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With the pottery and radiocarbon samples secured by mound excavations, reviewed in the previous chapter, we can now construct a chronology of mound centers for the region. This chronological ordering of centers builds on the efforts of other archaeologists. Caldwell’s (1955) work at Rood’s Landing identi¤ed an early Moundville-like component with abundant shelltempered pottery, followed by a middle component with pottery similar in style, but grit tempered, and a late component with Lamar Complicated Stamped and Fort Walton Incised pottery types that appeared related to the component found at the Bull Creek site in the 1930s (Ledbetter 1997a). Caldwell’s three-part sequence was correct in broad outline, but it was overshadowed by William Sears’s (1956) report on the Kolomoki site. Sears muddied the archaeological waters by incorrectly attributing the dramatic mound burials and ®amboyant pottery ¤nds at Kolomoki to the Mississippi period (Pluckhahn 2003). With publication of the Cemochechobee report (Schnell et al. 1981), a detailed chronology based on strati¤ed and radiocarbon-dated excavations of Mississippian mounds became available. Unfortunately, the 18 radiocarbon dates ranged widely from A.D. 690 to A.D. 1500, and yet the mound ceramic assemblages showed few changes, a clue that the actual occupation span was less than what was implied by the dates. It remained unclear how the Cemochechobee site and the Rood phase related to other regional mound sites because comparative data were lacking. Although the Mississippi period archaeological sequence was later subdivided with additional phases (Schnell and Wright 1993), much of the cultural chronology remained imprecise, largely intuitive, and unsubstantiated by published re4 The Cultural Chronology: A.D. 1100–1650 ports that quanti¤ed ceramic assemblages in strati¤ed, radiocarbon-dated contexts. With analysis of the RBS and Columbus Museum excavations, it is now possible to signi¤cantly re¤ne the cultural chronology, a requirement for measuring political and social integration through time. Identifying, Ordering, and Dating the Mound Components Our database for constructing the regional cultural chronology introduced in Chapter 3 is the pottery and radiocarbon samples from stratigraphic excavations in platform mounds. In addition to the previously published ceramic data from the Cemochechobee, Shorter, and Mandeville mounds, the database consists of samples from seven other mound sites that have received little or no previous analyses or publication: Abercrombie, Cool Branch, Gary’s Fish Pond, Singer-Moye, Omussee Creek, Lampley, and Rood’s Landing. Our method for constructing the regional cultural chronology was undertaken in the following manner. First, the pottery was classi¤ed with the goal of identifying those ceramic attributes that changed through time (and across space) so that the mound provenience units associated with the pottery could be arranged into a relative chronological order (Appendix C). Previous archaeological investigations provided us with certain expectations as to which ceramic attributes would be most useful for chronology building, but we also made the classi-¤cation as comprehensive as deemed feasible so that future investigators might use these data to pursue other questions. Tables of the classi¤ed pottery quantify the contents of mound provenience units (Appendixes A and B). We did not use all of the ceramic attributes classi¤ed in Appendix C to construct the chronology. Instead, the relative ceramic chronology is based on seven decorated ceramic types: Moundville Incised, Cool Branch Incised, Columbia Incised, Lamar Plain, Fort Walton Incised, Lamar Complicated Stamped, and Rood Incised. These ceramic types were chosen because they are sensitive to changes in temporal and spatial variables, are suf¤ciently abundant in the samples, can be unambiguously sorted as potsherds, and facilitate comparison to relative ceramic chronologies in adjacent regions. We classi¤ed 52,558 potsherds for this study, but because decorated pottery is always a small portion of any assemblage, the named decorated types used in the chronology are approximately 7 percent of this total. Based on their presence in household middens as well as platform mound contexts, it is likely that these ceramic types had a utilitarian function in the ancient societies . Pottery types and attributes that represent special-purpose use contexts (i.e., ¤ne-ware beakers and bottles) are identi¤ed in Appendix C, but cultural chronology / 61 we did not use these to construct the cultural chronology because low frequency or rarity renders them subject to sampling error. Therefore, we expect the seven decorated ceramic types to be less susceptible to the vagaries of sampling, and that the resulting chronology will be broadly applicable to both mound and nonmound contexts. Once the pottery...

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