Architectural Variability in the Southeast

7. A WPA D

7 A WPA Déjà Vu on Mississippian Architecture Lynne P. Sullivan Many students of late prehistoric architecture in the Southeast,including most of the authors in this volume, reference the work of Thomas M. N. Lewis and Madeline D. Kneberg (Lewis and Kneberg 1946; Lewis et al. 1995). As Lacquement notes in Chapter 1 (this volume), their 1940s ideas on flexed pole construction buildings with curved roofs are coming back into vogue, after a hiatus in which the alternate idea that wall trench houses had gabled or hipped roofs was more popular. There are many good reasons that present-day researchers are rediscovering the flexed pole, rounded roof house. One of these is that the Works Progress Administration (WPA)–era researchers had evidence in the forms of careful excavations of well-preserved charred superstructures, and full-scale experimental models upon which to base their interpretations. In fact, their program of investigations looks very much like those of today. Nonetheless, some seven decades have passed since this work was done. With a goal of gaining new insights into the formulation of their ideas, I revisit here the primary data upon which most of Lewis and Kneberg’s interpretations of flexed-pole architecture were based. The data that figure prominently in the discussion of architecture in the Hiwassee Island report (Lewis and Kneberg 1946:50–53) and in Lewis’s (1995:56–60) chapter on architecture in the Chickamauga Basin report derive from a particularly well-preserved, burned structure excavated in 1936 at the Hixon site in the Chickamauga Basin, and from little-known house reconstruction projects conducted by George A. Lidberg and Charles H. Nash, field supervisors for sites in the Kentucky Lake reservoir.The best documented of these projects was conducted by Lidberg at the Thompson Village site. Both the Chickamauga Basin and Kentucky Lake 118 Lynne P. Sullivan projects were done under the general direction of Thomas M. N. Lewis at the University of Tennessee as part of the archaeological investigations conducted before flooding of these Tennessee Valley Authority reservoirs. The Burned Building at the Hixon Site The Hixon site (40HA3) was excavated in the summer and fall of 1936, under the field direction of Jesse D. Jennings and Robert S. Neitzel, both of whom trained at the University of Chicago. Hixon was the first site to be excavated as part of the Chickamauga Basin project (see Jennings’s [1994:87–90] account of the field circumstances). Finding burned structures at Hixon was no surprise to Jennings and Neitzel or to Lewis. Jennings and Neitzel had excavated well-preserved, burned Mississippian structures in 1934 and 1935 at the Kincaid site in southern Illinois,and Lewis had seen burned,wall trench structure patterns with preserved superstructures in the Norris Basin (see Webb 1938). The structures at Hixon proved to be different from those encountered at Kincaid (see Brennan this volume). The Hixon site mainly consisted of a platform mound,including submound deposits, surrounded by a palisade, but essentially devoid of village deposits (Lewis et al. 1995:372–418). House 68, the best-preserved burned structure, likely was a public building as opposed to an ordinary, residential house. The structure occurred at the very base of the mound, in construction stage C (or B2) on Floor R, and may have been contemporary with another burned structure , Feature 55. The overlying mound stage B (or B1) has been radiocarbon dated to A.D. 1235 (calibrated intercept) (Sullivan 2007). The excavation of House 68 was supervised by Neitzel and was recorded on October 26, 1936.The building, which was approximately 43.5 m2 (7.9 x 5.5 m), was of wall trench construction with open corners, although there are three posts in the gap in one of the corners (Figure 7.1).Wall posts averaged approximately 12.2 cm in diameter, and there were a few posts found inside the wall trench pattern, but there were no definite roof supports. House 68 included a remarkably well-preserved section of interwoven, charred wooden poles (Figure 7.2). The saplings were 6 cm (2.4 in) to 9.1 cm (3.6 in) in diameter and crossed at right angles at intervals of about 30.5 cm (1 ft). More burned remains were found several feet beyond the building’s northeast corner, including “a number of charred poles lying in juxtaposition and in the same direction as the long axis of the structure. Some of these were as long as 25 ft [7...