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SECTION V SERIATION ANALYSIS OF POTTERY COLLECTIONS SERIATION ANALYSIS OF POTTERY COLLECTIONS Assumptions NOW the 346,099 sherds from 383 sites, collected by the Lower Mississippi Survey and duly classified as described in Section III, could be stored away in cabinets and forgotten for the time being. The data was safely on paper and time would heal our wounded consciences and dim our suspicions that at several points our classification was less than perfect. During the winter of 1947 Phillips turned to the problems of physiography, and the identification of historic sites; Griffin began the description of pottery types; and Ford started work on analysis, assisted and checked at every point by his somewhat fearful colleagues . The basic assumptions which served as a foundation for the analytical procedure need to be stated in some detail. They will help to explain the procedure followed and it is hoped will prevent the reader from accepting the conclusions in an any more "positive" sense than the writers intend. We consider these assumptions as a set of probabilities which lead to conclusions that are our best guesses. Not that we intend to apologize for this admission. This we think is the real method of science. We are trying to expose our limitations and are not setting out to prove anything beyond all doubt. A. In the portion of the Mississippi Valley which was surveyed and for the greater part of the span of history which is being studied, the aboriginal people were presumably agriculturists . The population was rather numerous, as will be shown later, and was collected in small villages. For these reasons it seems reasonable to think that there was comparative stability of peoples. These Indians did not wander as did the historic Indians of the Plains and, from the archaeological evidence, there seems to have been little or none of the frantic shifting of tribes that marks the post-contact history of the Eastern Indians. We are assuming then until the evidence indicates the contrary that 1 Linton, 1940, pp. 37-40 • the people who carried the cultural traits we are studying were probably relatively stable geographically and that for the most part population changes were slow gradual ones. B. While the prehistoric populations were comparatively stable in the larger geographic sense, this does not appear to have been true of the great majority of village sites. Some sites were inhabited throughout the time span which is being studied. Most, however, were occupied for a short time in proportion to the entire chronology. This assumption was based on archaeological experience in other parts of the Southeast and on a preliminary glance over the collections gathered in this Survey. The condition seems to be due to the limitations of the agricultural methods and equipment of the Indians. After a field had been cleared and used for crops for a few years, the grass and weeds probably moved in and took over. With the inefficient tools which the Southeastern Indians had, control of this vegetation very likely became so difficult after a few years that it was easier to ring and bum trees for a new field than it was to continue planting in the old one. In the course of a few decades, when all the desirable agricultural land in the vicinity of a village had been opened up to weeds in this fashion, the village would have to be moved to a new location.1 This was the practice of the Southeastern tribes in the early Historic Period before they acquired plows, and such names as "Chickasaw Old Fields" and "Tuckabachee Old Fields" undoubtedly refer to such weed-grown abandoned land. The securing of short time-span collections is essential if the method of seriating of surface collections is to be successfully applied. For this reason, careful attention was paid to the combinations of sherd material which were gathered from various parts of each village site. In the course of field work, where it was evident that one portion of a site yielded a different complex from that found on another part, two or more separate collections 219 220 ARCHAEOLOGICAL SURVEY IN THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI ALLUVIAL VALLEY were made. These were labeled "A," "B," etc., and were treated all through the course of analysis as though they came from different sites. A cross section of the ceramic styles in vogue at these different sites at one instant in time would have been the ideal material for seriation purposes, but that, of course...

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