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13 The Power of Beneficent Obligation in First Mound– Building Societies
- The University of Alabama Press
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Mound building began in the Lower Mississippi Valley and Florida more than¤fty-¤ve hundred years ago. Some mounds were large, and sometimes they were strung together in arrangements that lead us to think the unthinkable. Images of mounds as territorial and identity markers, as cosmic sociograms and creation metaphors, and even as massive earthen calendars aligned with the stars and moon creep into our consciousness (Byers 1998; Charles and Buikstra 1983; Clark, this volume; Norman Davis, personal communication, 2001; Gibson 1994a, 1996b, 1998b, 2000; Hively and Horn 1984; Romain 2000). Could such meanings really inhere in mounds as old as these? Their builders were Archaic ¤sher-hunter-gatherers! We are not even sure how large or sedentary their communities were, how they marshaled and sustained the requisite labor, or how organizationally sophisticated they were. They obviously possessed the leadership , organization, and wherewithal to pull off such feats. The mounds themselves stand as testaments. There is pro¤t to pursuing the ancient knowledge angle for researchers who know the stars, the math, and the lore, but I ask after another dimension of Archaic mound building—its source or sources of power. And I look for that power in social contexts lacking usual material indicators of power and prestige (Peebles and Kus 1977). I ask, can mounds be built via a communal call with voluntary, freely given labor or must there always be social inequality and an aggrandizing ethic lurking in their shadows? POWER HAS SHADES OF MEANING Power has several shades of meaning. Power entails motive, as in what inspires or prompts people to act—a cause, an idea, a pretty ®ower, or inane happening— just about anything that produces an emotional reaction. But it also entails a 13 The Power of Beneficent Obligation in First Mound–Building Societies Jon L. Gibson person’s ability to get another person to act a certain way. Morton Fried (1967: 13) distinguishes power from authority. To Fried, power is backed by threat and sanction, authority is not. He sees authority simply as the ability to gain another person’s assent. To me, however, authority carries sanctions just as surely, no matter how mild, deeply embedded, and nonthreatening they may be. A mother ’s love for a child, for example, is just as powerful withheld as given, a father’s praise as motivational as a limber switch, although maybe not as quick to bring action. A renowned hunter works on Lower Jackson Mound just as hard as the unsuccessful hunter, not because he hopes to win greater admiration but because if he does not he stands to lose face, as well as sanctity and security. I cannot think of a single action in life that is not predicated on some authorization or that does not carry sanctions, though many times they are subtle, implicit, or taken for granted. The path to exposing social power is well traveled and paved with enough theory and terminology to keep graduate seminars and learned symposia busy for a professional lifetime. Why add my voice to the clatter? It’s simple. None of this theory and terminology fully explores the social and political contexts of¤rst mound–building groups. Why? Because not even prophets among us expected monumental architecture to be so early or so imbued with cosmic symbolism , as Clark uncovers in Chapter 10. We have come to accept that builders of ¤rst mounds were ¤sher-hunter-gatherers (Russo 1996a; Saunders et al. 1997). Most of us would agree that early mound builders were richer materially than Spartan Bushman bands (see Lee and DeVore 1968)—if nothing else, mound builders had mounds. But we cannot lose sight of the fact that mound builders were mainstream ¤sher-hunter-gatherers living in one of the richest riparian strips in the Americas, not stragglers trying to survive on the harshest land in the world. Despite our best intentions, we still tend to regard Archaic mound builders as Bushman clones or else we reach too far in the other direction and expropriate models developed for complex social formations, which are then applied to mound societies like last Christmas’s wrapping paper. Neither view works, completely . Why? Because ¤rst-mound builders are without ethnographic counterparts . The pristine wilderness and social conditions that brought them into the world have not existed for thousands of years. The link between monumental architecture and complex society is one of archaeology’s most sacred tenets (Trigger 1990a). Dare we question its veracity by suggesting that egalitarian societies living...