had with both the French and the English (Johnson 1997). As a consequence, the peace villages had better access Fig. 4.2. Map of Chickasaw sites in northeastern Mississippi chickasaw lithic technology 53 to trade goods than did the war villages, whose European trade seems to have been largely restricted to the English. Stone tools were not needed to supplement metal tools once the production demands of the deer skin trade began to be felt in the Small Prairie villages. THE CHICKASAW PROJECT Unfortunately, this hypothesis about trade relations and stone tool production would be dif¤cult to test by excavating Chickasaw village sites in the Large and Small Prairies, since most of them have been destroyed by the growth of Tupelo. Therefore, John O’Hear and I initiated a joint Mississippi State University– University of Mississippi project to reanalyze the collections from the Chickasaw sites excavated by Jesse Jennings and Albert Spaulding between...

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