From Quarry to Cornfield: The Political Economy of Mississippian Hoe Production

Acknowledgments

Contents Figures and Tables ix Acknowledgments xiii 1. A Day in the Life 1 2. Specialization, Exchange, and Power in Small-Scale Societies and Chiefdoms 19 3. Exchanging Chert, Consuming Chert 47 4. Rethinking the Organization of Lithic Technology 77 5. Life in the Mississippian Uplands 98 6. The Regional Structure of Hoe Production 120 7. Hoe Production and the Domestic Economy 158 8. Production and Power: De¤ning Scales 191 References Cited 207 Index 251 Figures and Tables F I G U R E S 1.1 Location of sites and regions referred to in the text 4 1.2 General periods of the Southeast and lower Midwest 12 1.3 Mill Creek chert hoe 16 2.1 Wolf’s modes of production in relation to means of surplus extraction 29 3.1 Hoe varieties: oval, ®ared, and notched 48 3.2 Birgir ¤gurine 49 3.3 “Exotic” Mill Creek chert bifaces 51 3.4 Scanning electron microscope view of Mill Creek chert 52 3.5 Major chert sources for Mississippian large biface production 53 3.6 Distribution of Mill Creek chert hoes 63 3.7 Muller’s distance-decay model of hoe exchange 64 3.8 General model of hoe recycling 73 4.1 Snub-nose scraper 87 5.1 Location of Mill Creek region and major sites in the locale 99 5.2 Major Mississippian sites in the Lower Ohio and Mississippi Con®uence regions 101 5.3 Schematic map of the Linn site 104 5.4 Schematic map of the Hale site 113 5.5 Phillips’s cross section of quarry pits 114 5.6 Holmes’s rendering of Phillips’s cross section 114 6.1 Sites in the Mill Creek locale 126 6.2 Surface of quarry 129 6.3 Successive stages of manufacture for hoes of the®ared variety 135 6.4 Flake types from hoe manufacture 135 6.5 Workshop debitage categories 139 6.6 Workshop debitage cumulative graphs 144 6.7 Mortuary artifacts from the Hale site 156 7.1 Mississippian structure and farmstead 161 7.2 Plan view of Dillow’s Ridge, showing visible house basins and excavation units 163 7.3 Single-post structure inside (post-dating) wall trench structure 164 7.4 Midden pro¤le 165 7.5 Calibrated radiocarbon intervals and intercepts from Dillow’s Ridge 166 7.6 Arrow points and chopper/hammerstone 169 7.7 Scraper and serrated ®ake 170 7.8 Reworked hoe and roughed-out bifaces 172 7.9 Ramey knife production failures 173 7.10 Frequency and mean weight of size grade categories 175 7.11 Debitage percentages by screen size 176 7.12 Incised ceramics 178 TA B L E S 5.1 Phases for the Lower Ohio Valley and Con®uence Region 109 6.1 Hoe workshops and their characteristics 128 6.2 Counts and percentages of debitage categories at workshops 140 6.3 Hoe replica debitage 142 6.4 Replica and workshop ®ake frequencies 143 6.5 Chi-square analysis of biface stages 146 6.6 T-test analysis of thinning index 147 x Figures and Tables 6.7 Estimates of hoe production for U-636 149 6.8 Workshop tools 152 6.9 Mortuary goods from the Hale site 155 7.1 Tools from Dillow’s Ridge, the Bridges site, and the Bonnie Creek site 168 7.2 Debitage sorted by screen mesh size 174 7.3 Absolute and relative frequencies of vessel types from Dillow’s Ridge 177 7.4 Faunal remains from Dillow’s Ridge 180 7.5 Absolute and relative frequencies of Dillow’s Ridge fauna 181 7.6 Absolute and relative frequencies of mammalian remains from Dillow’s Ridge 182 7.7 Floral remains from Dillow’s Ridge 184 Figures and Tables xi ...