Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Pespectives on Food, Politics, and Power

11. Feasting and the Emergence of Platform Mound Ceremonialism in Eastern North America

1 FEASTING AND THE E ERGENCE Of PLATFORM MOUND CEREMONIALISM IN EASTERN NORTH AMERICA Vernon James Knight Freestanding platform mounds are a prominent feature of certain prehistoric sites in the southeastern United States belonging to the period roughly between 100 B.C. and 700 A.D. These Woodland period mounds are the earliest examples of the platform type found in the cultural chronology of the southeastern region. In the interest of exploring the variability within this category, my discussion is focused upon a subset of these early mounds that 1believe has relevance to the topic of this volume. It has been known for some time that, despite similarities of form, earlier Woodland period platform mounds of the Southeast exhibit fundamental differences from the later and far better known late prehistoric platform mounds of the same region. Generally, the late prehistoric Mississippian earthwork.s, dating to ap· 311 Vernon James Kntghc proximately ".D. 1000[550. are typified by the occurrence of summit buildings of various kinds. These occur in the context of chiefdom-type societies. As to their ancestry. their immediate prototype. it appears. is found in the slightly earlier platform mounds of the Coles Creek culture of the Lower Mississippi Valley (ca. A.D. 700-(200). Excavated examples of Coles Creek platform mounds at the Greenhouse and Morgan sites in Louisiana possess large, circular buildings on their summits . which are arguably elite residences (Ford 1951; Fuller and Fuller 1987). By contrast. those Woodland platform mounds that predate A.D. 700 seldom exhibit summit buildings. The majority belonging to this earlier period of transegalitarian societies were not lived on. and seem to be associated with altogether different kinds of summit activity. at least partly of a ritual nature (Knight 1990; Mainfon and Walling 1992; Jeffelies 1994; Lindauer and Blitz 1997; Kohler 1997). Despite this chronological shift in summit usc. the mounds themselves show important commonalities in their formal characteristics through time. These commonalities include rounded quadrilateral contours. multistage construction. and intentional use of contrasting fills. Specifically for the Mississippian case I have argued that. in attempting to understand mounds-as-anifacts. summit use ought to be decoupled from mound building per se. and that mound-building activity is best considered in itself as a repetitive ritual process. Some years ago I developed an interpretive model using ethnographic analogy. drawing from the languages. mythology. religious beliefs. and ritual practices of historic southeastern Indians. wherein Mississippian mounds were conceived by their builders as earth icons, the "navels of the earth" as the Chickasaw called them. periodically reburied in a purificatory process of' world renewal (Knight !981. 1986. 1991). !f this model has merit. the continuity of formal characteristics I have men· tioned suggests that the analogy might be extended with equal plausibility to preMississippian platform mounds. f'undamentally. from that point of view, the entire history of platform mound building in the Southeast may be seen as a conservative . long-term complex of world-renewal ritual. I will return to this point Further on. The known distribution of pre-Mississippian and pre-Coles Creek freestanding platform mounds is shown in f'ibrure [J .1. This map is accompanied by a table (Table [].!) giving the site names and basic references. Although there is uncertainty about the dating of some of these examples. particularly those excavated early in the twentieth century. other potential claimants are excluded for shortage of evidence. Despite this uncertainty there is no longer any question that the platform mound bUilding tradition ill the Southeast extends back in time to the Middle Woodland period and that such constructions were very much a part of southeastern Hopewellian and post-Hopewellianlandscapes. There is one seeming "hot spot" in the distribution: Northwest Florida and the adjacent Chattahoochee River Valley on the northern Gulf Coastal Plain was an 312 FEASTING AND PLATFORM MOUND CEREMONIALISM IN EASTERN NORTH AMERICA early center of such activity. Otherwise. the remainder are rather widely spread out. The settings differ as well. expressing something of a duality. Some sites. such as Marksville. Florence. and Pinson. possess large mounds within essentially vacant ceremonial centers. sometimes enclosed by earthen embankments. Elsewhere . in contrast. platform mounds lie at the margins of permanently occupied settlements. [t is intriguing that among the latter are some of the earliest welldefined nucleated villages, as contrasted to seasonal base camps, in the Southeast. It is the examples tangent to permanent villages rather than those at vacant centers that...