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With the discovery of earthen mounds dating to the sixth millennium before present in the American Southeast, the enduring anthropological question of the emergence of cultural complexity returns to an unusual setting. Although the Poverty Point complex of northeast Louisiana once garnered its share of attention as regards emergent complexity (Ford and Webb 1956; Gibson 1974), recent archaeological discourse over its genesis and organization has downplayed the level of sociopolitical development attending mound construction and longdistance exchange (e.g., Gibson 1996c, 2000; Jackson 1991). This change in perspective is owed, in part, to the empirical results of modern research: Poverty Point simply has not produced evidence for the suite of traits expected of complex societies, notably food production, social hierarchy, and political authority. Even population and degree of settlement permanence have been downgraded from earlier estimates. The Poverty Point culture and now the Middle Archaic societies that preceded it throw into question the structural linkages among demography, economy, and politics that have characterized cultural evolutionary models for decades. In these precocious cultural developments, we see a hint of complexity (monumentality) coupled with an economy (generalized foraging) and form of sociality (egalitarianism) that are presumed antecedents of complex society. While this contradiction alone exposes the shortcomings of modern perspectives on complexity, the tendency on some fronts has been to suggest that complex society is not necessary for building mounds (Russo 1994b; Saunders, this volume; White, this volume). This is similar to the argument used to undermine claims for monumentality in the Shell Mound Archaic (Milner and Jefferies 1998; Crothers, this volume). Without supporting evidence for economic and political change accompanying the construction of monuments, the mounds themselves are dismissed as simply de facto piles of earth and shell or, worse, “wasteful behavior” (Hamilton 1999). 11 Crossing the Symbolic Rubicon in the Southeast Kenneth E. Sassaman and Michael J. Heckenberger Middle Archaic mound complexes of northeast Louisiana—Watson Brake, Caney, and others—like Poverty Point, were anything but incidental or haphazard constructions. As John Clark demonstrates in Chapter 10, these early mounds were constructed according to a plan. This plan required not only design , engineering, and labor coordination, but it also embodied and reproduced, we submit, a hierarchical form of sociality. The central plazas that were a part of this plan have ethnographic parallels that mirror and reproduce social hierarchy in cases worldwide. Reticence on the part of archaeologists to accept an advanced level of cultural complexity on the basis of Archaic mounds alone can be traced to a priori assumptions about primitive society (Russo 1994b). Despite three decades of critical commentary on the evolutionary status of the world’s foraging societies, archaeologists continue to assume that the antecedents of complex societies were akin to the food-sharing, egalitarian, generalized foragers of the ethnographic present. If we release these ethnographic ideals from their subordinate position in a sequence of cultural evolutionary stages, we are free to explore how hierarchical forms of sociality emerge apart from economic and political change, as a symbolic transformation of forager society, which, in turn, formed the ideological basis for material change. We suggest that a major threshold, a Rubicon, was crossed in the early sixth millennium b.p. of northeast Louisiana. The result was a fundamental symbolic transformation of society wherein inequality based on difference from the other (culture vs. nature; us vs. them; insider vs. outsider) was turned inward, resulting in ranking or hierarchy among coresident groups. The mounds and central plazas they de¤ne are themselves testimony to this transformation. That it was not precipitated or accompanied by economic or demographic change makes the transformation no less signi¤cant, however, because once it took place—once the Rubicon was crossed—there was no turning back. This new structural principle was now on the landscape, encoded permanently in earth, and carried forward and transformed through practice. It would later become the ontological basis for dramatic economic and political change. As James Ford (1969) anticipated , it was the emergence of new ideas, a Theocratic Formative, that forever changed the American Southeast. Had he known how old monuments and central plazas were in the Southeast, Ford would not have had to turn to South America for the source of these new ideas. We have several objectives in this chapter. We begin with a critical examination of the concept of primitive communism, arguing that there is little that is primitive about it and thus there is no reason to assume a priori that the antecedents of so-called complex...

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