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5 Community Patterns at Moundville With the ceramic chronology now established, let us turn to the subject of how the size and configuration of the Moundville site changed through time. All the evidence gathered thus far suggests that people at Moundville were usually buried in close proximity to residential areas-in the floors of dwellings, just outside the dwellings' walls, or in cemeteries nearby (Jones and Dejarnette n.d.:3; Peebles 1978:375-381; 1979). Burials also occur in many of the mounds. Therefore, by plotting the distribution of dated burials and vessels for each time period separately, it should be possible to get at least a rough idea of when different parts of the site were occupied, and when various mounds were built. The plan of this chapter is as follows: First, I give a brief account of how the ceramic chronology was used to assign relative dates to vessels and the burials with which they were associated. Then, I discuss what is known about the spatial context of these features, and consider some of the limitations in the kinds of spatial interpretations that can be drawn. Finally, the chronological and spatial information are brought together in reconstructing community patterns at Moundville as they existed at various points in time. RELATIVE DATING OF VESSELS AND BURIALS The assignment of dates to vessels and burials was a two-step process. All of the whole vessels in the sample were first dated individually, and these dated 133 134 5. Community Patterns at Moundville vessels were then used to chronologically place the burials in which they were found. The actual procedures by which the dates were assigned are described more fully below. To begin with, each vessel was described in terms of the six classificatory dimensions to which the ceramic chronology refers (see Chapter 3). Each vessel might exhibit features characteristic of a particular type and variety, a particular kind of painted decoration, a basic shape category, certain secondary shape features, and so on. The chronological range of each of these features was usually known (see Tables 29-34 in Chapter 4); logically, therefore, a vessel that exhibited a certain set of features must have been made when the ranges of all these features overlapped. For example, if a vessel had a design that was known to date from Moundville I to late Moundville II, and a basic shape that was diagnostic of the time from late Moundville II to early Moundville III, then the vessel itself could only have been manufactured during late Moundville II. Once all the vessels had been assigned dates in this manner, these vessels were grouped into gravelots, which could then be used to date the associated burials. A burial containing a single vessel was assigned a date (or date range) identical to that of the vessel. A burial containing more than one vessel was assigned a date corresponding to the span of time in which the date ranges of the individual vessels overlapped. In carrying out this procedure, only local vessels were taken into account, since the chronological positions of nonlocal vessels usually could not be as reliably established. The resulting temporal assignments for all burials from which ceramic data were available are presented in Table 35. Inasmuch as the spatial distribution of "unassociated" vessels-those that cannot be reliably tied to grave proveniences-may also be of interest, their relative dates are given individually in Table 36. It is readily apparent from these tables that the above procedures, whether applied to vessels or gravelots, often result in chronological assignments that span more than one phase or phase segment; that is, most vessels and gravelots are dated to a plausible range, rather than to a "point" in time. At first glance this protocol might seem a bit retrogressive, for had not many gravelots already been dated more precisely when they were seriated? The answer is unequivocally no. The seriation did indeed assign each gravelot a best-fit position , but this best fit is by no means the only possible position, nor is it even the only plausible one. Looking back at Figure 25, let us consider gravelot 20/ NEC/M5 as an example. This gravelot contained attributes 21 (paired tails) and 7 (subglobular bottle with a simple base), and on this basis it was assigned a best-fit position in Segment 3A (early Moundville III). Yet taking the full chronological range of these two attributes into account (see Figure 26), we see that this burial could...

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