In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

With the discovery of the Watson Brake mound complex in Louisiana (Saunders et al. 1997), archaeologists have had to reevaluate causal factors in the rise of sociocultural complexity in North America. Previously, archaeologists have been strongly in®uenced by the stage concept of cultural development that sees the rise of sociopolitical complexity as a series of gradual, linear, steplike developments culminating in the Mississippian Tradition (Willey and Phillips 1958). This was further supported by the sequential development of two agricultural systems, with the second being more productive. The ¤rst development was based on indigenous cultivated starchy seeds and rose out of a collecting base originally focused on these wild seeds (Smith 1987, 1989, 1990, 1994; Smith, ed. 1992). This was later followed by the adoption of an imported tropical cultivar , maize, which became the staple shortly after a.d. 900 throughout much of the eastern United States. RISE OF SOCIOCULTURAL COMPLEXITY The development of sociocultural complexity has been linked in some way or other, implicitly if not explicitly, to these agricultural developments. Of course, Poverty Point has long been an “anomaly” that challenged this traditional viewpoint . However, it could readily be explained by diffusion or migration from the precocious Mesoamerican Formative, which was contemporary with it (Ford 1969). The nonagricultural Calusa and their Woodland period archaeological counterpart also developed a complex chiefdom, although much later in time than the Archaic period Poverty Point. This complexity could be conveniently “explained away” by a historical connection and therefore diffusion of traits from more complex, and agricultural, Mississippian societies (Phillips 1973:xvii). Of 12 Explaining Sociopolitical Complexity in the Foraging Adaptations of the Southeastern United States The Roles of Demography, Kinship, and Ecology in Sociocultural Evolution Randolph J. Widmer course, diffusion was the prime mover of cultural development in the eastern United States up through the 1960s. In the 1970s, it was recognized that an earlier independent and indigenous agricultural complex developed in the Midwest out of collecting adaptation focused on wild starchy seeds (Smith 1987, 1989, 1990, 1994; Smith, ed. 1992). Ironically, although this minimized the importance of a Mesoamerican source for the origin of agriculture or sociopolitical complexity, it actually reinforced the notion of lineal thinking on sociopolitical complexity; it merely shifted the prime mover, agriculture, from a foreign origin to an indigenous one. The Poverty Point site now comes into line, since it is within the time span of agriculture and plant domestication—and, of course, the atypical Calusa can still be explained away by diffusion. The Watson Brake mound complex has changed all that and has forced us to abandon our lineal “gradualist” models of sociocultural development in the southeastern United States and instead adopt “punctuated” models of sociocultural complexity. This is not a new idea or concept in archaeological thinking in the southeastern United States. There are examples of cycling of political complexity throughout the trajectories of Mississippian chiefdoms in the Southeast (Anderson 1994a). Cahokia, the largest Mississippian site in North America, is even characterized by a rise and fall (Milner 1998). However, it seems that little attention is paid to the initial origins and underlying seeds of complexity and, more important, how they affect the political structure of societies. Recently , a number of studies have focused on the political economy of chiefdom societies (Anderson 1994a; Earle 1997; Muller 1997), and there has been a surge of interest in praxis and agency theory in the development of power and social inequality in the eastern United States (Emerson 1997). Typically, these discussions focus on the emergence of social inequality and chiefdoms from an underlying agrarian sedentary community base and imply the existence of kinbased social groups, namely, clans and/or lineages. More fundamental questions are typically ignored in these discussions. How do these kin-based social units emerge in the ¤rst place? Why is it that social inequality and power emerge only after these social situations are in place? It is recognized that the striving for control of power and differential social status is an underlying inherent trait of human beings (Earle 1997:208) and therefore operates at many different scales regardless of the type of society, including that of foragers (Hayden 1996). Granting this, why is it that such differences are only seen at various times in the historical trajectories of cultural areas? Is this simply due to the problems of scale (Chapman 1996; Price and Brown 1985)? I think not. Instead, I maintain that it is because there is not a clearly focused understanding of the basic...

Share