The cultural significance of effigy pipes among southeastern groups during the Mississippian period (A.D. 1000-1600) has yet to be fully understood. Recent studies, however, have provided new archaeological contexts for framing explanations of their possible use and distribution among such groups. Apart from conjectures about their use as ceremonial objects, selection for effigy pipes in the Mississippian Southeast was directly related to fluctuating environmental and demographic conditions under which such objects were manufactured and distributed. These conditions provided the appropriate context for their emergence as costly signaling devices through which elite or special interest groups advertised fitness levels, typically expressed in displays of power and prestige. As signaling devices, effigy pipes attained their widest distribution in the Southeast during a time of environmental and demographic stability. Their decline was primarily the result of increasing climatic instability and widespread demographic upheaval--events that precipitated major disruptions in commercial and economic relations.

The timing of Mississippian-period occupations in the North Central Hills physiographic region of Mississippi has been debated. Some researchers believe they occurred in conjunction with Late Woodland period occupations during the Early Mississippian period, while others assert they were later, in either the Late Mississippian or early Protohistoric periods. A program of systematic shovel testing, excavation and frequency seriation was used to delineate Mississippian-period occupations and test the cultural lineage between them and Late Woodland period occupations at nine sites on the Ackerman Unit of the Tombigbee National Forest.

This project reexamines field notes and artifacts from a Works Progress Administration excavation of the Picnic Mound (8Hi3), a Safety Harbor-period burial mound located in Hillsborough County, Florida. The goals are to reconstruct burial practices digitally using a Geographic Information Systems approach to test Ripley Bullen's model of Woodland and Safety Harbor burial practices, and demonstrate ways that modern technologies can be used to provide new information from past investigations. This thesis also presents new information from a pXRF study about prehistoric ceramic manufacturing in the Tampa Bay area, and discusses additional archaeological resources associated with the Picnic Mound. This thesis also illustrates new ways that archaeological materials can be analyzed and exhibited using three-dimensional laser scanning. Results from the GIS modeling show that burial practices were varied, and cannot be used to assign temporal placement to burial mounds within the Safety Harbor period, as proposed by Bullen. This research illustrates the value of returning to extant archaeological collections and field notes to test models of past human lifeways in a manner that is non-destructive. Information derived from the technologies used for my research can be shared digitally among researchers and can be used to develop materials for public education and furthers additional research efforts.

Results from archaeological survey provide new insights into the origins of variation among the prehistoric Native American societies that occupied the Chickasawhatchee Swamp of southwestern Georgia. Through macroregional comparison, these insights are broadly applicable to the Eastern Woodlands societies that existed across the southeastern U.S. between A.D. 150 and 1600. Theoretical frameworks concerning landscape ecology, inter-regional exchange, and agency and structure provide the organizing structure for a multi-scalar view of change that contradicts earlier models.Within the Chickasawhatchee Swamp, survey, mapping, and excavation data present a complex regional settlement system. Within the swamp, a few large settlements were occupied for the long-term, in spite of the absence of monumental architecture. Smaller surrounding sites were periodically abandoned. At the swamp's edge, several subregions were organized around civic-ceremonial mound sites. At these edges, mound sites and surrounding subregions were abandoned simultaneously. Instead of being driven by changes in political complexity, residential mobility cycles were consistent through time and related to the region's heterogeneous landscape.Macroregional spatial data comparing mound locations through time support data from the Chickasawhatchee Swamp and confirm hypotheses relating mound construction and transitional landscapes. New data emphasize continuity in inter-regional exchange networks and contradict earlier views in which the emergence of hierarchical political structures were a transformational process that fundamentally altered Eastern Woodlands political economies. Temporal continuity and spatial variation are instead most evident.

No description available.

Native American societies in the Yazoo Basin during the Mississippian Period (ca. 1000 – 1700 A.D.) extensively built platform mounds often associated with “elite” or “sacred” areas, and exotic or energy expensive artifacts. Excessive energy expenditure, or “waste” behaviors, may be explained with costly signaling and bet-hedging, hypotheses stemming from evolutionary theory. I argue that costly signaling may best explain the waste evident in hierarchical and agricultural Mississippian Period societies of the Mississippi Valley. Consequently, I feel that differing levels of energy expenditure may be evident from the remains of perishable construction excavated from mound summits and off-mound contexts. During that time, wattle and daub was a common method of wall construction in the Yazoo Basin, leaving abundant evidence at Mississippian sites. By studying imprints from preserved daub fragments, the use of specific construction methods can be compared between mound and non-mound contexts and relative energy expenditure assessed.

No description available.

This thesis focuses on creating a deeper understanding of European-made metal objects uncovered at a Late Mississippian period site by using an object itinerary theoretical framework. This theory allows for objects to be understood and analyzed without bias as it acknowledges Indigenous and archaeological perspectives by considering the many different contexts an object moves through. I apply this theory to these European-made metal objects that were transformed and used by the Chicasa as a way to introduce a more collaborative and holistic approach to the other analytical methods being used at Stark Farm (22OK778). This process was completed by using a variety of methods, from statistical analysis to thorough literature review, to investigate the different interactions and stoppage points that the objects have traveled along and through.

Kinlock is a freshwater mussel shell ring site located in Sunflower County in the Mississippi Delta. Little work has been done at freshwater mussel shell rings, and therefore little is known about them. This thesis uses four different data collection methods to answer questions of chronology, site layout, etc. These four methods are controlled surface collection, excavation, coring, and magnetometry. Based on the results of these methods, Kinlock was found to be a Woodland period mussel shell ring with a later Mississippian period component built on top of the shell. This later component consisted of five mounds situated around a plaza. It was also found that the plaza was planned and maintained from the Woodland period through the Mississippian period, until the site was abandoned.