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7 Connections Between the Etowah and Lake Jackson Chiefdoms Patterns in the Iconographic and Material Evidence John F. Scarry The society whose political center was the Etowah site was one of the largest and arguably one of the most complex and influential of the Mississippian polities of the lower Southeast. The Etowah site itself is among the largest of Mississippian political centers on a number of important scales (viz. Payne 1994a). In size, it exceeds the vast majority of Mississippian centers (Payne 1994a). It is large in terms of numbers of mounds and the volume of those earthworks. Certainly, the big mound at Etowah was unsurpassed outside the American Bottom. The extent of habitation and the density of domestic debris also place Etowah among the larger Mississippian centers. Finally, the polity that included the Etowah site was also large, although not inordinately so in its geographic extent (Hally 1993). The Etowah polity included a number of subordinate centers and residential sites (Hally 1991; King 2001b, 2003; Southerlin 1990).This hierarchical settlement pattern points to a multitiered political hierarchy and associated complexity: to a complex chiefdom (sensu Wright 1984). Not only was the local area structured in a fashion that was more complex (in a hierarchical sense) than that seen in most Mississippian polities, but some have suggested that the political sway of the leaders of Etowah extended beyond the limits of the Etowah River valley to encompass groups in other valleys. Thus, Adam King (and others) has suggested that the Etowah site was not just the political center of a complex chiefdom but that at least some of the rulers of Etowah were paramount chiefs who had influence over the chiefs of other groups (King 1999). The rulers and other elites of the Etowah chiefdom were wealthy in material terms. Excavations at Etowah by John Rogan (Thomas 1894), Warren Moorehead (1925, 1927, 1932; Moorehead, ed. 1932), and Lewis Larson (Kelly and Larson 1957; King 1991, 1996, 2001a; Larson 1954, 1971, 1989) have demonstrated that the elites of Etowah possessed material things that were not available to commoners in their society and that they possessed some of those things in great quantities , even when compared to the elites of other Mississippian chiefdoms. Many Connections Between the Etowah and Lake Jackson Chiefdoms 135 of these things were manufactured of raw materials obtained from considerable distances outside the bounds of the Etowah chiefdom (e.g., marine shell, galena, and possibly copper). Many of them also required significant investments of labor in their manufacture (e.g., repoussé copper plates, shell beads, and engraved shell gorgets). To the extent that rarity, difficulty in procurement, and labor contribute to value, we could argue that these things represented wealth. The presence of many exotic artifacts (or artifacts manufactured of exotic raw materials) at Etowah provides evidence that the elites of that place had connections that extended beyond the limits of their domain. In fact, these artifacts and similar things found at other Mississippian centers well removed from Etowah point to interactions between local elites and the rulers of other Mississippian chiefdoms. I would suggest that the evidence also points to the influence of the rulers of Etowah on the elites of other societies. Much of the evidence of elite interactions recovered from the Etowah site consists of artifacts that form the material corpus of what has been variously termed the Southern Cult or the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC) (Brown 1976a, 1997; Galloway 1989; Waring and Holder 1945). These include engraved shell gorgets, repoussé copper plates, and repoussé copper ornaments and headdresses found in widely scattered Mississippian centers across the Eastern Woodlands. They also include symbolic weapons of chipped and ground stone or copper. The SECC (and the artifacts and iconography that form its material expression ) has been viewed in a number of different ways. Traditionally, we have seen it as, at least in part, a material reflection of the belief systems and religious rituals of the Mississippian peoples (Hall 1989; Knight 1981, 1986). We have also looked at the artifacts as items involved in exchange networks linking the elites of various Mississippian societies (Brown 1976a; Muller 1989). More recently, archaeologists have viewed the complex as discursive practice linked to the construction of elite identities and Mississippian social structure (Scarry 1999; Scarry and Maxham 2002). In truth, I suspect that, as Jon Muller (1989:26) has argued, it was all of these and more and that what it was varied from time...

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