Delusions of Chiefdoms: An Ethnohistorian’s Viewpoint

There is much to ponder in archaeologist Timothy Pauketat’s indictment of the community of American archeologists who study the Mississippian era of the Mississippi Valley and South. The implications of his ideas go beyond fractious archaeological debates and need also to be considered by ethnohistorians of the Native South. Many of us who study the postcontact, and usually post-Mississippian, age of Indian-European contact in the South nonetheless utilize the same evolutionary-based understandings of how Mississippian chiefdoms worked that are criticized by Pauketat. We do so in order to establish a baseline for interpreting later cultural expressions and changes we see in the documents and oral histories produced in the colonial era. I suspect that many of us trained in history, even those like me who had a doctoral field in cultural anthropology, have not thought overly critically about the way that archaeologists portray Mississippian chiefdoms. We can quote the tripartite formula of simple, complex, and paramount chiefdoms that “cycled” from lesser to greater complexity and back again during the Mississippian era (ca. AD 1000–1600). We enumerate the “characteristics” of Mississippian chiefdoms without much thought: that is, that large multiple mound sites designate complex and paramount chiefdoms with social, political, and economic hierarchy and centralization as an operating principle, with outlying “satellite communities” under the sway of a central town, elite management of rare trade goods from far-flung places, and elite control of labor and agricultural resources. Using this basic formula, as Pauketat makes clear about even many archaeologists, we then generalize about all Mississippian settlements, altering our portrayal only according to chiefdom size and perceived complexity.

Other than the obvious overgeneralizations and incomplete understandings, inherent in too readily employing this evolutionary interpretation to precontact Southern Indians, there is another omission that Pauketat makes abundantly clear: that we need a historical focus on the Mississippian world. Utilizing a historical understanding does not mean searching for nonexistent documentary evidence in dusty archives, but rather to realize that all of the human past—whether documented in writing or not—constitutes history, and history means change over time, including human-directed abrupt change. Rather than seeing change among precontact Indians as occurring only in gradual, or developmental, hundred- or thousand-year sequences, Pauketat advises archaeologists to be alert for sudden changes and quick developments of new cultural expressions, technology, and political arrangements, especially when examining the Mississippian era. What is hidden in the anthropological terms used to describe Mississippian polities, Pauketat argues, are “the histories of governance, resistance, foreign relations, militarization, incorporation, provincialization, colonization, and migration (among other things).”¹ Put another way, how much do we really know about how Cahokia operated on a day-to-day basis and how the expansion of “Mississippian” culture occurred, as opposed to what we think we know by theorizing about idealized “chiefdoms”? Moreover, how do we account for regional and spatial variability, as well as temporal changeability, if we rely too heavily on an idealized notion of how Mississippian societies operated?

Trained as a historian, I find Pauketat’s perspective refreshing and characterized by common sense. Postcontact Indian history is replete with analysis of fast-paced change creating “new worlds” for Indians, colonizers, and African slaves alike. Pauketat suggests that for us to view precontact Indian history as any less capable of dramatic change or cultural variety, as something that was naturally and predictably evolving, limits our understanding of the possible and flies in the face of archaeological evidence.

Pauketat is especially eager for us to reconsider the role of Cahokia in the history of the Mississippi Valley and the South. Cahokia, when we ethnohistorians think about it at all, is usually considered a larger-than-usual paramount chiefdom that reached its pinnacle of power and size around AD 1100 and “cycled” back down into obsolescence before Europeans arrived in the Americas. Though admirable and curious for its immense scale, Cahokia seems to have had little impact on the postcontact Native South. Pauketat and other archaeologists want us to reconsider Cahokia within the history of the South. Although the bulk of his work...