The Archaeology of Everyday Life at Early Moundville

1. Introduction

1 Introduction How complex were Mississippian polities and in what ways were they complex? What role did small-scale social groups play in the emergence of regionally organized political hierarchies? These issues are the focus of this archaeological investigation of the Moundville site in the Black Warrior Valley of west-central Alabama . Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, the Moundville site was the political and ceremonial center of a regionally organized Mississippian polity. The Moundville site encompasses 75 ha and consists of 29 mounds grouped in pairs around a rectangular plaza (Figure 1.1). There is a very orderly arrangement of these earthen monuments (Peebles 1971, 1978). The largest mounds are located on the northern edge of the plaza and they become increasingly smaller going either clockwise or counterclockwise around the plaza to the south (Figure 1.1). Knight (1998) has interpreted this community plan as a sociogram, “an architectural depiction of a social order based on ranked clans” (Steponaitis and Knight 2004:168). According to this model the Moundville community was segmented into a variety of different clan precincts, the ranked position of which was represented in the size and arrangement of paired earthen mounds around the central plaza. The largest earthen mounds on the northern portion of the plaza were associated with the highest-ranking clans while smaller mounds to the south were associated with lower-ranking clans. There has been a general acceptance of Knight’s (1998) interpretation, which is grounded in both archaeological analysis and ethnohistoric analogy. Still unclear is the kind of hierarchy this network of ranked clans at Moundville entailed. Did a corporate group’s ranked place and space in the Moundville sociogram involve notable differences in status and wealth? If so, how were these inequalities materialized and what kinds of corporate-group strategies served to produce them? Previous investigations of Moundville’s Mississippian occupation portrayed a complex chiefdom that was highly differentiated politically, socially, and economically . It has been argued that substantial organizational differences not only characterized mound and off-mound residential contexts but also crosscut the broader community and regional polity (Peebles 1971, 1987a, 1987b; Peebles and Kus 1977; Steponaitis 1978; Welch 1991a, 1991b, 1996; Welch and Scarry 1995). This model of Moundville’s political economy has become an oft-cited example of how Mississippian polities were organized and compare to other middle-range 2 Chapter 1 societies around the world (Cobb 2003; Earle 1987; Price and Feinman 2001; Scarry and Fish 1999). In recent years, however, there has been increasing debate concerning the organization of Moundville’s political economy (Marcoux 2000; Maxham 2000, 2004; Welch 1996; Wilson 2001). These disagreements stem from a broader scholarly debate regarding the complexity of Mississippian polities throughout the southeastern United States (Blitz 1999; Milner 1998; Muller 1984, 1986, 1997; Pauketat 1994; Welch 1991b). Over the past decade different scholars have generated contrasting arguments based on the examination of the same regional datasets (Anderson 1994; Blitz 1999; Emerson 1997a, 1997b; Mehrer 1995). In many cases it appears that these disparate interpretations are linked to different perspectives about the organizational dynamics that define “chiefdoms” as a societal category. I believe that investigations of Moundville’s political economy would benefit from the implementation of an agent-centered household archaeological approach. Figure 1.1. The Moundville site (geographic information system [GIS] representation ), featuring the Roadway (1939–1940), Riverbank (Picnic Area [PA] and East Conference Building [ECB] tracts), and North of Mound R (NR) excavations. Introduction 3 By focusing on the everyday practices and interactions among small-scale social groups, I hope to sidestep many of the a priori assumptions about macroscale organizational dynamics that fuel ongoing debates about Mississippian political complexity . I begin by documenting and describing the different residential groups at early Moundville and the kinds of routine activities that formed everyday Mississippian domestic life. Second, I consider how the everyday practices and interactions among these groups contributed to the emergence of social complexity in the Black Warrior Valley of west-central Alabama. The data for this research include 140 Mississippian buildings and 14,320 pottery sherds from throughout the Moundville site (Appendixes 1 and 2). These data derive primarily from the 1939 and 1940 Moundville Roadway excavations conducted by the Alabama Museum of Natural History. Agency and Structure in the Archaeological Record Agency theory and practice theory are broad, interrelated approaches for examining the relationship between the actions of individuals and broader social phenomena .These theoretical approaches were developed, in part, as a reaction against top-down...