Ancient Chiefdoms of the Tombigbee

5. Storage, Defense, and Chiefs

CHAPTER 5 Storage, Defense, and Chiefs WE TURN NOW to consider the Summerville settlement system in detail. It is an axiom of archaeological research, and perhaps obvious to the reader, that in order to understand a past way of life researchers must examine a representative range of locations-archaeological sites-where people conducted their daily activities. To forward this goal, I will attempt to sketch (if sometimes in rather tentative, broad strokes) aspects of Summerville site seasonality, site permanence, and subsistence activities. The picture presented in the following pages is no doubt incomplete, but the cumulative result is the perception of the farmstead-local-center settlement system as an interdependent social, economic, and political unit. In another aspect, however, the comparison of site categories helps to isolate those social and economic conditions that may have led to the establishment of the farmstead-local-center system, and serves to focus attention on how these conditions perhaps shaped the emergence of formal positions of leadership. I argue that the logistics of maize production , defense, and food storage created two potential sources of political influence: (1) authority over pooled food surpluses sanctioned through appeals to the sacred authority; and (2) leadership in war. Storage and Defense As reviewed in Chapter 3, the archaeological evidence of population -induced resource stress in the Tombigbee River valley is equivocal. Maize was used at low levels in Miller III and then rapidly intensified to become a staple with the transition to Summerville I after A.D. 1000. Storage, Defense, and Ohiefs 99 While it is important to determine which processes were active in a specific historical context, it should be emphasized that the populationresources stress hypothesis and the social "corn as commodity" hypothesis are not mutually exclusive. If surplus maize conferred social advantages, then this was doubly so under any conditions of subsistence stress. Whatever the cause, there are logical reasons to suspect that intensifying maize production demanded changes in the organization of subsistence practices. Such changes may be reflected in the appearance at this time of dispersed households or farmsteads, each composed of a small number of people. Farmsteads apparently provided the optimal conditions (or at least the preferred situation) under which to practice a mixed economy of cultivation, hunting, and gathering. If maize permitted a smaller work group such as a family to generate food at productivity levels that had previously required larger work groups, then dispersed households may reflect this greater independence. But new problems were possibly created that make it unlikely that these farmsteads were socially or economically autonomous. Farmstead maize fields had to be tended in the warm months, and the harvest stored. However, the individual farmsteads were vulnerable to attack. There is direct evidence that the introduction of the bow in the Miller III phase created a more dangerous social environment. For the first time there is unambiguous evidence of violent conflict among Tombigbee Woodland populations. Miller III burials include multiple interments with embedded arrow points (Hill 1981). Evidence of violent traumatic injury, as indicated by "parry" fractures or embedded projectile points, is present in 24% (19 of 78) of the Miller III population and 18% (6 of 33) of the Lubbub Creek Summerville I population (Cole et al. 1982; Welch 1990: Table 25; Powell 1988:487-489). Parry fractures of the ulnae were also present among farmstead adults (Gilbert 1980:301-304; O'Hear et al. 1981:137-144), and at Tibbee Creek a young man died when an antler arrow point penetrated his upper torso (O'Hear et al. 1981:145). The escalation of group conflict that accompanied the bow need not be interpreted as a response to stress from population growth. As I have argued elsewhere (Blitz 1988), the large-scale, time-transgressive pattern of bow adoption in the Eastern Woodlands represents a rapid chainreaction mechanism of competitive advantage that crosscuts local environmental conditions. The external introduction of the bow may have presented new possibilities of resource exploitation or territorial expansion and perhaps even fostered demographic changes in the Late Woodland period, rather than having been a response to such changes. The threat of attack raises questions about storage and defense. 100 Storage, Defense, and Chiefs There is a change in storage technology in the transition from Miller III to Summerville I that may be related to the increase in maize production. Miller III groups dug large, deep storage pits to hold acorns and other nuts...