Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces: Searching for an Architectural Grammar

3. The Nature of Mississippian Towns in Georgia: The King Site Example

(Brown 1976; Muller 1989). This network also formed the arena in which many of the political and social interactions of the Mississippian chiefdoms were carried out. The artifacts marking this network form part of what has been called the Southern Cult or Southeastern Ceremonial Complex paraphernalia . They include copper, shell, and stone items, many of which were probably used as symbols of status or political position. Among these items are weapons and nonfunctional representations of weapons, elaborate headdresses , carved shell gorgets, and repoussé copper plates. Other items, such as shell cups, ceramic beakers, and pipes, may have been used in social or religious ceremonial contexts. The artifacts that moved through this network were typically low mass/high value goods. There is clear evidence of Apalachee participation in regional exchange networks linking it to other Mississippian polities. The nobles buried in Mound 3 at Lake Jackson were accompanied by grave goods that included prominent items of the Mississippian prestige economy. Recall that the artifacts recovered from Mound 3 include large repoussé copper plates, Figure 2.8. Late prehistoric population trends in the Apalachicola River Valley (top) and the Tallahassee Hills (bottom). The chronological scale is early Weeden Island (EWI), late Weeden Island (LWI), early Fort Walton (EFW), middle Fort Walton (MFW), and late Fort Walton (LFW). 44 Payne and Scarry quantities of shell and pearl beads, copper and groundstone axes, engraved shell gorgets, pipes, and the remains of regalia and elaborate headdresses (Jones 1982). For Apalachee nobles to obtain such valuables, they must have had something to exchange. The Mound 3 burials give a few clues about what these might have been. The burials contained hundreds of marine shell beads, pearl beads, and shark’s teeth. All these items are most easily procured as by-products of subsistence ¤shing and shell¤sh gathering (Brown, Kerber, and Winters 1990:271). Small scattered ¤shing settlements dotted the Gulf Coast south of Lake Jackson and could have provided limited supplies of shells, pearls, and shark’s teeth. The large quantities, however, suggest acquisition from a relatively large population engaged in ¤shing and collection of shell¤sh. This points to coastal societies, perhaps the coastal chiefdoms of the Tampa Bay and Charlotte Harbor areas, as the source of these items. Another product that Apalachee could have provided to inland groups was Ilex vomitoria, which was used to make the ceremonial “black drink.” This important plant is abundant in the coastal zone; the Apalachee were thus in a good position to supply it to inland groups. The presence of decorated ceramic beakers in submound contexts at Lake Jackson suggests that black drink ceremonialism was part of Apalachee culture from its beginning. Apalachee could also have supplied interior Mississippian groups with knowledge gained from non-Mississippian peoples (Scarry 1991). Mary Helms (1988) notes that political and religious elites typically monopolize esoteric knowledge and use it as a source of power. She points out that geographically distant places, and the people and things found in those places, are frequent sources of such esoteric knowledge. Support for the suggestion that the leaders of the Lake Jackson chiefdom may have linked other societies with South Florida chiefdoms may be seen in a set of elaborately decorated pins bearing the images of crested birds. One of these pins, manufactured of marine turtle shell, was found in the grave of a high-ranking man at the Etowah site in northern Georgia (Larson 1993). A second was excavated from a protohistoric Apalachee site on the Gulf Coast just south of Lake Jackson (Goggin 1947; Grif¤n 1947; Marrinan , Scarry, and Majors 1990). This pin was manufactured from sheet copper and gold and was associated with European artifacts. Both these artifacts were likely manufactured in South Florida. Several similar pins have been Town Structure 45 recovered from sites in the Charlotte Harbor–Lake Okeechobee area (Allerton , Luer, and Carr 1984; Goggin 1947). Most of the pins appear to date to the sixteenth century, although the Etowah example should date to the thirteenth or perhaps fourteenth century (i.e., contemporaneous with Lake Jackson) (cf. Larson 1993 for a different interpretation of the dating of the Etowah specimen). The pins found at Etowah and in south Florida are so similar that they can be taken as evidence of the exchange either of ¤nished artifacts or of the ideas about the styles and symbolic forms, if not the meanings, that were used to decorate such...