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20 Lamar Archaeology nee Valley from an environmental perspective in his dissertation. He discusses adaptations by the Indians to different areas along the river, such as bottomlands and rapids, and shows that settlement models developed for the lower Mississippi River (logically) can be modified to help understand Mississippian societies in the southern piedmont. He further developed a measure of site permanence, site specialization, and group size to help begin our understanding of the smaller sites that make up Lamar settlement systems. Political Studies An understanding of the political aspects of Lamar societies has been developing over the years in a complex manner. One of the first important steps was the 1962 publication by Elman Service of a model for the evolution of human social systems from simple to complex. This included the notion of chiefdom-level sociopolitical organization as a distinct stage between tribal-level and state-level societies around the world. For years, researchers in the Southeast, particularly John Swanton, had been constrained to force the southeastern Indian societies at the time of first European contact into one or the other of these categories, usually into the notion of a tribe. That the Lamar societies best fit Service's notion of a chiefdom is widely accepted. One of the best studies showing this in detail is the dissertation of Chester DePratter (1983). He has carefully extracted early historic accounts of the Indians and has shown how these chiefdoms operated in some detail. His essentially nonarchaeological study has tremendous archaeological importance for understanding the politics of Lamar chiefdoms. Perhaps the first real attempts to define a political unit per se on the basis of archaeological information is that of M. Smith and Kowalewski (1980) for the piedmont portion of the Oconee River in north Georgia. Their work was based upon the recognition of equal spacing for mound centers within that area. In the years since 1983, Williams and Shapiro have followed up their lead by obtaining the necessary data to examine this concept. In a series of papers, they have found that the growth of the Oconee Province was far more complex than initially thought. Their study is still under way but represents an attempt to apply chronological refinements to the study of Lamar politics. Lamar Archaeology 21 Historical Studies DePratter's 1983 study clearly showed that there is much to be gained by analyzing the available historic documents in detail. Charles Hudson has been a leader of this new analysis of the historical record. Further, with Marvin Smith and Chester DePratter, he has attempted to use new information to more accurately reconstruct the routes of the early Spanish explorers in the interior of the Southeast (Hudson, Smith, and DePratter 1984). Second, and more importantly, he has insisted that these route reconstruction attempts are important to gaining a better understanding of the southeastern societies contacted, rather than simply solving the puzzle of these routes themselves. One of the most valuable historical studies that has resulted from this lead is a dissertation and recent book by Marvin Smith (1987). He studied the early historic societies of the Southeast and outlined the rapid and dramatic decline in the chiefdoms within the Lamar area. His study effectively combined both archaeological and historical data to gain information that could not have been revealed by either source alone. Daily Life Studies On the level of attempts to discuss the daily life of Lamar Indians, Mark Williams (1983) attempted to combine a detailed traditional site report with a traditional ethnographic point of view in his dissertation . He examined the form, use, meaning, and function (sensu Ralph Linton) of parts of the society. This was most extensively undertaken with the data on the ceramics as containers from the small nonmound Joe Bell site. There have been many other attempts to understand the role of Lamar ceramics as containers in recent years. David Hally (1983aj 1983bj 1984) has attempted to determine the range of vessel forms and uses for Lamar peoples in northwest Georgia. Under his guidance , Gwyneth Duncan (1985) has conducted similar studies on the Lamar materials from the Tugalo site in northeast Georgia for her master's thesis. Shapiro (1984) also studied Lamar containers as an indicator of the use and function of small Lamar sites in the Oconee Valley. 22 Lamar Archaeology There is still much room for studies of all sorts in this area designed to present quasi ethnographies of these archaeologically known Lamar societies. Several of the papers presented in Part III of...

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