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SECTION II THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIELD WORK THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIELD WORK INTRODUCTION The Problem THERE is general agreement among stud .ents of Southeastern archaeology that the climax of the late prehistoric cultures is the archaeological facies long recognized under the designation "Middle Mississippi." At a. comparatively late date - A.D. 14001500 IS probably not too late for its peak of development - this culture type was firmly established over an immense area. The large prehistoric settlements represented by the remains at Cahokia, Moundville, Etowah, and Macon, not to mention some of the less- ~nown but equally impressive sites described m the present work, are thought to have been occupied about this time, or even later. By 1939, when the present Survey was first discussed , an immense amount of data on Middle Mississippi had accumulated, but the problem of its origins and development appeared to be as far from resolution as ever. There was a general impression, shared by many students of Southeastern culture, that this was because the "central" Mississippi Valley, the assumed center of distribution of the culture, had not been sufficiently investigated. It was primarily to make good this lack that the present Survey was undertaken. The existing status of archaeological studies in what we have defined elsewhere as the Survey Area was such as to make it a very attra ~tive. field for research. Except for the Umverslty of Chicago's work at Kincaid and ~ther sites in southern Illinois, the investigatIO .ns sp~nsored by the St..Louis Academy of SCIence m southeastern MIssouri, and excavations by the University of Tennessee at the Shelby Site (I2-P-2), in the vicinity of Memphis , Tennessee, none of which had been published , the area had been largely untouched by modem methods of investigation. 1 Thomas, 1894. • Holmes, 1903. I Peabody, 1904. 'Moore, 1908a, 19Q8b, 1908c, 1909, 1910, 1911, 1913. To understand this apparent neglect, it is necess~ry to review briefly some of the earlier work m the area. From the earliest beginnings of what used to be called "Mound Archaeology " it received its full share of attention. Private collectors were busy as early as the seventies and the Peabody Museums of Harvard and Yale, the Davenport Academy of Sciences, and the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution soon followed. The long series of investigations of the latter culminated in the publication of Thomas' monumental report of 1894 1 and Holmes' monograph on the pottery in 1903,2 both of which gave a great deal of space to the archaeology of the area. Thomas' problem may be summed up in the question: "Were the Mound-builders ~ndians?" Consequently, the Bureau's investIgators , under his direction, gave particular emphasis to mounds, enclosures, and other features of a constructional nature. Their reports provide invaluable data on such features, many of which have since disappeared and all of ~~ich hav~ been altered almost bey~nd recogmnon , but m questions involving the analysis of cu~ture material~, particularly pottery, they contnbuted very lIttle. Holmes' great treatise w~nt far to make up the deficiency, and it is to thiS remarkable pioneer effort that we owe the term, "Middle Mississippi." It is important to remember that as used by Holmes, it was a broad typological concept applied to pottery alone. So far as our particular area is concerned , it ha.s remained just t~at. The largescale excavatIOns and comparatIve studies necessary to convert that concept into a culture context have not been started. The later investigati ~ns. o~ Peabody,3 Moore,4 Brown,5 Lemley, DIckmson, and Dellinger,'!' had, except for the last three named, been concerned almost entirely with burials and their asso- • Brown, 19z6. • Lemley and Dickinson, 1937. • 7 Dellinger and Dickinson, 1940; Dickinson and Delhnger , 1940. 39 40 ARCHAEOLOGICAL SURVEY IN THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI ALLUVIAL VALLEY dated artifacts. A mass of material, chiefly ceramic, was saved from the commercial poihunter , whose activities in this area have been unremitting, and is now moldering on museum shelves. Not unnaturally, the misconception arose that the field has been fully exploited through all this effort, professional and otherwise . Nothing could be farther from the truth. It so happens that in the Lower Mississippi Valley profusion of burial offerings is a late development characteristic of the Mississippian cultures, but not of the earlier cultures that preceded them. In planning the Survey, we had to accept the melancholy conclusion that accumulated materials were mostly late and therefore of little use in solving the questions we...

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