Deposing the Chiefdom Model “Monster-God”

Timothy Pauketat is right about the chiefdom model and neoevolutionary theory; it needs to go. Pauketat is not the first to delineate the chiefdom model’s failings, but he is the first to forcefully make the case for interpretations of Mississippian Period archaeological complexes.¹ He gives us this message via engaging, humorous characters and anecdotes, but also with serious scholarship and logical arguments. The behavior of Pauketat’s “Darth Evader” character, a corporate archaeologist who bypasses sites to please his clients and to increase his own profits, is in some ways analogous to the chiefdom model: always lurking in the background; seriously interfering with the research necessary for interpreting the archaeology of specific peoples and places; and placing a detrimental overemphasis on personal aggrandizement.

Many of us working in Mississippian Period archaeology have come to realize that the chiefdom model is indeed a monster that has devoured the discovery and discussion of real diversity in the archaeological record of late prehistoric Southern groups. Nevertheless, archaeologists continue to acquiesce to this model as if it were part and parcel of their own anthropological belief system. Unique histories of diverse peoples are sacrificed to this monster god. It has consumed the stories of the development of distinctive communities—along with an understanding and appreciation of differing traditions in gender dynamics, family life, conflict, and leadership (to name a few topics). Its veneration also has promulgated ethnocentric views of Native American cultures. For example, the “elite–centric” modeling that Pauketat’s Uncertain Graduate Student ponders in chapter 2 too often has the result that Western notions of leadership and gender relationships permeate interpretations. Politically powerful male chiefs (yet who are denied the power equivalency of Western “kings”) are the focus of attention while potential female power roles in matrilineal kin groups and networks, which are so important in many American Indian groups, are downplayed. Another significant sacrifice that is made to the chiefdom model, one unintentionally made by archaeologists—and that is alluded to in Delusions—is that the chiefdom model swallows stories of individual culture formation, thus concealing the histories of peoples and places. Pauketat asks in chapter 1, “Did the people of each province contribute in some way to the larger history of North America? Did they change the story of other people?”² My response is, What peoples have not done so? They all are important.

The chiefdom model’s comeuppance in the Mississippian South has been a long time coming. Back in the early 1980s, when I was writing my dissertation, the use of this model was still fairly fresh in Southeastern archaeology and the quest to find “archaeological correlates,” à la Peebles and Kus’s 1977 American Antiquity article, was in vogue.³ For my dissertation project I dutifully searched for evidence of a chiefly lineage and hierarchy in the mortuary practices of the Late Mississippian, Mouse Creek Phase of southeastern Tennessee. All of that hereditary hierarchy just did not seem to fit the mainly age- and gender-based differentiation I was seeing. So, I concluded that “the historically recorded native societies of the southeastern Tennessee area provide better models for Mouse Creek phase social organization than [does] the chiefdom model.”⁴ My conclusions largely were dismissed either as evidence of the collapse of Mississippian chiefdoms just before and at contact (since most historicperiod American Indian societies are thought to be more “egalitarian” than those of the centuries before Europeans arrived on the scene) or that the Mouse Creek phase sites were part of a paramount chiefdom and the “elites” were interred elsewhere.⁵

But to this day I remain convinced that the chiefdom model has been particularly detrimental to archaeologists’ ability to gain an understanding and appreciation of the diversity of late prehistoric cultures in the Great Valley of east Tennessee (which encompasses the Tennessee River drainage basin between the scarp of the Cumberland Plateau and the Blue Ridge), and indeed in Southern Appalachia. These peoples likely were always more “egalitarian” than Mississippian Period polities in other areas. It is somewhat ironic, in light of Pauketat’s focus on Cahokia, that one reason for...