Mississippian Mortuary Practices: Beyond Hierarchy and the Representationist Perspective

13. The Mortuary Assemblage from the Holliston Mills Site, a Mississippian Town in Upper East Tennessee

13 The Mortuary Assemblage from the Holliston Mills Site, a Mississippian Town in Upper East Tennessee Jay D. Franklin, Elizabeth K. Price, and Lucinda M. Langston After extensive archaeological investigations at Phipps Bend on the Holston River in upper East Tennessee, Lafferty (1981: 520) concluded that “the Mississippian occupation appears to be quite unintense.” The Mississippian Period in the area was characterized by small, scattered settlements with no evidence for corn agriculture. Lafferty’s volume stands out as a thorough and remarkable body of scholarship. However, it is clear that Lafferty was unaware of the archaeology of the Mississippian towns that once dotted the Holston River terraces immediately upstream of Phipps Bend. Lafferty (1981: xxii) also stated, “I would be surprised if all of the conclusions reached in this monograph remain unmodified, and I am certain that much greater detail is possible through more analysis and excavation.” Toward that end, we introduce the archaeology of the nearby Holliston Mills site (40HW11), a Mississippian town in upper East Tennessee, with particular focus on mortuary patterning. We end by suggesting that the Mississippian occupation in the region was both intense and extensive if not prototypical of Mississippian occupations elsewhere in the greater Southeast. The Holliston Mills site is located on the north bank of the Holston River south of Kingsport in Hawkins County, Tennessee (Figure 13.1). The site was excavated by members of the Tennessee Archaeological Society between 1968 and 1972. It was excavated in 10–foot blocks using six-inch levels, revealing a large late prehistoric (and perhaps protohistoric) town represented by least two palisades, more than 660 burials, a large public structure, and several smaller domestic structures. Richard Polhemus (personal communication, 2005) remembers multiple palisades and abundant structures. No mounds have been recorded at this locale (Figure 13.2). Figure 13.2. Plan View Map of the Holliston Mills Site. Figure 13.1. Location of the Holliston Mills Site. 252 Jay D. Franklin, Elizabeth K. Price, and Lucinda M. Langston Ceramics and Chronology The excavators initially reported the recovery of what they believed to be Cobb Island pottery (see Polhemus and Polhemus 1966) in the plow zone and much Dallas material from the level excavations, but they also noted that the site had been looted prior to their excavations. Ceramic analysis is ongoing , but we can clearly say that the Holliston Mills site certainly had multiple components. There is little, if any, Cobb Island pottery, but there are some Pisgah ceramics. The rectilinear stamped pottery from Holliston Mills is not shell tempered (i.e., Cobb Island) but rather is sand and grit tempered. Thus, it is better characterized as Pisgah Rectilinear Stamped, Design A narrow and broad (Dickens 1976: 172–177). Dallas and Pisgah ceramics occur contemporaneously in both feature contexts and archaeological levels; there is no stratigraphic delineation between the two. The Pisgah “phase” spans the period of about A.D. 1000 to 1550, and the Dallas phase typically from about A.D. 1300 to 1600. The ceramics from Holliston Mills fall later in these spans (i.e., A.D. 1400–1540). We have also recorded several Lamar curvilinear stamped sherds as well as several cazuela bowl fragments with typical middle Lamar incising along the rim and large reed punctations just below. The presence of these Lamar ceramics suggests that the Holliston Mills site dates to the Middle Lamar phase, about A.D. 1450–1550 (Hally 1994). Of the 1,894 pieces of pottery examined to date, 1,555 are body sherds and 339 are rim sherds. Six accepted types have been identified thus far: Dallas (Mississippi) Plain, McKee Island Cord Marked, DeArmond Incised (Salo 1969: 62–63), Pisgah Rectilinear Stamped, Lamar Incised, and Lamar Complicated Stamped. Dallas wares make up nearly 70 percent of the assemblage, while Pisgah wares constitute approximately 30 percent of the ceramic assemblage . Of interest is the fact that McKee Island Cord Marked constitutes nearly 58 percent of the identifiable Dallas wares, which is very high even for Middle Dallas assemblages (Polhemus 1990: 41). We have identified a handful of DeArmond Incised sherds and two fabric-marked salt-pan sherds. In sum, the Dallas wares appear to represent a Middle to Late Dallas assemblage, ca. A.D. 1400–1525 (Polhemus 1990: 41). We have obtained nine accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon age determinations from the Holliston Mills site (Table 13.1). The dates suggest that the town at Holliston Mills endured...