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Acl"\nowledgments The present endeavor is actually part of a larger project that was organized by Christopher Peebles in 1977. The overall aim of the project was to attain a better understanding of the Moundville phase, particularly with regard to questions concerning the development and decline of the complex Mississippian society that the phase appeared to represent. At its inception, the project was planned as a cooperative venture among four researchers: Marggaret Scarry was to reconstruct subsistence using excavated food remains; Margaret Schoeninger was to be concerned with the biocultural aspects of nutrition, using osteological data from human burials; Peebles was to conduct a surface reconnaissance in order to gather detailed information on settlement patterns; and I was to construct a ceramic chronology so that fine-grained temporal control in all areas of investigation could be achieved. Although each of these lines of inquiry was to be pursued somewhat independently, the hope was that ultimately the various lines would converge to attain the project's overall aims. The project was funded by a National Science Foundation grant to the University of Michigan (BNS78-07133). Fieldwork began in June 1978, and was carried on intermittently until August 1979. A tremendous amount of information was gathered during this interval by all the investigators, and much of this information is, at this writing, still in the process of being analyzed. For my own part of the project, "fieldwork" was mostly carried out indoors, recording data on whole vessels from Moundville in extant museum collections. I was assisted in this task by Laurie Cameron Steponaitis, who xix xx Acknowledgments photographed all the vessels, developed and printed the film, and helped the fieldwork along in innumerable other ways. It is safe to say that without her talents, we would never have accomplished as much on this project as we did. Other people who, at various times, helped us sift through these collections are John Blitz, Gail Cameron, Mary Meyer, Masao Nishimura, Jeffrey Parsons, John Scarry, Margaret Scarry, Letitia Shapiro, Deborah Walker, and Paul Welch. Their willingness to put up with the tedium and dust while looking through countless boxes is gratefully acknowledged. Our obsessive search for Moundville collections eventually took us to five museums in four different states. Although not all of the collections were found to contain whole vessels, the work was invariably made more comfortable and productive by the staffs of the institutions we visited. Among those to be thanked are Joseph Vogel, John Hall, and Dorothy Beckham of the Alabama Museum of Natural History; Richard Krause, Kenneth Turner, and Amelia Mitchell of the Department of Anthropology, University of Alabama; Carey Oakley, Eugene Futato, and Tim Mistovic of the Office of Archaeological Research, University of Alabama; David Fawcett, James Smith, and Anna Roosevelt of the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation; Vincent Wilcox, Joseph Brown, and Marguerite Brigida of the Department of Anthropology , National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution; Barbara Conklin of the American Museum of Natural History; and Richard MacNeish of the R. S. Peabody Foundation, Andover. Once the data had been collected, the bulk of the analysis was carried out at the Smithsonian Institution, where I was appointed a predoctoral fellow. Bruce Smith, my advisor while on fellowship, was truly a stimulating colleague with whom to work. He not only shared freely his ideas on Mississippian culture, but also provided logistic, bureaucratic, and moral support in more ways than I can possibly enumerate. A number of other people at the Smithsonian contributed substantially to the effort as well. David Bridge was instrumental in helping me grasp the complexities of SELGEM, the data-banking program with which I managed to keep track of all the vessels. Jane Norman helped by reconstructing beautifully a vessel which seemed to be fragmented beyond hope. Also to be acknowledged is Florence Jones, who, as a Smithsonian Institution volunteer, ably drew most of the rim profiles that appear in this report. The technological studies of ceramics were all done at the National Bureau of Standards in Gaithersburg, Maryland. I arrived at the bureau as a complete novice in materials science, mindful of issues that needed to be studied , but with no inkling of how to actually go about doing it. I was most fortunate, therefore, to fall in with a group of experienced colleagues who never seemed to tire of my endless questions. Carl Robbins, for one, spent countless hours showing me how to use a petrographic microscope, and helping me with mineralogical identifications. He...

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