Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces: Searching for an Architectural Grammar

1. The Design of Mississippian Towns

grammar of these places. Most of these generalizations are familiar to researchers who have worked on many town sites, but, with few exceptions, they have not yet been communicated to a larger audience. The ten chapters cover the Southeast and southern Midwest— speci¤cally, Georgia, northwestern Florida, central Alabama, the Yazoo Basin in Mississippi, eastern Tennessee, western Kentucky, the Cahokia site in Illinois , and the Lower Ohio Valley. R. Barry Lewis Charles Stout xii Preface Acknowledgments Portions of the chapters in this book were presented in 1993 in the Mississippian Towns and Central Places Symposium at the Fifty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, St. Louis, Missouri. We thank Christopher Peebles for the many insights he offered as the discussant for this symposium. As part of the research for this book, Lewis went to India in 1993 to study the traditional Asian city. In his case, the search for comparative perspective , a traditional anthropological tool, led not only to a deeper understanding of the nature of Mississippian towns, but also to an acquaintance with several extraordinary researchers whose ideas in®uenced this book. Drs. John Fritz and George Michell have been invaluable mentors and generous hosts at Agra and many times at Vijayanagara. Through the kind hospitality of the Directorate of Archaeology and Museums and the cooperation of its Deputy Director, Dr. C. S. Patil, Lewis recently began a collaborative study of medieval and early modern forts in Karnataka, which will eventually come full circle back to a comparative study of Mississippian towns and South Indian forti¤ed towns. Part of Lewis’s research for this book was supported by grants from the University of Illinois Research Board and by a Senior Scholarly Development Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS). He wishes to thank Drs. Pradeep Mehendiratta, Kaye Hill, L. S. Suri, and Philip Lutgendorf for the many contributions the AIIS fellowship experience made to this book. It would not have been possible without the AIIS. In Chitradurga, Jagadeesh C. and his extended family, the S. V. Reddy family, and Shankar S. Athani went out of their way repeatedly to ensure that this project and Lewis’s fort research, which has yet to be written up, went as smoothly and productively as possible. Robert Connolly, Sue Lewis, Ian Brown, and an anonymous reviewer read and commented on several drafts of the manuscript. Jarrod Burks served as sounding board and research assistant for Stout on many aspects of this project. Kathy Cummins did an outstanding job with the copyediting and index. Finally, we extend our sincere thanks to the authors who contributed chapters to this book and to Judith Knight at the University of Alabama Press. They put up good-naturedly with Barry’s tendency to wander off to India every time a deadline approached and Chuck’s apparently compulsive household moves. xiv Acknowledgments Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces Searching for an Architectural Grammar 1 The Design of Mississippian Towns R. Barry Lewis, Charles Stout, and Cameron B. Wesson Architecture is the most visible physical manifestation of human culture. As such, it encodes much information about a society—political organization, economy, subsistence, aesthetics, cosmology, and gender relations , to list only a few topics—and the limits of this information expand as we learn more about the dynamic relationships between people and their environments. Archaeological investigations seek to decode this information and reconstruct the cultural meanings assigned to architecture by the men and women who created it. Stella Kramisch (1976), in the preface to her book The Hindu Temple, writes, “The Hindu temple is the sum total of architectural rites performed on the basis of its myth. The myth covers the ground and is the plan on which the structure is raised.” This statement captures the essence and spirit of one new direction in which studies of prehistoric American architecture are moving. This book also steps in that direction. Some of the chapters move boldly; others may appear tentative, but together they advance a view of the larger late prehistoric communities of the midwestern and southeastern United States that is more centered on a search for meanings than on settlement patterns and site function. Like Kramisch, we (Lewis, Stout, and Wesson) believe that the architecture we study re®ects design decisions that were based on widely shared meanings. This assertion is, in...