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Our research presents a unique culture history and yet polity formation, growth, and decline in the lower Chattahoochee region cannot be understood as isolated or particular developments. Similar political and social dynamics unfolded across the Southeast. There are several reasons for this: historically related population movements from ancestral areas of development, widely shared subsistence strategies, organizational patterns common to chiefdoms, and linkage to other populations in interaction spheres. These similarities were the products of cause-and-effect relationships that developed over time at scales larger than sites and regions. In this chapter we examine the processes of political and social integration identi¤ed in the lower Chattahoochee region—polity formation, growth, and decline—from a perspective that encompasses the entire Mississippian world. Because the formation of mound centers after A.D. 1100 coincides with the appearance of a nonlocal cultural tradition in the region, we address the issue of Mississippian origins. It is our contention that many of the initial Mississippian polities throughout much of the middle and lower Southeast were the result of population movements on an expanding frontier. Speci ¤cally, we propose that movement into new regions by nonindigenous Mississippian settlers and subsequent competitive interaction with indigenous Woodland peoples was the common way that the ¤rst Mississippian polities were established in the lower Chattahoochee region and many other areas. Next, we argue that the ¤ssion-fusion process identi¤ed in the lower Chattahoochee region was the principal mechanism of polity formation, growth, and decline throughout the Mississippian world. Not only is the lower Chat7 The Rise and Decline of the Chattahoochee Chiefdoms tahoochee sequence of short-lived, politically unstable mound centers common elsewhere, but the proliferation of multiple-mound centers from A.D. 1200 to A.D. 1400 was synchronous with similar growth-and-decline cycles throughout the Southeast. We propose that polity formation and growth was subsidized by surplus food, labor, and valuables achieved during periods of favorable rainfall, and that drought-induced shortfalls of these resources was an important factor in the abandonment of large, multiple-mound centers in the lower Chattahoochee region and neighboring regions after A.D. 1400. We conclude that the timing of initial Mississippian settlement and the synchronous growth-and-decline trajectories are unitary phenomena when viewed from a panregional perspective. Mississippian Origins In the previous chapter we interpreted the Cool Branch site and other Rood I centers as the products of nonlocal Mississippian immigrants. Summarizing evidence presented at length elsewhere (Blitz and Lorenz 2002), we based this conclusion on (1) a regional discontinuity in material culture; Rood ceramic styles and wall-trench house forms have no antecedent developmental forms in the region; (2) Rood site distributions are in an area between Averett and Wakulla site distributions; Rood sites have no evidence of immediately antecedent occupations and thus reveal a demographic discontinuity with indigenous populations in the region; (3) the extraregional source territories for the Rood immigrants, while not precisely known, can be identi¤ed as regions to the north and west, based on similarities in material culture and settlement patterns; these Mississippian cultural characteristics appeared ¤rst in the source territories, especially in the central Mississippi River valley; and (4) the organizational capabilities of rank society and the ability to erect forti¤cations is evidence of a logistical advantage that allowed the immigrants to successfully compete with neighboring indigenous populations in the new territory. This evidence satis¤es the minimum requirements for demonstrating population movements or “site unit intrusion ” with archaeological evidence (cf. Krause 1985; Rouse 1958). Our explanation for the rise of the Chattahoochee polities addresses an enduring issue: the origin and spread of the Mississippian cultural phenomenon , or what Bruce Smith (1990:1–2) calls the “analogy-homology dilemma.” Is Mississippian an analogous process of multiple, local developments due to “independent and isolated cultural responses to similar challenges ” (Smith 1990:2)? Or conversely, are Mississippian origins to be understood as a homologous or historically related process of migration or diffusion from core areas of development to new areas? This complex problem is compounded by the multiple meanings of Mississippian as a developrise and decline of the chattahoochee chiefdoms / 123 mental stage subdivided into time periods (Bense 1994), a form of chiefdom organization (Peebles and Kus 1977), an adaptive or subsistence strategy (Smith 1978), a set of distinctive artifact complexes (Grif¤n 1967), and a cultural tradition (Caldwell 1958). We are most concerned here with “Middle Mississippi” (Grif¤n 1967; Willey and Phillips 1958) or the “Mississippian Tradition” (Caldwell 1958), widely...

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